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The police are the good guys, or so I thought as a kid growing up in the suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s when just about everything I knew about policing came from what I watched on television. Long before I had ever heard the word “copaganda,” I had little reason to not take the dreamy heroes of 21 Jump Street and Miami Vice at face value, or even the well-meaning dummies of the Police Academy franchise. My new essay collection tracks how I ultimately lost faith in liberal American institutions I once revered, but it’s not without hope. I Want to Burn This Place Down is my attempt to share with you all of the ways I was wrong. Maybe you were wrong too. Maybe, together, we can hope for something better.
We weren’t supposed to watch too much TV in our household, but that didn’t stop us. We were firmly in the era of “TV rots your brain,” before 24-hour cable news and long before smartphones and social media were invented. Before the internet, television was one of our primary tools for learning about how the world worked, what life was like outside of our middle-class suburban neighborhood.
This was not too long after Don DeLillo published his 1985 suburban satirical masterpiece White Noise, a critique of media consumption in contemporary American life, in which pop culture professor Murray Jay Siskind, equal parts pretentious and insightful, says, “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.” We were too young to have read the book, but if we had, I know we would have agreed. Television was the center of our universe.
My brothers are five years older than me, so as a child, I could never wrest the cable box from their greedy hands, but that was OK. While they squabbled for control of the remote, I was just happy to sit next to them on the couch and watch whatever they were watching. There were Saturday morning cartoons and the ads for sugary breakfast cereals that accompanied them, after-school specials and 5 p.m. sitcom reruns, primetime TV shows, MTV to fill in the gaps. Dad commandeered the TV at 6:30 every night to put on the news, the one thing that was ostensibly good for us to watch.
And of course there were the movies: comedies that were broadcasted over and over again, which we would watch in different 20-minute chunks until we’d seen the whole thing many times. Like listening to a song on a repeat, movies that were constantly being replayed on cable channels became ingrained in your consciousness by sheer osmosis. Aside from ending credits, information about the films you were watching wasn’t readily available; when you wanted to remember the name of that one actor who played the best friend in that one movie, you had to flip through Dad’s copy of Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion to get answers. But by force of sheer repetition, what you were viewing could become a part of you, bleeped out curse words and all. Some of the movies that are still a part of me: Weird Science, Mannequin, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Gremlins, Can’t Buy Me Love, Overboard.
My brothers loved a zany comedy as much as I did, but they were also delighted by anything with a fight scene, anything with a villain with a dastardly plot or a hero with a score to settle or a war to be won. They liked Dirty Harry, but that Clint Eastwood movie co-starring the orangutan was much more my speed. If my brothers were watching something really bloody, like a movie in the Rambo franchise, or too loud and cruel, like the reality TV series Cops, I would go to another room and read. I liked books, too; it wasn’t an either/or. I just liked to get caught up in narratives that took me outside of myself, as I think, did they. So off I’d go with my Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High; later I got into murder mysteries and various James Patterson series, which are the Sweet Valley High of police procedurals.
Like Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the twins of Sweet Valley, my brothers Seth and Jay looked so much alike that people had trouble telling them apart. People asked all the time whether I was able to tell the difference between them, as if I hadn’t lived with them my entire life and understood on a gut level how they varied. But as we know from media representations throughout history, twinhood is one of the most complicated and intriguing of human relationships, a bond nearly supernatural in its potency. From Jacob and Esau to Tweedledee and Tweedledum, not to mention the Doublemint Gum ladies, history showed time and time again that twins can be best friends or worst enemies, or, more likely, both at the same time.
Unlike Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, my brothers Seth and Jay did not have personalities that were as different as night and day. They were more alike than they liked to think. They were both super friendly like my mom, capable of talking to just about anyone, while I tended to shrink back. And they were mostly into the same things: soccer and Little League, hogging the Nintendo, and later, weightlifting. There were smaller differences I could pick up on: Seth was more likely to crack a joke, and Jay was quicker with a smile, but overall they provided a fairly unified front to the outside world. They both knew how to push each other’s buttons, how to artfully deploy the little dig that would hurt the most. And I had front-row seats.
