cops and cop shows (might be duplicate; sorry)

Our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates makes several good points in his Atlantic essay "Blue Lives Matter."  This may be the central one:

To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek.

Though I wonder whether this is really the people seeking power, as opposed to desiring protection from the abuse of power.  It's a skein of responsibilities intertwined with desires and fears.

I'm inching toward some observation about cop shows.  The difference between the British style and the American -- though even as I try to articulate it, I come up with exceptions. 

The Sherlock Holmes hero works independent of police; not against them, but rarely seeking help from them.  The Joe Friday character is the police, more or less humanized for the sake of story.  When Joe Friday wins, the establishment wins.  When Holmes wins, his client wins, often against the desires of authority.

I guess what's curious about this, to me, is that the Holmes pattern is superficially American – the individual versus the establishment – and the television hero often is the opposite, a representative of the establishment who is after some twisted individual.

I better leave it at that, lest it become a ten-thousand-word essay that I don't have time to do.

Joe