Drama vs. data: when 'The Wire' matters more than bodycam video
The curious case of fictional characters influencing real legal outcomes
Police body-cams were supposed to give simple, objective data to quickly resolve accusations of police misbehavior. Did the accused cop overstep, or did the accuser? Any judgement would be quick and easy. But in many cases, that’s not how it turned out.
According to a paper by American lawyer Susan A. Bandes, some jurors’ perceptions were framed by TV dramas. At least one Supreme Court decision even cited two, The Wire and French Connection.
Why did justices would put more weight on fiction than on actual events? For the moment, I’m intrigued by just that question alone.
In “Video, Popular Culture, and Police Excessive Force: The Elusive Narrative of Over-Policing,” Bandes describes examples — including an 8-1 majority opinion written by then-Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. In the opinion, he cited the TV series The Wire and the film The French Connection as an important part of his decision for the police.
A chase had resulted in the pursued driver’s injury that resulted in a shooting and in the driver becoming a paraplegic. An officer was accused of unreasonable behavior.
In the court’s majority opinion [8-1], Justice Scalia characterized what he saw on the video as “closely resembling a Hollywood-style car chase of the most frightening sort, placing police officers and innocent bystanders alike at great risk of serious injury.” During the preceding oral argument, Justice Scalia shed light on his frame of reference, likening the chase to the movie The French Connection, in which the good guy cops chase the bad guy drug dealers, and there is no moral ambiguity about who is to blame.
… Justice Stevens pointed out in [his lone] dissent [that] the video was susceptible to more than one reasonable interpretation, and moreover, any conclusions about the legal import of the vehicle must take into account the larger context in which the video took place (e.g. a wide four-lane highway and the presence of police sirens alerting bystanders to get out of the way). Scott v. Harris helps illustrate the influence of culture on the interpretation of law. At the same time, and in ways that cannot be easily disentangled, it provides an example of the law’s formal adoption of perspectives and assumptions that hinder police accountability.
Why did raw video have have less effect on the justices’ perceptions than popular drama did?
I think it demonstrates a principle in storytelling: we feel more empathy for characters we know, even if they’re fictional, than for characters we barely know.
Video of the incident shows people we know by name, some details like race, apparent social class, and a few other details. We know the cop by the uniform. There’s a some brief action, perhaps a chase, perhaps a confrontation, and then a sudden blur of action that’s hard to see well even when replayed.
The people involved are little more than archetypes. For Americans whose politics run down the broad mainstream, the cop stands for safety and established order. The civilian, presumed to have done something to attract an officer’s interest, stands for danger and disorder, especially if young, belligerent, intoxicated, or all three.
On the other hand, on the TV show The Wire, you know the characters, fictitious as they are. The sequence of events is emotional because on some level we care about them. They’re familiar, we see their lives, their virtues and faults. In a sense, they’re more real than the people on the police video.
We’re storytelling beasts. It may not really matter very much whether a story is “true.” The story with the most effect is the one we know best.
Think about it: What are two or three stories or beliefs that you once lived by? How did you react when they were questioned or contradicted?