This article is from WeChat official account:Hardcore Reading Club (ID: hardcorereadingclub), author: Lu Dapeng, editor: Cheng Chi, title picture from: “FireWire”
“FireWire” is one of the few TV series that I watched all at once. Before that, I ridiculously believed that my English listening skills were already great, but I was taken aback when I first came into contact with “FireWire”. It took a while for my ears to adapt to the expressive, rhythm and rhythmic black people with unique charm. English language. I’m not afraid of everyone’s jokes, I learned from “FireWire” that the word police can actually put the accent on the first syllable: poh-leece! That’s how it is read, that’s right.
Dominic West and Idris Elba in the American TV series “The Wire”.
“FireWire” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It pretends to be a crime drama, but in fact it explores sufficiently profound issues such as personal vs. system, freedom vs. social discipline. I’m sure there’s no way to convert people who don’t like it, but I have a suggestion to friends who have watched this street Shakespeare show-you can read several documentary works by one of its main screenwriters, David Simon, especially It’s “The Fierce Year”.
David Simon. /Douban
1. A reporter’s record
David Simon used to be a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. The newspaper was once one of the most influential newspapers in the United States, but then declined sharply. One of the main plot lines in the last season of “FireWire” was the decline of the once-brilliant newspaper industry and the corruption of journalistic ethics.
In 1988, Simon spent a year in the murder team of the Baltimore Police Department as a trainee. (embedded journalist in modern fashion) Follow the police detectives to handle the case and learn how the police detectives in one of the worst and most murderous cities in the United States deal with Sisyphus-style detective missions. Except for the chief in the police station, almost everyone opposed to allowing a young reporter to follow the detectives. Why did the Commissioner agree? One explanation is that his old man has an advanced brain tumor.
“The Year of the Fierce”
[US] David Simon, translated by Xu Zhanxiong
Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2021-4
“The Fierce Year” is not a Sherlock Holmes-style classic detective novel that shows off the detective’s high IQ, nor is it a heroic adventure and love story like “The Book of Spirits”, nor is it a social ethics drama like “Wieland”.
The truth of “The Fierce Years” is true. There is no Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty here. Some are filthy and unbearable in a blue-collar city that is declining, poor, and drug-ridden.
The police here are full of swear words and perverted humor; the criminals here are often extremely stupid “brain-handicapped” or insensitive anti-social elements; here, justice is often not served, and the case is often not solved smoothly. Criminals may get away with it. For example, the torture and murder of a little girl throughout the book has been treated “highly valued by leaders at all levels”. The police has invested extraordinary manpower and material resources, but it is always an unsolved case; the police leaders here are mostly proficient. “Political” old foxes demand absolute loyalty from their subordinates, but they can sacrifice their subordinates at any time and lose their cars to protect them. The “system” here is inexplicable, and it is full of “Catch-22” traps. The audience of “FireWire” will be very familiar with my above summary. After all, “The Fierce Year” and “The Wire” are stories from the same universe.
The swearing police officer in the American drama “The Wire”.
However, what needs to be reminded is that “The Wire” is not an adaptation of “The Fierce Year”, so there is not much direct contact between the two works. I read the complete book and found only two identical elements.
One is the detective team leader, Jewish Jay Lanzman, who is obese, loves to read pornographic magazines in the office, exports in chapters, likes to spoof, and has a sick sense of humor. The second is that a gangster who likes to rob gambling funds while gambling was shot to death. The police asked: “Since you all know that he will rob, why do you allow him to play together?” The other gangsters said in astonishment: “We must let him play. This is the United States.” Yes, it is the number one in FireWire. The beginning of the season.
Although the police only has a character like Lanzman who appeared in the “Line of Fire”, we often feel that we have seen the naughty Jimmy McNatti and others among the busy figures of dozens of police detectives.
Second, from books to American dramas
One big difference between “The Fierce Year” and “The Line of Fire” is that “The Fierce Year” is entirely from the perspective of the police, so it does not involve municipalities.The government, state government, labor unions, education system, press and other institutions that have collapsed will not be involved in organized crime.
