American Cop-Porn
Urban crime, often fuelled by easy access to weapons and an epidemic of drug dependency, keeps American police on red alert. But 2024 threatens something much darker.
We all have our guilty online viewing pleasures (admit it, most of us are somewhere on the spectrum of attachment to one banal internet or social media phenomenon or another.) Mine is eavesdropping on a very specific kind of social collision broadcast via thousands of real-life American cop videos on YouTube.
I call it Cop Porn. No, nothing to do with consenting adults enjoying rumpy-pumpy dressed as officers of the law. These are videos of dash-cam and body-cam footage of police officers, sheriff’s deputies, state-troopers, SWAT teams and other heavily armed members of state and federal law enforcement engaged in tense, real-life high-speed car chases and shoot-outs, sometimes ending in loss of life.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of those involved in these standoffs with the law turn out to be from impoverished, ethnically marginalised and economically disenfranchised communities. The ‘perps’, as they are commonly termed, tend to be of Black or Latino heritage, or if not they’re frequently the kind of person that used to be called a “redneck” (poor economic status appears similar across the classes and ethnicities of those involved.)
Many of these souls have somehow availed themselves not only of expensive-looking, high-powered SUVs or pickup trucks capable of 100mph on the freeway, but are also armed. In one dramatic incident, a man fires an AK47 assault rifle at police while his associate is driving at speed on the freeway. Three pursuing officers were hit but survived.
If you’ve ever disappeared down this weird rabbit-hole, you will know what a compellingly addictive thing it is. After seeing a few of the more reckless, catastrophic car chases, you find yourself clicking on yet another, while quietly intoning, “This will not end well.” They never do.
The most alarming conclusion one draws from eavesdropping on these true-crime vignettes is that parts of America already seem to operate as a kind of police state. No matter how coolly objective and dispassionate the pursuing police officers’ real-time voice-over narratives might sound, in many cases a single individual fugitive (whether on foot or behind the wheel of an eventually immobilised vehicle) can find themselves surrounded by twenty or more armed police with handguns, rifles, pepper-balls and Tasers. All too often the long arm of the law comes across as short-fused and heavy-handed. Like I said, it never ends well.
In idle moments it’s easy to kick back, pour another beer, rubberneck another grisly pursuit, and see it as little more than a kinetic cowboy movie for the modern age. As Jack Reacher recently intoned to his team on Amazon Prime: “Saddle up, because we’re about to do a whole lot of cowboy shit.”
Of course, back in the Wild West the sheriff wasn’t up against entire communities in which two or three generations of the same family had been ravaged by crystal meth, fentanyl, ketamine or OxyContin addiction. (For the full story of this, see Patrick Redden Keefe’s brilliant Empire of Pain about the egregious billionaire Sackler family, creators of the OxyContin opioid).
It’s notable how many of those finally brought to heel after these high-speed car chases and gun-fights on foot through suburban estates turn out to be suffering from a background condition — schizophrenia, paranoia, bipolar disorders, drug and alcohol-dependency, and so on. The fact they’ve still managed to get their hands on lethal firearms is even more worrying. Hence, perhaps, the seemingly excessive police response. Then again, from a law enforcement perspective how many of us have had an opiated teenager point a loaded handgun at us, to say nothing of an AK47 assault rifle? However well the police are prepared, the daily risks they run are truly unnerving. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth.”
Clearly these events are just part of the daily challenge facing your average American traffic cop or firearms officer and are relatively unusual when compared with the vast majority of law-abiding American citizens going about their daily lives. However, reports already suggest that easy access to firearms among a vast segment of MAGA-motivated Trump supporters, when taken against the backdrop of widespread drug dependency and mental health issues, represents a powder keg.
Should Trump be re-elected, the guilty pleasure of watching white-knuckle car chase videos on YouTube may yet be replaced by something far darker and more disturbing. January 6th may turn out to have been just the prologue.
I should go back to the cookery channels.