I was perfectly content to play a minor role in my brothers’ twin drama, and when they included me in anything it felt like entry into the most exclusive club. How I loved doing silly dances in the kitchen with them after dinner, riding bikes with them in a little neighborhood gang, pillow fighting. But TV-watching — this was our true shared passion.
There were times when the twin drama got too intense. One morning, as they were getting ready for high school, a fight broke out in the bathroom. It appears they had both picked out the same shirt to wear for the day, and one of them was going to have to change. But who? I didn’t see it, but I remember blood spattered all over the sink.
Then there was that one fight in the basement, where we kept the weight-lifting equipment. I’m not sure I ever knew what the fight was about, but I swiftly came to know that weights make for cumbersome yet scary weapons. When my mother couldn’t break it up on her own, she called the police, knowing they would help. We huddled on the front steps and waited for them to arrive, so relieved when an officer showed up and swiftly deescalated the situation downstairs. He then gave my brothers a stern talking to and told them to apologize to our mother for scaring her. They obeyed. They were sorry. I know they were. The police officer’s presence simply hastened their contrition. We were so grateful. It’s more than a decade later when I realize what a privilege it is for a mother to be able to call the police on one’s own children and know they’ll only receive a mild scolding and learn an important life lesson, nothing more.
We watched so much TV about law enforcement that in the 1980s, I thought policing mostly involved pumping the gas and darting through busy intersections while suspenseful music played in the background.
Car chases were as reliable a trope as the maverick officer with his own moral code mouthing off to superiors, or the battle-scarred veteran who’s seen it all and just wants to eat donuts and make it to retirement. The camera angle is everything, making it feel like you’re doing a ride along with a dashing and ballsy officer in excellent sunglasses, who will do anything to catch the bad guys and look cool doing it. Sirens blare, horns honk, tires skid, and suddenly you’re zooming down a narrow back alley, hot on the heels of some bank robbers or drug dealers.
CHiPs, an early 1980s series about two California Highway Patrol officers, adds a distinctive new twist to the genre. This time, the cops are on motorcycles. Now they’re more lithe, more agile, more able to get up to even more trouble. ChiPs was my brothers’ favorite. They even had the CHiPs merchandise, 8-inch action figures of the show’s two stars in their uniforms, with a model of a patrol motor bike sold separately, perfect for zooming around on the tile of our kitchen floor. My brothers, how they loved to go very fast.
Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t answer the doorbell if your parents aren’t home. Don’t get lured into any vans by strange men promising candy. Don’t end up like the children on the back of the milk cartons you read about while eating your sugary morning cereal, or like Dudley (Shavar Ross) in that one special episode of Diff’rent Strokes where the kids come face to face with a pedophile. Have your parents check your Halloween candy to be sure one of your neighbors hasn’t hidden a razor blade inside.
Oh, to be a child in the era of stranger danger. With suburban paranoia at its peak, we were taught to be constantly on alert and not to trust any adults except people we knew—and the cops. Every year a couple of police officers would come to school and give an assembly on safety. You should call the police if ever anyone is in danger, they said, or even if you just have a weird feeling about some grownup who doesn’t look quite right.
The cops were the good guys, everyone knew that. And the township cops really did always make me feel safe. It never even occurred to me that they could be villains. By the time I was in high school, I had seen that Ray Liotta movie in which a cop stalks a woman and makes her life hell, but that was strictly for entertainment. Even movies about bad cops usually have a good cop or two who will save the day.
I had no reason not to trust authority. Authority was the police and the evening news and the three newspapers my parents got delivered every day. We were their target audience. It did not occur to me to consider their biases and blind spots, and certainly, I never bothered to get anyone else’s perspective.
