The article header here is from EA’s Battlefield Hardline. You’d be mistaken for thinking this was a military shooter by the presence of tanks and APC’s blurred out in the background. Our hero is interchangeable with any number of military shooter protagonists. His chiseled jaw and sunglasses gives him away: This Man Is The Police.

If you wanted to draw a line in the sand about American Stories, you can really boil down all of our popular fiction two ways. There are stories about Cops, and there are Cop Stories. Our word game here is to suppose that these are two ultimately distinct things with distinct goals.

The goal of every Story About Cops is to create a type of empathy. These stories are always hedged somewhere in reality that TV writers call “gritty”. We’re supposed to attach ourselves to these fallible Police Officers. We still want to look up to them, or see them as bad eggs completely distinct from much of the rest of the world. Vic Mackey is a dirtbag cowboy cop who ruins the lives of everyone around him. At the end of The Shield, the audience is meant to be empathetic to him. His failures are great and his nobility is small, yet he still had his ideals about him he stuck true to.

Cops in Stories About Cops can look like you or me. We love it in America when our cops are People of Color or otherwise marginalized. It let’s the pop culture empire say hey: no matter how many people they kill or how many cases they mishandle, they’re just like you or I.

Suppose we were to sit down and watch TV. There’s a good chance much of what is on the air is some kind of Story about a Cop. They can be Superheroes, Noir Detectives. Even network television got it’s fingers to re imagine a famous movie about class struggle into a Story about Some Cops. America’s finest export, our reason for creating pop culture sometimes solely seems to be how much we love to heroize Cops. Harry Potter is a Cop. One of the most famous pieces of young adult literature that’s not even American is about a kid who wants to become a magic cop. That’s how far under the earth the claws go.

Now, Cop Stories really only come in one variety. The Cops know what’s right, they know what to do. There is a system that is holding them back. The irony, after all, is usually that the very system they’re sworn to protect is keeping them from being Best Cops. Almost every time will they either abandon the rule of law to better enforce it. Otherwise, they’ll just convince the people who’s job it is to make sure they don’t blow up an orphanage to catch a crook see things their way.

What’s being created here is a different type of empathy. Cops know what’s right because of what they do – even bad cops are an essential part of the system. No matter what, even in the face of the law that’s supposed to be preventing all of us from shooting our neighbors, police officers have the final say in the word of civic morality. Cops are heroes, a class of their own. Just look at the ubiquity of Thin Blue Line flags in any street in America.

Battlefield: Hardline came out in an unspecified time in the past I don’t want to remember. All I know is that it’s the Cop Battlefield. The horror of America is people starting to see that modern policing does mean our neighborhoods are seen as war zones. The comedy of the time we live in is that EA made a game specifically about that. It went mostly unnoticed, a thinkpiece here or there. I don’t need, really need to play Battlefield: Hardline. So long have I spent my life as an capital A American that I know exactly what type of Cop story I imagine the game to be. As a videogame, it was poorly critically received. As another piece in the steel-plated armor of Western Cop Propaganda, it is a link that cannot be really severed.

We have an occupying force in America, called The Police. For the most part – they’re the bad guys. Whatever kinds of questions we have about the complicated morality of cops is mostly inexcusable. A group of people paid their daily wages to dehumanize and treat the rest of us like chattel on the brink of self destruction can never truly represent the values of the American People.
And Yet.

Hopefully I don’t need to summarize the awful news feeds and twitter posts. The Videos of people being forcibly dragged away into unmarked vans or places otherwise unknown. The Jackbooted Thugs, as one superhero in the 90’s referred to them (mostly out of a kind of liberal irony) are truly performing what they were designed to do. Protect the property of The Rich, and curtail a social movement by any means necessary.
Battlefield: Hardline is a story about hero cops, because that is the only kind of story in America about The Police. We take our grittiness in fiction to make them only slightly resemble the racist skinheads they often are in real life – and say gee, wouldn’t it be terrible if things were like this? Thank god we can all empathize with the hardworking Boys in Blue*

*They can be the Hardworking Women in Blue if you’re a liberal concerned with representative politics. It’s important that people that look and think like us are allowed to commit war crimes in their own country.

I often wonder why videogames seem to be so full of Cop Stories. After all, we often call them empathy machines, but concerned mostly with empathizing with people capable of brutalizing us in real life. I don’t need to play Battlefield Hardline, or Call of Duty Modern Warfare, I don’t need to play Uncharted or anything involving a man with a gun. The stories are the same: Law has failed society and society failed it – it is time to do the grisly work of putting things back in order. There will be time for prisons (there is always a time for prisons) afterwards.

Videogames aren’t uniquely unable to reckon with the realities of Police in the United States of America. Like all arms of propaganda, like all types of Cop Story, everything is in well working order. These stories are telling us exactly what they always have, and reinforcing values we all know are there.
The reason there aren’t more games where you play a real boots on the ground Police Officer is because the role of the police so heavily influences all of our culture that it is the background psychology of many of our military thrillers and more. Battlefield Hardline may be unique in that it is nakedly about police, but it is so much more naive in the way it doesn’t need to hide it.

All Cops may be bastards, but in fiction we still often give them all the room we can to be heroes.