The criminals in “The Fierce Year” mostly fight alone, or negligent crimes, passionate killings, etc. There will be no big men like Bucksdale. Therefore, “The Fierce Year” is a police story. Moreover, when depicting the police station, “The Fierce Year” is not as dark and desperate as “The Line of Fire”. Generally speaking, the description of police workers at all levels in “The Year of the Bad” is positive.
Following the footsteps of the police detectives in “The Fierce Years”, we will also have a more in-depth understanding of related institutions such as forensic medicine, court trials and juries. If you are interested in forensic technology and the American judicial system, this book will also be helpful to you, but it was written in 1988 after all, so viewers need to decide for themselves.
The cover of the English version of “The Year of the Sorrow”.
The thing that impressed me the most was the mass media(in this book is TV, and now of course there is also the Internet) The distortion caused by the vast majority of people has a serious misunderstanding of it, and this will seriously affect the judgment of the case in the U.S. court with a jury system.
For example, in crime TV dramas, killings always have a sufficient “motivate”, so the jurors who are deeply influenced by TV(Jury in Baltimore Often there is no culture, and the main source of information is television) will be surprised to find that for many murders, the police do not give motives for committing crimes, and are not even interested in motives. The police just want to prove that someone is the murderer. As for why he wants to kill, the police don’t want to know. However, the jurors will feel that the police’s failure to give motives constitutes a reasonable doubt (reasonable doubt), which may overturn the case that the police believes to be ironclad , Allowing the murderer to escape sanctions.
The narrative of this book is linear, progressing in chronological order, rather than in the order of development of a case; and there are many characters, there are almost 20 detectives with more dramas, although some The characters are unforgettable, but most of them are actually blurred.(This is also inevitable, after all, this is a strictly documentary literature, which cannot be like “FireWire” Shape the characters as you like).
For these two reasons, this book tends to give people a sense of complexity and chaos, with a lot of clutter and a mess. But I don’t think this is a shortcoming, because The author’s perspective is similar to that of a camera. His observations are very direct and naturalistic. The depiction of reality is alive, unmodified, condensed, and enhanced >. This just creates a very realistic atmosphere, allowing readers to experience the life of a police detective from the murder team of the Baltimore Police Department immersively.
For a police detective investigating a murder case, fighting the murderer is only part of his job, and it can even be said to be an easier part of his job. Police detectives need to fight against the “system” of the police station all the time, or to find ways to coexist with the “system”. This is a topic rarely discussed in general detective-themed literary works, so I find it particularly interesting. The friction, or malice, caused by the “system” against police detectives has many manifestations. I think two of them are particularly interesting: statistics and overtime pay.
The average rating of Douban in the five seasons of the American TV series “FireWire” is as high as 9.5.
Let’s talk about statistics first. “FireWire” viewers will be particularly impressed by this, because the statistical trick (juking the stats) is a police department item Common activity. The police station is like a company. It must (police detective)(case closing rate) is quantified, evaluated and evaluated. This is easy to understand. Simon told us, “The worship of data has become a common concept in all modern police departments.
Only when the data is good, the police inspector can become the police chief, the police chief can become the chief inspector, and the chief police inspector can become the deputy chief; when the data is bad, the road to promotion of all these leaders will be like a sewage pipe. Generally blocked”.
Quantitative statistics is a management tool, not the ultimate goal. To put it more ideally, the meaning of the existence of the police station is to detect crimes, bring criminals to justice, and bring justice to justice. How to do this? That is to use very “scientific” quantitative management methods.
However, since leaders use statistics to demand subordinates, subordinates under great pressure are not stupid, so statistics quickly become the ultimate goal of most work. Everyone danced around the data and worshipped this evil god, but forgot their “initial intentions”. Then it is only natural for everyone to try to cheat.