Newspapers were not inclined to report on police abuses, and local news made the world look like a dangerous place, with kidnappings and robberies and police bravely fighting on the frontlines of the war on drugs that was turning city streets into chaos. In the pre-Internet days, it took a lot of effort to find out how the world actually worked. Especially if you had no reason to question the facts put before you. Especially if you were a sheltered kid, living in a New York City suburb. Especially if you were white.
“It’s no coincidence that the nation’s missing child or ‘stranger danger’ panic originated in a city that much of the nation had already come to regard as the epicenter of dangerous strangers—and a city that had already begun to lay the groundwork to respond with more police and prisons,” writes Meagan Day in a 2020 Jacobin piece about the moral panic of the 1980s. “The link between mass incarceration and violence against children was there from the beginning of the stranger danger panic, foreshadowing what would transpire in the decades to come.”
I moved to New York City in 2000, directly after college, even though I knew it was unsafe. In the city, people would try to take advantage of me, or so I was told. On the street, everyone was guilty until proven otherwise, or so I was told. Basically, there were rapists and muggers everywhere, just waiting for oblivious young women to fuck up. This was Stranger Danger Part 2, for young white women from the suburbs who move to the city.
And so I was vigilant. I carried my keys in a strategic way when walking down the street late at night. I didn’t look any fellow pedestrians in the eye. I avoided dark alleys, even considered carrying a rape whistle. I prepared for my daily commute to work as if I were going into battle, closing myself off in the most unfriendly, self-absorbed way. (An up-hill battle for me, because smiling has always been my default.)
This fear escalated tenfold when, a year after I moved to New York City, I watched the Twin Towers fall in real time on the TV at my Midtown office. I will never forget the smell of the city as I shakily walked home about an hour later. It was the smell of everything I could possibly imagine in Downtown burning, the photocopiers and fax machines you’d find in an office as well as the people inside.
In a report on 9/11’s legacy for the Pew Research Center on the 20-year anniversary of the attack in 2021, Hannah Hartig and Carol Doherty note that fear was the norm. “Most Americans said they were very (28%) or somewhat (45%) worried about another attack. When asked a year later to describe how their lives changed in a major way, about half of adults said they felt more afraid, more careful, more distrustful or more vulnerable as a result of the attacks.”[3]
At the same time, the NYPD was elevated to hero status. In Rudy Giuliani’s New York post-9/11, I would see people stopping cops on the street to say thank you, and the sight would warm my heart. I felt pride for the people keeping me safe in my city, even as they began to erect surveillance cameras and conduct random bag checks in subway stations.
Then on Sept. 16, 2001, Susan Sontag published a sharp criticism in The New Yorker on the messages we were receiving from the government and the media, mostly that America was an innocent victim of an attack. She skewered my newly found patriotism. “The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing,” she writes. “The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.” I had no problem with that; I was basically a baby sucking my thumb and waiting to be told that everything was going to be okay. But at the same time my world was getting bigger everyday. I was seeing more and reading more and meeting new people with backgrounds different from my own. And as I did, I began to question some of the ideas I had taken to be facts: that New York City is inherently unsafe, that strangers are out to swindle you, that we need cops to keep us safe.
Two decades later I would talk to Casey Plett, a trans writer and publisher I admire, who has every reason to don her armor while walking down the street. Still, she makes the conscious effort not to.
“I doggedly, doggedly believe that there is a balance that most of us know in our bones, about a distinction between guardedness and openness,” she told me in an interview about her 2023 book, On Community, which grapples with both the positive implications and the faults of the way we think about how we connect to other people. “Plenty of people I know in my life who have survived some of the most awful things at the hands of strangers are also some of the kindest people I know to people they don’t know.”
How much time I have wasted with my irrational fears.
It never even occurred to me, back in the early aughts, that openness could be a choice, a life-affirming decision about the people around you that you made every single morning before walking out the door, that there is strength in trusting and taking care of each other. That such care could mitigate the conditions that beget crime.
