Alt title: This is how you get me to root for the cops
Earlier this week I reported to the Kings County Supreme Court for my first-ever jury summons. (Well, the first one I didn’t ignore.) Jury selection was weird for all kinds of reasons, but two of the reasons were
- How many cops there were everywhere, and
- How often the judge asked us whether or not we would trust the testimony of cops.
It’s not hard to imagine why they’d feel the need to ask this question in the Year of Our Lord 2024. Ever since George Floyd was murdered by members of the MPD, a lot of us on the left have cultivated a profound suspicion (dare I say dislike) for the cops. Whether this stems from personal experiences of persecution, allyship with those who have, or an ethical opposition to the state monopoly over violence (or all of the above), nearly every young left-leaning person I know either mistrusts or openly despises the cops.1 And like, same. Idiot that I am, I basically did not think about the cops prior to 2020 unless I was actively speeding, but in the months following Floyd’s murder I was all aboard for ACAB.2
This presents a challenge for judges and prosecutors, who tend to rely heavily on police testimony when making judgements. So it makes perfect sense that if you’re trying to prosecute the law as it currently exists you’d need to weed out jurors who are going to discount the validity of that testimony out of hand, potentially leading to a hung jury (or even more fun, jury nullification). A couple of my fellow candidates confessed their skepticism of police testimony and were summarily dismissed. [Inquiries as to how I responded to the judge’s questions and whether I may have perjured myself in the process will not be entertained in this medium. Suffice to say I was not selected.]
But what if the cops were cool and funny and didn’t kill people? What if they didn’t work for the state, but were themselves criminals and outcasts who fought against corruption and oppression from outside the system? Which is to say, what if they weren’t cops?
Tactical Breach Wizards is a game about playing an elite team of wizard cops (who are not cops), and it’s easily my favorite game of the year. I’m not going to get much into the gameplay here (I wrote a sleep-deprived Steam review after I got home from jury duty, which you can read if you want to hear me gush about its adaptive difficulty system3, but in short: it’s an extremely well designed turn-based tactics game that looks vaguely like XCOM, but is actually much more like Into the Breach, in that the levels are secretly puzzles rather than battles of attrition. Also it’s got jokes.
So many jokes
It’s just endlessly funny to me how TBW appropriates the visual language of the police and special forces while bending over backwards in its character and story writing to make it clear that the good guys are absolutely in no way the actual cops. For one thing, you do not to kill people, ever.4 You still do plenty of violence to the bad guys with assault-staves and storm-grenades and riot shields, but it’s always written as non-lethal.5 Even when you hurl someone out of a tenth story window (which you will do a lot), the game assures that it’s fine, because your squad already prepped the windows with “slow-fall charms” before the action started. The funniest example of this hacky non-lethality is the “less-lethal pyromancer” enemy, who creates “mild-fire” that isn’t quite hot enough to kill you, but can still make you pass out from heat stroke.
In short, the main characters are nothing like actual cops, because they possess at least a modicum of concern for the lives of their enemies (not to mention innocent civilians). They have an objective and need to keep their teammates safe, but they aren’t going to kill anyone to achieve those ends.
You do encounter the actual in-universe cops in the first act of the game, and then spend the next hour ruthlessly defenestrating them.
I wonder if there was some point in the game’s six-plus year development (say, around 2020) when the developers started thinking about the cops as more than a stylistic backdrop for the game, and then realized they didn’t want to write a story in which the cops were the goods guys, or rather, in which the good guys were cops. There’s actually some evidence for this in the lead developers’ original pitch for the game, in which he suggested you’d be fighting “gangsters and other hostiles”, while in final actual game you mostly fight private paramilitary groups, fascist governments, etc. At some point during development one of the main characters was even re-skinned (and presumably re-written) from a “Witch Cop” to a “Freelance Witch Detective”.
TBW doesn’t provide much in the way of a viable critique or solutions to any of our real-life issues around policing (“just use non-lethal guns lmao”), but that wasn’t the job they set out to do. They tried to make a videogame about wizard cops that could be enjoyed even by people with a strong dislike for the actual cops, and they succeeded magnificently in my opinion.
Let this be a lesson for future game developers: this is what it takes to get me to root for the cops in 2024. You just have to make them
- Never kill anyone
- Be very funny
- Not be cops.
NOTE
Followed up by: What we think about the cops
Footnotes
-
Though I find that nearly everyone still relies on them when the shit actually hits the fan (e.g. if they get robbed/assaulted). There’s probably something worth pulling apart there re: disavowal of a necessary but unseemly function in society, though I am much too tired and stupid to expound on it. ↩
-
My present-day feelings re: the cops are considerably more complicated, but I’m not gonna get into them here. You can ask me in person if you’re curious. ↩
-
You really really don’t need to read this, I promise. ↩
-
Well, not permanently. ↩
-
At least as far as you know. There’s a chilling bit of dialogue about this in the back half of the game, in which one of the antagonists reminds you that “non-lethal is a hope, not a promise”. ↩