Deliberate and Deliberative: Democratic Policework in Unforgotten

• In Event: Work/Force: Exploring the Politics of Work, Violence & Terror in Popular Culture

Abstract

Police dramas – a staple of the television programming landscape from its inception to its contemporary Golden Age – provide fertile ground for political analysis. Indeed, scholars often critique televised law enforcement shows for mis-representing or oversimplifying violence against women, framing forensic science as a neutral source of truth, and valuing vigilantism over the rule of law. While these criticisms are significant, the existing scholarship leaves open the question of what might constitute a positive representation of law enforcement. How do we want to imagine the use of our collective, democratic power as our representatives respond to crime, encounter victims or their mourning families, question persons of interest and suspects, and interact with their colleagues? We have many bad examples, but few that illustrate police officers as members of the polity rather than its guardians. If (and it is not a small if) some sort of executive power is needed in a complex, multicultural society – an organization that seeks to protect citizens from physical violence and polices those who act violently towards other – how might police work be imagined differently?

We argue that the first two seasons of Unforgotten – a drama produced for ITV and distributed by BBC productions in the UK, which appeared on Masterpiece Mystery as well as Amazon Prime in the US – offer a representation of criminal investigations as deliberate and deliberative efforts undertaken by thoughtful, humane, caring representatives of the state. Unforgotten illustrates a normatively desirable police force in three ways. First, in contrast to the typical ‘lone wolf’ working outside of procedure to secure vigilante justice, Detective Chief Inspector Stuart offers an example of democratic and accountable leadership. Though capable and assertive, Stuart assiduously cultivates the agency and talents of her subordinates by exhorting when necessary, asking rather than yelling, thanking rather than assuming, and responding appropriately to resistance from below and direction from above. In doing so, she positions herself as a leader among peers: the kind of leadership necessary for democratic life to work. Second, the police officers attend to how oppression shaped the contours of the initial crime and the initial investigations into the now-cold cases serving as the focus of each season. In the first season, what at first blush appears a racially-based hate crime turns out to be mundane jealousy occasioned by a wife’s discovered of her closeted husband’s illicit homosexual encounters; in the second season, the long-term effects of sexual predation are exposed through a strangers-on-a-train scenario wherein each of three radically different victims kills one of the other’s abuser. In both seasons, the power imbalances inherent in differences of class, gender, race, immigration, and sexuality are confronted and discussed frankly even as the police seek to be fair. Third, by doing so, the show begins to pry apart the typically close relationship between legal responsibility and broader political responsibility even as it stays on the terrain of a police procedural. How should we as a society respond when the police have failed to act to protect the most vulnerable, resulting in the vulnerable acting to protect themselves and others? By explicitly raising this question, Unforgotten interjects a structural analysis into a genre that has typically focused on individuals and legal guilt rather than structures and political responsibility. By offering a normatively desirable example of democratic leadership and a genre-challenging engagement with structural injustice, we argue that Unforgotten may provide a template to reimagine police work as deliberate and deliberative.

Authors

• Heather N. Pool, Denison University

• Allison Rank, SUNY, Oswego State