“Baltimore’s data is reasonable, which shows that the police in this city are basically good and hardworking. However, they will also play a little trick on the detection rate itself. If anyone dares to point out that this data is not true, then I can Tell you, no data is true.”
This sentence is too important! “No data is true”! Statistics may seem like science, but in fact, it is often far from science.
Stills from the American TV series “FireWire”.
How do police detectives cheat on the statistics of crime detection rate? First of all, “As long as a criminal suspect is arrested in a certain case, it is considered solved. If the accusation against the suspect is abandoned because of lack of evidence, if the jury is unwilling to give a verdict, if the prosecutor decides to abandon the investigation or suspend the investigation, As far as the detectives are concerned, they are still solved.” In other words, whether justice is done is not a criterion for assessing the quality of police detective work. The standard is to arrest people.
Statistics cheating often produces ridiculous results. For example, “Statistics rules allow cases that were several years ago to be included in this year’s case detection rate. So if a murder team cracked 90 out of 100 cases this year, and then solved 20 cases left over from previous years, they would The detection rate is 110%.” The result of 110% of the case closure rate seems counter-common sense, but it still makes sense.
The following paragraph, it is estimated that people with workplace experience will understand it. After all, this is what everyone understands when doing performance reports and reporting. But everyone shouldn’t expect that the police station does it in the same way.
“You can say that this kind of behavior is totally outrageous, but the police are always playing tricks. If the crime detection rate in that year is high enough, then a mindful rotating supervisor or squad The superintendent will move a case that was solved in December to January of the next year, which will make their data for the beginning of the next year look better. And if the detection rate of that year is not high enough, the supervisors will give them to their subordinates. There is a two- to three-week buffer period. In January, detectives will focus on solving the cases in December of the previous year, and then count these cases in the statistics of the previous year. Through such tips, the crime team’s detection rate is usually Can improve by 10 points.”
Stills from the American TV series “FireWire”.
Let’s talk about the overtime pay of the police. The salaries of police detectives in the murder team are not high, and their money mainly depends on overtime and court fees. The manipulation of overtime pay is one of the most important political games in the police station. The Baltimore Police Department is one of the poorer bureaus in the country, with tight funding, and Baltimore City has a lot of homicides, which means that detectives have to work a lot of overtime to barely keep up with the pace of criminals.
In this case, the overtime and court fees of the murder team often exceed the budget by as much as $150,000. Therefore, in certain months of each year, the police department must save money as much as possible to avoid exceeding the budget too much. It is impossible to increase revenue, only to reduce expenditure, so overtime pay must be used. In other words, try to reduce the overtime of police detectives.
How to restrict? This isThe same stipulation: If the total amount of overtime and court fees for a police detective exceeds 50% of his basic salary, he will not be allowed to participate in rotating work. In other words, only let him sit in the office (possibly idle) during normal working hours from 9 to 5 Answer phone calls and new cases outside of time.
This is tantamount to severing one’s arm and taking the initiative to reduce manpower. So there may be situations of idle death and busy death. Those who are busy will soon increase their overtime work, and the overtime pay will reach 50% of the basic salary. This is a very nonsensical phenomenon, leading to fewer and fewer manpower in the murder team.
Stills of the American drama “FireWire”.
The above two examples are very “universal” management issues. Although they wrote about the Baltimore Police Department in 1988, I believe we can easily understand them today.
But I want to emphasize again that exposing “system problems” is not the main theme of “The Ominous Year”. “The Ominous Year” still holds great kindness and “comprehensive sympathy” to the police station. The description of the frontline police is even more It is positive, but careful readers will also notice that one of the policemen is a racist, one is a misogynist, and one is a homophobic.
If you just read “The Fierce Year”, readers may be surprised. After seeing through so many absurd system problems, Simon has not yet become cynical, and he can write the police station so positively, which seems a bit unbelievable. . Of course, in “FireWire”, Simon has let himself go, and the world there is darker and perhaps more “real”.
This article is from WeChat official account:Hardcore Reading Club (ID: hardcorereadingclub), Author: Lu Dapeng