The Black Lives Matter narrative has taken over network television's fall season. This has made most law and order dramas numbingly predictable. With a notable exception like Blue Bloods, most cop and legal shows are churning out mindless angst over "systemic racism" and bad, bad police officers.
CBS's legal drama All Rise, a promoter of left-wing propaganda, has devoted the fall to BLM talking points. This week's episode, 'Bad Beat,' on December 7 follows the story of prosecutor Mark Callan's (Wilson Bethel) discovery that an officer-involved shooting from years ago wrongly placed the blame on the unarmed victim. The officer said the victim had a gun and charged him. Newly discovered photo evidence proves otherwise. This plot set-up leads to lots of dialogue from the characters about how awful the police system is.
"In the past decade, in this town, a grand total of zero officer-involved shootings have been prosecuted. I mean, it's systemic. Everybody contributes-- you know, the police, the police union," Tony (Steven Williams), a man helping Mark says.
"I know it's dangerous. I know it could tank my career, but I also know what the cops are capable of," Samantha (Audrey Corsa), a clerk in Mark's office, agrees.
Using the phrase "officer-involved shootings" with an inherent presumption that such shootings are criminal rather than defensive rears its head again when Mark is talking with his friend, Judge Lola Carmichael (Simone Missick), on the roof of the courthouse about how working on the risky case might effect his relationship with his girlfriend.
Mark: Amy's on board-ish.
Lola: And what if she isn't? What if, when this thing blows up, which it will...
Mark: Oh, that's cute.
Lola: I'm just sayin'! This affects her, too, and you do not wanna screw up the one good relationship that you have ever have.
Mark: Do you think it's weird that she still has her condo six months later?
Lola: I mean...
Mark: It's just sitting there, empty. She says it's covid, and bad time to sell, but I think it's a safety net.
Lola: You two need to talk to each other. And look, here's what you tell Amy. Hundreds of men are shot by the cops, hundreds of grieving families. -
Mark: She knows.
Lola: And all we ever hear about are "Bad apples." This is a chance to change that narrative, to show that the entire system protects those cops, a chance for real, meaningful change, and it starts with this case. You just gotta be ready for the repercussions.
Here at NewsBusters we will probably have to keep repeating certain statistics as each drama exaggerates or lies about an epidemic of wrongful police shootings, but the fact remains that in 2019 there were only 14 fatal police shootings of unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims. There is no epidemic of innocent men being criminally shot by police officers throughout the country. There is, however, an epidemic of rising violence and murder rates since law enforcement became BLM's national scapegoat during the summer of 2020.
With the show All Rise, you could play a drinking game with the number of times they throw around the word "systemic." In a separate subplot, a prosecutor decides to let off a young black man for selling cocaine because "My office treats Black and brown kids between the ages of 18 and 24 more harshly."
"Yeah. You're right, it does," the defense attorney agrees. No explanation is offered for why any young man, black, brown, or white, should face no consequences for selling cocaine.
Such is the simplistic mindset of woke legal shows. Cops are bad. Legal consequences for a crime are racist. If the political mentality reflected in this show continues to take hold in cities across the nation, innocent citizens will suffer.
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