I Am The Law chapter by chapter #2 — Judge Dredd
I Am The Law is out in February. Each chapter takes a single ‘Judge Dredd’ story and uses it to show how the strip reflected and predicted how ‘law and order’ politics would remake the world, from the politicisation of policing to the shift towards authoritarianism, from neoliberal hyper-capitalism to the end of protest.
In the lead-up to publication, I’m writing posts about each of the fifteen chapters. You can read the first post here. This time, we meet the toughest lawman of them all…
It’s difficult to appreciate just how much the police crime story has come to saturate our culture.
Shows about cops, investigators, detectives, private eyes and criminals are near ubiquitous on our screens. In the US, almost one in five scripted shows on network TV in the 2019–20 season were about police officers, detectives or other law enforcers — and that’s slightly down on previous years — while there has been a recent explosion in the popularity of ‘true crime’ documentaries. In the UK, crime dramas remain among the most watched series on TV, from ‘cosy crime’ such as endless adaptations of Agatha Christie and Inspector Morse spin-offs, to corruption thrillers such as Line of Duty and the hugely popular ‘Nordic Noir’ of The Killing and Wallander and their bi-lingual Welsh clone, Hinterland.
The social role of the near-universal presence of crime drama and true crime on TV screens came under particular focus following the murder by police officers of George Floyd in 2020 and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests that followed — and particularly its role as ‘copaganda’ in glamorising policing and misleading the public about how the criminal legal system actually works. It seemed, for a moment, that calls for the dismantling of the pop culture that portrayed the police as a wholly positive, non-violent societal force were bearing fruit — long-running sensationalist series such as Cops were cancelled (it resumed production just months later) while the last series of the police comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine was at pains to atone for its own ‘copagandist’ role. From the bumbling detective of Columbo to the endless permutations of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, crime drama plays an important role in legitimising and reinforcing the societal role of the police in the eyes of the public.
However, in the 1970s the British police were undergoing their own crisis of legitimacy. Wracked by scandal and stung by criticism, even as they were valorised by TV series such as The Sweeney, profound questions about the role and practices of the police were being asked. At the same time, crime dramas celebrated the ‘vigilante cop’, the man (always a man) who steps outside of the rules to overcome the system’s failings and restore the status quo. This new genre was a permutation of crime dramas that both harked back to and subverted the previous century of such stories.
As with Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Harry Blythe’s Sexton Blake, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and many others — the best crime-solving minds were rarely members of His Majesty’s Constabulary. These were private individuals whose beat was generally the aristocratic parlor or the bourgeois drawing room, lowering themselves into the filth of the flophouses, beer halls and brothels of the lower classes only when necessary. As journalist William Ruehlmann pointed out in Saint With A Gun (1974), such detectives are merely a vigilante pursuing a private sense of justice, not due process of law — that same decade, it would be the police themselves who pursued their own senses of ‘justice’…
Before then, the police were usually bumbling buffoons or dull-brained bureaucrats, guilty of stabbing around in the dark just as much their their quarries, only for the supersleuth to swoop in and solve the crime with only their brains and wits. The ‘plod’ was there to complete the detective’s work, stepping in to deprive the culprit of their liberty, acting merely like a glorified medieval watchman whose social function they had replaced. The copper was, to all intents and purposes, invisible. (There is a wider point here about the social standing of the police officer — for much of its history a stoutly working-class profession regarded by social ‘superiors’ on a par with maidservants, butlers, and drivers.)
British comic books were no different. The crime-fighters who appeared in the pages of titles like Super Detective Library, which ran from 1953 to 1960, were usually similarly gentleman-adventurers like Simon ‘The Saint’ Templar, private investigators such as Rip Kirby and Lesley Shane, and even space detectives like Rick Random.
In comic books aimed at children, the portrayal of police officers fell broadly into one of two stereotypes: there was the image of the paternal servant of the public who can be trusted to be fair and kind, and there was the bumbling bobby more in keeping with the comic incompetence of Shakespeare’s famous night watchmen, Dogberry, from Much Ado About Nothing.
Dogberry’s pompous and easily-pricked self-regard lived on in the funny pages, with The Beano’s Dennis the Menace facing off against Sergeant Slipper (ironically also the name of one of the detectives who investigated the 1963 Great Train Robbery), while Minnie the Minx ran rings around PC Thyme and the acne-suffering PC Pimples. These stories were no different to what a young Pat Mills and John Wagner were pitching to future 2000 AD publishers IPC at the very beginning of their freelance careers: ‘Partridge’s Patch’ was a series for the short-lived Jet about a rural policeman and his dog while ‘Yellowknife of the Yard’ in Valiant saw a Native American — complete with braided hair, moccasins and dubious ‘um’-patois — inexplicably become a London police detective.
Alongside this, youngsters were fed thinly-veiled variations of the titular avuncular TV bobby George Dixon from Dixon of Dock Green, a comic book adaptation of which ran in Swift from 1955 to 1976, and the cosy adventures of ‘PC 49’ in The Eagle, adapted from a series of stories on BBC radio. Even when America — that land of violent excess — featured, it was hardly more wild or threatening. ‘Spot the Clue with Zip Nolan’, which ran in Lion from 1963, was a strip about an American motorcycle cop where readers were invited to turn detective and solve the mystery before the answer was revealed on the following page; and ‘The Big Palooka’, which ran in DC Thomson’s The Hornet in the 1960s, followed the lumbering Detective Sergeant Jim Ransom of Scotland Yard, who for some reason is sent on assignment to New York to help the police there with various dangerous cases.
These were all ordinary ‘bobbies’ with beats full of mild peril, petty crimes, and chummy adventures, whose stories wrapped up with everyone safe or under arrest by the second or third page. Even the police officer alter ego of homegrown superhero ‘Thunderbolt the Avenger’, who appeared in Buster from 1965 to 1968, was so mild-mannered as to make him a joke amongst his peers, while the danger faced by Constable Bill Lennox and his Aborigine tracker, Wally Omes, in the short-lived ‘Johnny Hop’, which ran in The Victor in 1964, owed more to the Western than the police procedural.
Crime was dangerous and scary, and had no place in childrens’ comics.
A long shadow had been cast by the British ‘comics scare’ of the 1950s, when moral campaigners blamed American crime comics for juvenile delinquency, but there were wider hegemonic reasons for portraying the police as benign guardians. This was the copaganda of its time— from a young age, children were taught to trust the police, who were to be either avuncular protectors or figures of fun, humorously confounded by the Bash Street Kids or relied upon for a friendly word. This was why Ezquerra’s cover for Action, in which it appeared as if a teenage tearaway was about to beat a policeman with a chain, touched such a nerve — it was an attack on that most British of symbols: the policeman.
But Dredd was different to the friendly ‘Bobby’ and the tough ‘vigilante cop’ — he would not be another instance of ‘copaganda’, but a warning of its logical conclusion. For the story of Judge Dredd truly began six years before his first appearance, on a rooftop overlooking San Francisco. It began with Dirty Harry.
Blending comic book history with contemporary radical theories on policing, I Am The Law is out on 23 February and takes key Dredd stories from the last 45 years to demonstrate how they provide a unique wake up call about our gradual, and not so gradual, slide towards authoritarian policing. From the politicisation of policing to ‘zero tolerance’, from violent suppression of protest to the rise of the surveillance state, I Am The Law examines how a comic book warned us about the chilling endgame of today’s ‘law and order’ politics.
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