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Gotham gave network television an accurate — and rare — portrayal of police violence
Network television is filled with cops. Between Chicago PD, the ever growing list of CSI’s and Law and Orders and scores more, it is hard to find a place on TV where the police are not the protagonists. This makes sense, as the nature of the job can often put the main characters in the midst of danger and drama.
Fox’s Gotham is another one of those shows, but it does stand out from the rest. The city of Gotham is filled with corrupt cops, and in season four the corruption took center stage. The police department was bought off by Oswald Cobblepot, the Penguin, as he is known, one of the cities most influential mobsters. Crime becomes fully legalized. A serial killer who refers to himself as the “Pyg” soon arrives in the city to clean up the “dirty” cops. In the episode A Day in the Narrows, Pyg kidnaps three dirty cops in “The Narrows” — Gotham’s most dangerous neighborhood — sending the police on a quest to find their lost officers.
This leads to a tense scene where the police, alongside Penguin’s henchman, storm into an apartment building. They go door to door, beating up everyone they can find, hoping that one of them will tell them what they witnessed near bye when the cops were kidnapped. Harvey Bullock, partner to our protagonist James Gordon, gives a rousing speech beforehand, telling all his men that they need to make the residents more scared of the police than they are the criminals. Outside of Gordon, every single cop buys into it and takes part in the assault.
It reaches its apex when Headhunter, one of Penguin’s assassins, drags a sick man into the street and threatens to publicly execute him is he does not receive the information he desires. This causes that man’s wife to run out into the street to defend him and giving up which way she saw Pyg drive away.
As the spotlight gets put on police violence more now than ever, many shows that feature cops as the lead are using it as a plot point. They usually do not do it well, though, and have the characters sympathize with the police. Law and Order SVU, famously tried it and made a mess of it, showing the police themselves as sort of victims of the situation.