“We know that in a society where everyone’s needs are met, we would no longer need to fear being unable to pay for our health care, or losing our jobs and going hungry, or being hurt by desperate, disillusioned people,” writes Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in their 2023 book Let This Radicalize You. “Yet many of us accept the violence, limitations, and boundaries imposed by the system as though they are natural laws–inalterable, inevitable, and final–and view everyday people as an existential threat to control, contain, and manage.”
Slowly I become a real New Yorker, growing comfortable enough to trust myself and the other people I saw every day rather than being on high alert all the time. It is a remarkably better way to live. And with that trust came the ability to decide things for myself, to determine which lore about New York City was actually true.
I saw very few roving gangs of criminals; none, actually. I saw street harassers who for sure made me feel discomfort in every single part of my body, but never truly unsafe. I saw unhoused people hassled by cops, and I saw subway fare evaders treated like violent criminals. I saw cops gather on the street outside my local bar at 4 am when the drunk people trickled out, ostensibly to prevent fights but most of the time they just talked to girls.
On a Saturday night in 2008, I came home from a business trip at close to midnight, groggy and jet-lagged, to find crime-scene tape surrounding my building. Before I could enter, a police officer checked my ID and asked whether I’d noticed any disturbances in the building, anything off. Something was wrong, I understood, but other than letting me know it was safe to go in, he wouldn’t tell me anything more. I learned the next morning that a neighbor had been murdered by her boyfriend in her apartment. If I had been home, I might have overheard something from that gruesome, unthinkable night. I was glad I had been away.
A few weeks later, I ran into the cop who’d stopped me in front of my building on the night of the murder. I was at my local bar, a place where I usually felt safe and the bartenders knew my drink order. He aggressively hit on me, and I was disturbed by how quickly he was able to go from protector to pursuer. I craved a feeling of security, of knowing someone out there was looking out for me, but it was nowhere to be found. I’d always loved to watch romantic thrillers, but this felt neither romantic nor thrilling.
Only three months following, in December, two on-duty NYPD detectives were dispatched to help a drunk woman get into her home safely. She testified that she woke up in her apartment to being raped by one of the cops; the other one was on lookout duty. Both men were acquitted of the rape in 2011, and the tabloid headlines were as victim-blamey as you might imagine, but I never again instinctively thought to call the police if ever there was trouble. I was so very lucky to have had reason to hold onto that illusion as long as I did.
I can’t overstate how closed off I was growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, even though I didn’t know it at the time. There was a whole wide world that was not getting covered in the New York Times or on the evening news, and so Xennials like me were only getting to see a small sliver of it. And then the internet came along and there were so many smart voices aside from the ones I regularly saw in the media, and they were accessible to anyone who wanted to find them.
It’s often difficult to recall, in the post-Elon Musk era, that for a moment in the aughts, social media became a tool not just for fucking around or for self-promotion, but for citizen journalism and activism. Twitter was vital.
In the aftermath of the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, writer and editor Jenée Desmond Harris explained how social media changed the way the world saw the protests. “It started with Brown’s dead body lying in the street,” she writes in Vox. “It continued with shocking images of confrontations between protestors and an aggressive, militarized police force, as well as first-person accounts of abuse so dramatic as to be almost unbelievable. And so much of it was captured in photographs and videos.” This footage often didn’t match what the big major networks were showing, at least until some major players started to use Twitter to find sources.
We take so much media literacy for granted these days, but it was revelatory when I first saw a tweet, say, directly comparing the headlines the news media uses when a person of color is the perpetrator or victim of a violent crime, versus the ones they use for white people in similar situations. Or when a trusted Twitter follower broke down a newly published newspaper article line by line to fact check and to scrutinize the grammar and vocabulary, a true education in dehumanizing tactics like when the passive voice is used (when trying to let the alleged perpetrator off the hook) versus when publications use actual verbs.
Once you see it, it’s everywhere.
