I’m the odd man out in my friend group in terms of watching ‘classic’ TV series. I only finished The Sopranos like a year ago. I watched Breaking Bad like six months after it ended. I didn’t get into Game of Thrones until season 5. I’m only halfway through The Wire. And so on and so forth. However, while digesting this much popular culture at one time, I’ve noticed a trend amongst the characters in these shows. Namely, they’re not neccessarily. Sure, you have your heroes and villains, but the heroes could also be the actual villains of the story/be willing to cross lines that heroes don’t normally cross. This isn’t even limited to TV shows. Look at this year’s Batman V. Superman. You have a Batman who was running henchman over with his tank and throwing grenades at them while Superman spent most of the movie questioning whether anyone was actually worth saving. These are characters who used to be above killing their enemies and stood for Truth, Justice and the American Way. Now they’re tossing each other through buildings.
Stating the obvious, media is a direct reflection of the societal mindset. The Superman that existed before terrorism can’t exist anymore. The homicide investigators who would never cross a line in order to get their mind cannot exist in the current political landscape crisscrossed by underhanded and corrupt red tape. The line between good guys and bad guy is almost non-existent. For every decent person out there, it seems as if there is another who is not nearly as decent. Enter today’s story out of Baltimore of a prosecutor ridiculing a rape victim to her colleagues.
Via Washington Post:
“After a Baltimore woman reported her rape to police, the prosecutor on the case shared his thoughts with an officer. “I am not excited about charging it,” the unnamed official wrote in an email. “This victim seems like a conniving little whore.”
“Lmao!” the officer wrote back. “I feel the same.”
The Justice Department unearthed the exchange in a sprawling Aug. 10 reporton the Baltimore Police Department, which found rampant discrimination against black residents, a tendency to use excessive force and a rash of illegal arrests. Toward the end of the 167 pages was another bombshell: Officers frequently dismissed or mishandled sexual assault complaints. They often neglected to interview suspects or send DNA evidence to laboratories. Between 2010 and 2014, authorities tested rape kits in just 15 percent of adult-victim sexual assault cases. The Justice Department concluded that “gender bias” had infected investigations. “In their interviews with women reporting sexual assault,” investigators wrote, “BPD officers ask women questions such as ‘Why are you messing up that guy’s life?’ ”
Meanwhile, just 17 percent of sexual assault reports in 2015 ended with an arrest. More than half of the reports made to the department languished as open cases.”
I’ve said this before, but I will never touch social injustices with a ten foot pole. I’m a straight, college educated white American male. If every person in the country threw their societal problems into a pile, I’d be too embarrassed to even show mine and probably just go home. That being said, this is just disgusting. What human being does something like this? That’d be like blaming a murder victim for sending the murderer to jail. “Listen, I know you’re dead and all, but you really gotta do this to him?” It doesn’t make sense in that context, so why can it make sense if the person was raped?