a very good piece, and i suddenly realised that in a ton of notable crime fiction (e.g. Conan Doyle, Christie), police are 'operationally significant' in solving crime, without being narratively or morally centred, so it's by no means a difficult thing to do. https://twitter.com/Micha_Frazer/status/1281516403305197571

of course, both of those examples could be racist as hell in their own right, but the message of 'the police make everything worse with their shitty assumptions' was still pretty constant.

and it was generally couched in terms of 'it stops them being efficient!', which is a very privileged-white-person lens, but there's still a 'Incremental Woke-ness of Inspector Japp' angle to be explored.