New York City during the early days of the pandemic were the scariest ones I’ve ever known. Before Covid vaccines were available, it felt perilous to go anywhere at all. We could hear the sound of ambulance sirens around the clock. The people working at the bodegas or stocking the grocery store shelves were literally risking their lives everyday. And in the midst of all of this devastation and confusion, the only people I regularly saw who did not wear masks while in public were the police officers patrolling the neighborhood. It had become so clear: these people were not on the side of the community.
And then George Floyd was murdered by police officers and the country was inflamed. The Black Lives Matter movement that had begun in Ferguson moved back onto the streets. In tragedy there was also solidarity, with protestors masked and motivated and taking care of one another. But with that brief wave of hope came new footage on Twitter every night of the NYPD acting like bad cops out of a Harvey Keitel flick: cops harassing peaceful crowds, cops kettling activists, cops literally driving a car into a crowd of protestors. It was impossible to view the police as anything more than a right-wing institution that actively fought social progress. As Thin Blue Line flags claiming to represent solidarity with law enforcement became a familiar sight at far-right actions, it grew particularly difficult to separate xenophobia and general paranoia from the police officer brand.
The guys I had grown up believing were fighting on the side of good had officially become the villains. Or they were just hanging out in clusters in the subway stations checking their phones.
It only got worse when former NYPD officer Eric Adams was elected mayor of New York City in 2022 and began doling out a budget for the police that could sustain an entire country’s military: $5.83 billion in 2023. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU, criticized the city’s police-first problem solving in 2023: “Adams’ executive budget sees the NYPD as the driving solution for too many of our city’s most pressing needs. His budget fails to take a proactive approach to public safety, and includes cuts that would make life worse for New Yorkers.”
It’s more than disheartening to watch the city become increasingly militarized as education budgets are slashed and social programs lose funding and city libraries can’t afford to be open seven days a week.
My brothers grew up and became cops, both of them. Twin Jewish cops. I know this sounds like a premise for a bad joke, but trust me, I’m deadly serious. And as much as their matching career paths might sound like a winning formula for some 1980s buddy cop film, I’m relieved to tell you that no, they aren’t partners; they’ve never policed in the same department or even the same state.
From the time we were small children, the news and entertainment media unceasingly told us that the police would bravely save the day no matter what was wrong, and they would also look cool doing it. I don’t want to put words in my brothers’ mouths, but how could such depictions not be seductive, as if they could choose a career that was a straight path to being a hero everyday and getting paid a decent wage with great benefits for it? It took me years and years to be deprogrammed, to look outside of my own personal experiences and my avid TV-watching and begin to see something much uglier in its place. But I was once as enamored with the badge as they were.
We had gone our separate ways as we grew up, not that we’d had a ton of similar interests even as children. I grew increasingly bookish; eventually, I would get paid for reading and even for watching TV, as I’d so often dreamed of as a child. My brothers, on the other hand, would get paid for actually doing the profession we’d so admired on TV.
From what I could see, police work for my brothers wasn’t like it was in the movies at all. There was a lot more boredom involved in their day-to-day work than we were led to believe as kids, more sitting around and more court dates and more paperwork, the sheer bureaucracy of the whole thing. The hours were weird, especially at first when they were newbies and had to work nights and weekends. They were tired and frustrated a lot.
Still, there were times when they could drive really fast. They looked good in their uniforms. They got a ton of free coffee, probably even some donuts. That’s a cliché for a reason. They were naturals at calling cars “vehicles,” as in, “Sir, please step out of your vehicle.” And they did help people, even if it was by responding to medical emergencies rather than chasing after kidnappers on jet skis.
