Help Police

Those two words up there have plenty of meaning, alone or together. A lot depends on how you choose to assert them. Either word can be a verb or a noun. But perhaps the most regular occurrence of this phrase is a plea for assistance. When things go bad, who aside from Ghostbusters are you gonna call? Help! Police!
There is a moment in the movie Fletch, where Chevy Chase is confronted by Joe Don Baker who plays the crooked chief who is behind the heroin ring being run on the beach. With perfect deadpan irony, Fletch looks up and says, "Thank God, the police." Things have just gone from bad to worse for this investigative reporter. The cavalry has arrived, but not to rescue anyone.
This is what I keep thinking about as we wade through the weeks and days of tumult and questions about police reform. I am certainly old enough to remember playing cops and robbers without a stitch of Chase-ian irony. We knew who the good guys were. We knew who the bad guys were. Of course this was right about the time that a sitting American president felt the need to stand up in front of a group of press and a national television audience to tell them "I am not a crook." Well, as it turned out, Richard Nixon was a crook. The President of the United States was a bad guy. He got out of the White House just ahead of the cops coming to take him away.
At least that's how my twelve year old imagination had it.
It was also around this time that we found out just how bad a guy the Federal Bureau of Investigation had at the top of their ranks. J. Edgar Hoover was the head cop in the United States from 1924 until his death in 1972. For a long time, Hoover was looked upon as a national hero for all his crime fighting exploits. Presidents came and went, but Hoover stayed on. And by the time he was taken out of his well-feathered nest by the angels, he had become every bit as corrupt as any of the ten most wanted. He had a profound issue with the burgeoning civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. Some of those presidents for whom he served were afraid of him. Even Richard Nixon.
Fear can be a pretty amazing motivator.
Along about the mid-seventies, the trope of one good cop was established. Frank Serpico, in real life and as portrayed by Al Pacino was one of the early whistleblowers. Frank was the one who brought down his fellow cops when he shined a light on the NYPD corruption. In the late sixties and early seventies. Serpico was a lone wolf, and for his trouble he was set up to be murdered by his fellow officers. Setting the stage for rogue cops to be the standard, both in real life and in media.
It is now 2020. The need to rely on old chops like "a few bad apples" doesn't fly very far when we are presented daily with new evidence of bad apples. Everywhere. Those in law enforcement who do not welcome reform of some sort at this time must have been asleep for the past fifty years. Or maybe they were just going to different movies than I was.