Fuck it, let's do this : Brooklyn Nine Nine as copaganda.

First of all, let's start by talking about the police. Specifically, the New York Police Department. Where should we begin? Maybe with Amadou Diallo, who was shot 19 times by plainclothes detectives who were trying to arrest him for literally no reason.

Or maybe we should look at Adrian Schoolcraft, an NYPD officer who was locked up in a mental hospital by his fellow cops because he was blowing a whistle on their use of quotas.

Then there's Eric Garner, killed by the NYPD for the crime of selling loose cigarettes. Or Kalief Browder. Or countless others.

Perhaps most telling is Kyle Erickson, an NYPD officer who was caught on bodycam planting marijuana on a suspect. Internal affairs cleared him of misconduct, despite, well, being caught on bodycam trying to frame someone.

The NYPD isn't a friendly cop on the corner, ready to help anyone who needs it. It's an occupying army that exists to brutalize the weak and vulnerable.

So what's copaganda? It's any media that tries to make people think that police aren't awful.

In a general sense, it can refer to staged photos of police officers playing basketball with kids, but we're using it more specifically to refer to TV shows and movies that portray cops as good guys.

Think NCIS, Blue Bloods, or Law And Order. I'm going to use Castle as my example, because I don't watch many police shows.

In Castle, most of the main characters are NYPD detectives. They're all good guys, thorough professionals, and law-abiding crime solvers. They would never violate someone's rights, they would never beat a suspect, and they would certainly never frame someone.

I saw every episode of Castle, and I can only recall one instance of a cop being the bad guy...although I seem to remember that he was being blackmailed or otherwise coerced.

Castle was a fun show, but it obviously has no relation to the actual NYPD. It's pure copaganda - whitewashing, plain and simple.

Brooklyn Nine Nine is a little more complicated. The NYPD itself is generally portrayed as a deeply flawed institution.

The top brass are almost universally shown to be amoral careerists who are happy to violate civil rights on a mass scale or tamper with investigations for personal reasons.

Individual cops are also shown to be a serious problems - consider Jake's former partner, who planted drugs to frame a suspect, or the elite task force that was actually robbing banks. Even an FBI agent turned out to be corrupt.

On a more systematic level, the show has repeatedly used the idea that the entire NYPD has been infiltrated by the Mafia, and that no individual cop could be trusted.

The NYPD has constantly been shown to be racist and homophobic - Captain Holt's entire career trajectory is based on that idea. Santiago was sexually harassed by her former superior officer, and Jeffords was racially profiled & harassed by a street cop.

Season 6 had an ongoing story line that was all about the 99 taking on NYPD leadership over stop-and-frisk.

Does this exonerate Brooklyn Nine Nine? I wish it did, but absolutely not. People a lot smarter than me have said that it's impossible to make an anti-war movie - no matter how bad you make war seem, by focusing on soldiers & violence, war will be glamourized.

Brooklyn Nine Nine faces a similar problem - the show depicts 99% of the NYPD as severely flawed, with only the detectives of the Nine Nine being good cops, but every episode focuses on those detectives. After all, they're the main characters.

That means the overall impression you get from the show is that cops are good guys who solve crimes, even if the institution itself is flawed, and occasional individual cops are in the wrong.

How can the show tackle this problem going forward? The simplest answer would be to have all the main characters transfer to Internal Affairs. Every episode would be about investigating bad cops.

That may be the simplest answer, but it wouldn't necessarily be the best one. After all, it would still portray the NYPD as an organization that could be salvaged - a fundamentally decent police department that just needs to get rid of the bad apples.

The evidence strongly suggests that this isn't the case - the NYPD can't be reformed, and it can't be saved. Internal Affairs Nine Nine would be a dishonest concept.

@marcbernardin has suggested changing the show's setting - make it Fire Department Nine Nine instead, and pretend that it was always that way.

That has a certain appeal, but it also lets the show & its characters off the hook. It's an easy solution, but it's still a whitewash. A better solution would involve confronting their complicity with the NYPD's crimes.

How the hell do you do that? I've jokingly suggested Antifa Nine Nine, but a humorous take on such a serious subject might not go over too well.

I honestly don't know. Maybe have the team realize just how bad things are in the NYPD, and make them become private investigators who work for defense attorneys, putting their skills to use protecting innocent people from the NYPD.

Can you abandon the whole investigation concept entirely? Could you have the characters start working at a paper company? It seems like a lot of the show's stories are based on the character's personal lives & office drama, rather than police work...

but police work still makes up an important component of the show. I'm not sure if you can just get rid of that.

I'm a big fan of Brooklyn Nine Nine, and I love the characters. It's not quite up there with my favourite comedies of all time, but it's close. I'd hate to see it go - but maybe there's no fixing it. Maybe it's time for the Ninety Ninth Precinct to shut down.