The institution of American law enforcement, though, emphasizes heroism above all else. By becoming a police officer, the fantasy goes, you also automatically become a hero. In The Atlantic, the former sheriff of King County, Washington, Sue Rahr, explains how such self-congratulation obscures so many less palatable truths. “My generation of police was socialized in the comforting myth of police as heroes, engaged in a righteous battle,” she writes. “We didn’t learn the history of how police have been used to maintain order for those in power, such as on slave patrols or through enforcing Jim Crow laws, busting unions, or waging the War on Drugs. The insular culture of policing protects the flattering myth of heroes and keeps the ugly original mission hidden.” Such mythologizing of police and the righteous battles they fight means that violence is a key selling point of the profession, and not the kind we’d watch on the carpet in the den when we were little kids, where there was a clear-cut dangerous villain who needed to be taken by force. So attuned are they to potential villains that my brothers still never sit with their back to the room in a restaurant, as if they’re members of Vito Corleone’s crew, on high alert with enemies circling everywhere.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement when I, like so many others, reevaluated my relationship with depictions of cops on TV, media emphasizing police heroism above all else feels omnipresent. Crimes procedurals are seemingly as popular as ever, with gazillions of Law & Order and NCIS franchises, and there’s also Paw Patrol, a popular animated children’s show which I like to refer to as Policing for Babies. I don’t bother with them, but I was addicted to Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the FOX sitcom (2013–2021) that was the first on-screen depiction of cops I’d ever seen that really reminded me of my brothers. The show starred Andy Samberg as Detective Jake Peralta, a charming and genial kind of doofus who clearly got into police work because as a child he too had watched too much TV and dreamed of one day saying “Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker” in a professional capacity. With the help of a charming and ethnically diverse array of loveable colleagues, Peralta brings down criminals in entirely bingeable 22-minute chunks.
In 2018, before I and the rest of the world were ready, my friend, Northwestern journalism professor, author, and activist Steven Thrasher, tweeted about the particular dangers of shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, referring to it as “an interracial police buddy comedy meant to make white & Black cops seem like your friendly neighborhood jokesters (& to culturally gentrify “Brooklyn” as sitcom fodder).” After George Floyd’s murder, the world began to take Thrasher’s critique more seriously. In a 2021 article entitled “Cops Are Always the Main Characters”, the TV critic Kathryn Van Arendonk considered Brooklyn Nine-Nine anew: “If anything,” she writes, “the show’s lightness makes it an even more effective way to generate empathy for the police, who come across as sweet, thoughtful people just trying their best. It sanitizes the police.”
This is why I loved Brooklyn Nine-Nine so much: because it allowed me to pretend that my brothers are part of something good.
Even the most well-intentioned cops are part of a system that is broken. Rosa Brooks, author of Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City, told a reporter for Vox that we give cops too many jobs. “We expect them to be social workers and medics and mediators and mentors and warriors and counselors, and no one can be all of those things.” Without proper assistance in place for the most weak and vulnerable among us, cops are set up to fail. Sometimes I like to fantasize about what life might be like if social workers got the same movie star main character treatment as cops do.
Over the years I’ve watched my brothers become more and more indoctrinated into the police mind-set. We grew up in the same liberal household but my brothers are now people who listen to conservative talk radio and complain about “gang bangers” and crime in general. Sometimes I think they don’t believe me when I tell them that I feel safe in my neighborhood; I think they prefer to see New York City as a lawless, scary place where violence could erupt at any moment.
They’ve seen some shit, they would have me believe, and that has informed their way of thinking: that the world is a dangerous place and that we must always be on guard. Just as the shit I’ve seen has me veering in the opposite direction, towards community and trying to take care of each other. I feel our common ground diminishing with each passing year, and I have learned to avoid discussing politics with them at all costs. I don’t want to know to what extent our viewpoints have diverged. And yet I love them. My brothers are a part of me, and they are also part of a rotten system that no amount of copaganda can reform.
My brothers and I have become such different people over the years, but we still share an escapist love of TV and films. But when I get up from the couch and look around it’s clear we need fewer aspiring heroes and more social safety nets for all. This kind of fantasy may be less adaptable for the screen, but the ending will be so much more satisfying.
Excerpted from the book I WANT TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN by Maris Kreizman. Copyright © 2025 by Maris Kreizman. From Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
