IVIV (1) Bigfoot Bjornsen & Tube Reality

[Doug Millison]

from Boing Boing:

Radley Balko's crime column for Reason Online this week "criticizes  
the thinly-veiled S&M fantasy/cop reality show, The Police Women of  
Broward County."

"The most obvious criticism of these shows is their exploitation and  
general tackiness. Police work is reduced to clownish pranks,  
adrenalin-inducing raids, and telegenic lady cops edited to invoke S&M  
fantasies for the shlubs watching at home. No one expects much dignity  
from cable networks, but you'd think, for example, that the Broward  
County Sheriff's Department might object to the sexualization of its  
female officers, or to a national ad campaign insinuating that they're  
sporting itchy Taser fingers.
As for the SWAT programs, America has unfortunately grown comfortable  
with, or at least accustomed to, the idea of using SWAT teams to kick  
down doors and conduct volatile, confrontational raids for consensual,  
nonviolent crimes. We've seen a massive increase in these raids, from  
about 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to some 50,000 per year by the  
early 2000s. The popularity of SWAT shows didn't cause the problem,  
but their popularity is sympomatic of it, and they can only further  
ingrain the troubling notion that there's nothing wrong with sending a  
unit of cops dressed like soldiers into private homes to arrest  
nonviolent drug offenders. And of course, we're never going to see the  
wrong-door raids, or police mistakes that result in fatalities."  http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/31/police-women-of-brow.html

The item at Boing Boing includes a photo of a poster for the show,  
headline: TASER TIME