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OK - who else on here hates cops, actively opposes #prisons and #policing, fights for #abolition BUT still has some deep-routed cultural love for the deeply problematic crime genre? 
Not the real gung-go pro-cop stuff. I can’t stomach that. But usually the outsider/rogue/maverick/genius/righteous cop in a precinct of bad apples type gimmick. (Like how, technically most super-hero stories are cop stories).
I grew up adoring #Columbo mysteries, and watched them with my mother - they will always make me think of her - as well as my best friend. #MurderSheWrote too. #SherlockHolmes, #Monk. Stuff like that. And I really like the books of #MichaelConnelly, which I’ve been reading since I was a teen, as well as a few other #crime writers. I loved #Luther and #LineOfDuty too. All perpetuate the propaganda of carceral logic - the cops ‘have’ to catch the ‘bad’ guy and either jail them, or often outright kill them (which the writer tries to make us root for!) and even corrupt cops are caught by cops and, (we are trained to hope), put in jail by the end. Often they also perpetuate a justification of police brutality too - assault, lies and terror are justified to catch a ‘crook’ by any means necessary, etc., etc… Truly terrible stuff. BUT shamefully enjoyable as a work of fiction still because of a lifetime of tropes and cultural programming.
Anyone else have this problem too? And are there any good anti-cop and anti-carceral murder mysteries out there? Is #ACAB Crime a genre? Should it be? Or do I just need some cultural de-programming?
Thinking out loud here as I’ve just bought the latest Michael Connelly and am excited to read it…
@Authenticdmckee columbo is about class war and therefore is acceptable!! i love detective stories, especially 30s/40s stuff like dorothy sayers and craig rice. i try to pick carefully so i’m not reading outright copaganda. and recently i’ve been really excited about podcasts investigating the problems with policing, as a kind of meta true crime thing, but with an abolitionist bent.
@nonmodernist that’s how I’ve always justified Lieutenant ‘Bo to myself 
He was never after them for the murders, he was after them for being rich 
If we wanted to be very generous, there definitely could be a compelling interpretation made of detective fiction that the detective trope itself - usually an independent operator doing their own maverick thinking beyond the limits of the everyday police force, or even outside of the formal police as a PI or consultant - could be read as satirising the ineffectual nature of the police and their failing as a force for keeping society safe. The police never get the villain, the autonomous rule-breaking detectives acting beyond the police do. That they remain police-adjacent as they break their rules also subversively suggests that all law enforcement is inherently corrupt and exposes some of the tensions within the very idea of law (which rules do we enforce, which rule-breakers do we punish? Etc…) Furthermore you could even read into the serial nature of good detective stories - another book, another episode, another crime to be solved - a further critique that punitive and carceral responses to crime don’t work, because even these iconoclastic detectives bucking the overall system fail to actually address what is causing the so-called crime in the first place when they catch their criminal and send them to prison. Nothing changes and another body appears next story in the series to start the cycle all over again.
But I think that would be a VERY generous reading of the genre