So far this year, according to the Washington Post, more than 800 people have been shot and killed by members of law enforcement.

In the smartphone body cam age, each graphic new video of a so-called officer-involved shooting

gives the public a chance to reckon with the stakes,

the relative threat, the context, the general impunity, and too often the racial double

standards in the application of lethal force. That reckoning is a relatively new phenomenon,

even though we have been awash in police shooting imagery for a century.

In films and on TV, cops routinely gun down the bad guys without controversy.

So observes the post's Alyssa Rosenberg.

The third installment of her series on the police in entertainment media is headlined in pop culture.

There are no bad police shootings.

Alyssa, welcome back to OTM.

Thank you for having me.

Actually, Alyssa, in Hollywood, there are hardly any bad police in the first instance.

There's heroes, there's anti-heroes, there's the whole mess of

tortured souls beaten down by the job, but for the most part, they're all just trying to keep us

safe. Why is that? Joseph Wambaw, who's a former LAPD detective sergeant, who turned to

write novels and eventually helped create the show

police story, says that the public wants to be comforted by the idea of the stoic cop who

always makes the right decision, and if they pull their weapon and fire it, does so in a state

of extreme calm and clarity about what they're doing. The stories that Hollywood tells

create a presumption that any

police shooting is good because if we had stories that suggested that cops were emotional or

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