The Police in Literature and Media: An Overview

2.10The Police in Literature and Media: An Overview

As Aylmer reminds, constables often appear as comic characters in Shakespeare’s plays, for example Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing, Elbow in Measure for Measure and Dull in Love’s Labour’s Lost (29). According to Evans, they all are “depicted as naive, prosaic men [who] are sublimely unaware of their blunders, intent upon fulfilling their offices even when they are not really sure just what those offices are” (427). The characters are also well known for their problems with the language and for their malapropisms, for which the police officers remained a laughing matter 300 hundred years later.

Emsley reminds that the essence of comic characters endured and became a part of the image of the modern Bobby. The Police Review run a Dogberry column for many years in which it published stories of police officers speaking of police dogs as ‘a great detergent towards crime’, and similar jokes (GBB 10). The old police had a reputation for corruption and lasciviousness (Hurl-Eamon 469) and the new police were portrayed in the same way. According to Emsley, “corruption and suspect behaviour was often a part of the popular image of the policeman, particularly among the working class [and] the early Bobby was also often portrayed in hot pursuit of female cooks and servant girls” (GBB 9). Policemen were mocked in popular press but in the mid-century the middle-class started developing another image, the image of a loyal servant (Taylor 101), which helped the reputation of the police in the eyes of the public and the policemen themselves. According to Emsley the humour about the police began to get softer and the police were actually becoming “the national favourites” (EB 120). In 1883 The Times described the policeman as a friend of the people who look at him as an excellent person and whose relationship would be destroyed if the police were to carry guns (Emsley, EB 121”). This could be seen as the beginning of the indulgent tradition that determined the Bobby’s image for the following century.

As far as literature was concerned, the detective attracted more attention than the uniformed policeman, which consequently affected the relationship between the two branches. The detective was seen, in contrast to the uniformed constable, as a mysterious character and began to appear in plays, for example The Ticket-of-Leave Man, novels, and newspaper stories (Rawlings 170). As Rawlings reminds, Charles Dickens was fascinated by detectives and based one of his characters, Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, on Detective Inspector Charles Field (170). According to Pittard, Inspector Bucket is the first literary detective and the one responsible for the image of a detective standing between the respectable society and the criminal underworld. The public became fascinated by the world the detectives moved in, the detectives were celebrated for their successes and the breakthroughs were given a lot of attention in the press. “From the 1880s especially a succession of detective police officers published thrilling memoirs describing the cases that they had solved during their careers and emphasizing the dangers as well as their skills, effectiveness, and dedication” (Emsley, CPPP 208). The uniformed policemen responsible for prevention of crime could hardly, unless something went wrong, arouse such interest.

As mentioned earlier, the relationship between the press and the detectives worsened at the time of Jack the Ripper killings. The detectives, desperate not to cause panic among the public, developed a tight-lipped approach and did not impart any news to the journalist, which caused them a negative publicity in return (Wade 79). At this time the fictional detectives began to be humiliated by the amateurs and their intelligence and efficiency started to be questioned. According to Emsley “a certain lack of intellectual capacity [became] a continuing feature both of humour about the police and of the ‘indulgent tradition’” (EB 125) and still in the inter-war period “on the whole, policemen are portrayed in a favourable light by novelists, except perhaps as regards their intelligence” (EB 126), as is shown later.

The Bobby was not a central character in early films but his time came in 1950 in the form of PC George Dixon in the film The Blue Lamp. Although he was shot in the film, he featured the television series Dixon of Dock Green which ran from 1956 to 1974 (Loader 1). To Loader Dixon represents a “paragon of virtue, integrity and, dedication to duty [and] all that was best about the ‘upstanding citizen in uniform’” (5). He has become the perfect Bobby, the national hero and the representative of the 1950s, the gold age of policing, and also the benchmark to measure the realism of later police series.

In the decades that followed, the public’s view of the police changed and so did their representation in media. The gentle Bobby was replaced by a tough copper, who did not lead an exemplary family life, drank and fought, like the characters of the TV series Z Cars. It ran from 1962 to 1978 and presented the public with the new view of policing. According to Emsley the shift was not only the result of changes in policing and the views of the public, but also of the influence of American films and series that were presenting tougher style of policing (EB 130). Set in a fictional town north of Liverpool, the Z Cars replaces the Bobby on the beat with cops driving fast cars, bullying suspects, coaxing confessions and beating their wives (Millington, “Z Cars”), and brought publicity to the reorganization of the beat system and to the development of Unit Beat Policing⁷ (Emsley, GBB 250). The toughness of the characters of Z Cars was brought to a new level with the 1970s series The Sweeney.

The series provoked controversy and fears of the public’s image of the police, as it showed the police bending rules and involved careless driving and fist fights (Millington, “The Sweeney”). In the article Millington further explains that the series realistically reflects the atmosphere of the period, imprisonment of a Flying Squad officer for corruption, increasing bureaucracy, mugging, shift to the political right and breakdown of the post-war social consensus.

The issue of mugging and the problematic relationship with the black community was overlooked for some time and appeared in literature, for example in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners or Colin MacInnes’s City of Spades, rather than in films. In the late 1970s the police slowly started recruiting members from ethnic minorities and their fortunes were followed in the BBC series Black in Blue (“John Pettman”). Women police officers appeared on screens in 1980s in The Gentle Touch and the BBC Series, Juliet Bravo (Angelini). They consider the difficulties of women police officers, problems with combining the career and sexism and discrimination respectively.

Although the beat Bobby George Dixon remains one of the most popular television police officers, more attention has been paid to detectives whose work involve more action and more opportunities for drama. And nowhere were the detectives given so much space as in the genre of detective fiction.