How Three Arrowverse Shows Tackled Police Brutality In 2021

How Three Arrowverse Shows Tackled Police Brutality In 2021

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Three Arrowverse series addressed the problems of police corruption and militarization as part of their 2021 seasons, but which one did it best?

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How Three Arrowverse Shows Tackled Police Brutality In 2021

Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for Batwoman Season 2, Black Lightning season 4, and The Flash Season 7.

Three different Arrowverse series, Batwoman, Black Lightning, and The Flash, made the issues of police brutality and corruption a major theme of their 2021 seasons. While the subject was tackled with sensitivity by all three of the shows, they also differed in their various approaches. This does beg the question, however, of which show handled the topic best.

While the subject of police brutality was topical in 2021 because of real-world events, the role of police in a world where superpowers exist has always been a ripe source of stories. The fact that vigilante justice was sometimes necessary because of police corruption has spurred many superheroes into action and crooked cops are as much a problem for some costumed crime-fighters as common criminals. This was frequently the case for Batman in many of his origin stories, where the Gotham City Police Department was basically just another gang until Jim Gordon became Commissioner and cleaned house.

The examination of current events like police brutality through allegory has been part and parcel of the superhero medium for decades. While police officers in the real world may not be armed with advanced energy weapons, the concerns many have regarding the militarization of police officers are exactly the same. In addressing these issues, the Arrowverse is continuing a fine tradition started by writers like Stan Lee and Dennis O’Neil, who tried to explore serious ideas while telling an entertaining story.

How Batwoman Tackled Police Brutality

How Three Arrowverse Shows Tackled Police Brutality In 2021

While Batwoman has always been a politically charged show, it did not deeply explore the issues of police corruption during its first season, despite establishing a version of Gotham City where a private security firm staffed with former soldiers, Crows Security, had taken over policing the parts of Gotham that could afford to hire them. This was probably due to the inherent bias of the show’s protagonist, Kate Kane, who had spent five years training to join the Crows and prove herself to her father, Crows Commander Jacob Kane. By the end of the season, however, it became clear that the Crows had a serious corruption issue, with one high-ranking agent having been involved in a conspiracy to cover up the murder of Lucius Fox.

Season 2 began to explore the corruption in the Crows and the GCPD in earnest, through the eyes of the new Batwoman, Ryan Wilder. Unlike Kate Kane, who grew up among the elites of Gotham City, Ryan was an orphan and a product of the foster care system, who was stopped by the Crows for “looking suspicious” and subsequently convicted of being a drug dealer with what was heavily implied to be forged evidence. This gave Ryan a rather low opinion of the police in Gotham in general, the Crows in specific and frequently caused her to butt heads with Crows Security Agent Sophie Moore, who insisted that the Crows were largely good cops and that Ryan’s claims of systematic racism were just an excuse for her own bad choices.

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The episode “And Justice For All” tackled the problem of crooked cops abusing their authority head-on, with all three of the series’ Black protagonists winding up in jail after the GCPD shut down a fundraiser for a local community center being held in the bar that Ryan Wilder managed. Despite the officer’s claims that he was enforcing a noise complaint, the real reason for his actions was made clear by his reference to “you people (being) so loud.” In the end, it didn’t matter that Luke was from a rich, respected family or that Sophie was a legitimate law officer herself; the color of their skin was enough to condemn them as troublemakers in the eyes of the officer. The incident prompted a discussion where Sophie described how she got into law enforcement hoping to stand up to bullies and help people and Ryan said, while she admired the sentiment, the Crows were too corrupt to be saved from within. This point was driven home in the episode’s final scene, as Luke was shot by a Crow’s Security agent after a white car thief tried to pin his crime on Luke, who was trying to stop the thief when the Crows showed up at the scene of the crime.

How Black Lightning Tackled Police Brutality

How Three Arrowverse Shows Tackled Police Brutality In 2021

Season 4 of Black Lightning introduced a new villain, Ana Lopez, who became the new Chief of Police in Freeland, Georgia. Despite the city being torn apart by a gang war between The 100 and the Kobra Cartel as she took office, Chief Lopez made cracking down on Freeland’s metahumans her top priority. Under her administration, the FPD began administering no-knock warrants to search for fugitive metahumans like the Tattooed Man Lala and she declared the teen hero Lightning to be public enemy number one, blaming Lightning for the death of Mayor Billy Black, despite there being no evidence tying her to the crime. Thankfully, her excesses were mitigated by Detective Hassan Shakur; a protégé of former Police Chief Bill Henderson, who became an ally of Black Lightning based on his mentor’s recommendation.

Chief Lopez’s hatred of metahumans was ultimately revealed to be the result of her husband developing an unspecified metahuman power and killing her brothers. Her bias was revealed to the world when Lightning brought the Mayor’s true murderer to justice and she live-streamed her handing him over to the police through her goggles, resulting in an online audience seeing a clearly displeased Chief Lopez growling that Lightning and “the other meta filth deserve to be wiped from the face of the Earth.” Disgraced and panicked, Chief Lopez used a meta-booster that could temporarily give an ordinary person superpowers and set about draining Freeland’s electrical grid with her own energy absorbing powers, so she would have the power to kill Lightning once and for all. Thankfully, Chief Lopez was stopped by the united efforts of Lightning and a team of Freeland police officers led by Detective Shakur.

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How The Flash Tackled Police Brutality

How Three Arrowverse Shows Tackled Police Brutality In 2021

Season 7 of The Flash introduced a new threat in the form of Kristen Kramer, a member of the Governor’s Municipal Logistics Commission who was assigned to the Central City Police Department to help solve the problem of metahuman crime. Kramer was oddly obsessed with arresting Frost, despite her having renounced her criminal ways to become a respected member of Team Flash and having the endorsement of CCPD Captain Joe West. Frost turned herself in for her past crimes and pled guilty hoping to win a plea deal based on her good behavior. Unfortunately, Kramer was out for blood, and determined to make Frost the precedent for a new punishment for metahuman criminals, forcibly removing their powers with the metagene cure developed by STAR Labs. Thankfully for Frost, the judge had a low opinion of Kramer’s grandstanding and agreed to accept Frost’s proposal to accept a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole instead.

The trial taxed the resolve of Joe West, who sympathized with Kramer upon learning that her desire to take away the powers of metahuman criminals was born of her time in the US Army, where she was betrayed by an unnamed metahuman criminal who pretended to be a hero and lost most of her unit. West spoke repeatedly of seeing Kramer as a good cop with good motivations, until he learned that she had ordered high-tech weapons for the CCPD without his authorization, along with specialized ammunition containing the metagene cure. Declaring that Kramer had gone too far and that he was “staying on the right side of the line,” Joe West handed in his badge and his service weapon and walked out of the CCPD headquarters, quitting his job rather than enforce Kramer’s twisted idea of law and order.

Which Arrowverse Series Did It Best?

While all three Arrowverse series tackled the same issue from different angles, Black Lightning probably offered the most balanced view of the problems caused by police corruption. Ironically, while Chief Lopez is probably the least nuanced of the various corrupt cop characters, Black Lightning’s writers explored the topic well through her, and also did a fantastic job of simultaneously using the episode to continue overarching plots at the same time. Despite this, it should be noted that Batwoman probably did the best job of examining the issue from a variety of perspectives, and that The Flash and the Trial of Killer Frost offered the most fleshed-out version of the their respective characters.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/arrowverse-flash-batwoman-black-lightning-police-brutality-corruption/

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