As a gamer this brings up a few things. Something like didn't Watch_Dogs talk about Chicago needing technology to fight crime? and David Jones' Crackdown (mostly cops) and the police and criminals game called APB, And GTA, mostly criminals. What's with Chicago getting so much fame for the country needing to focus on their crime problem as if that's going to magically turn that city's decades of woe around? Like many American cities that saw their fortunes and populations balloon at the turn of the century, it got too big around big industry money for lower and middle class and that subsided somewhere along the way. Big industry money doesn't happen for big cities anymore.
Watch_dogs actually did forget something.. To actually give that updated crime fighting a chance. You enter that game and see crime still happening without a response. They only tend to respond to you. Typical ego centric video game bullshit where how hard would it have been to skip the beat cop issues and allow the player to SEE good teched-up police with in action? You get these idiotic side missions that should be taken care of by the police not a stupid wannabe vigilante. Watch_dogs was about a man and his personal issues and his personal quest towards justice for his family... What about the meat and potatoes of the crime and justice for everyone else? APB brings that to the front very quickly. This isn't about personal problems from the leadership. That didn't mean the show doesn't have problems.
Is it too touchy to ask.. why the cruisers aren't actually Teslas? or at least EVs? Are we supposed to actually ignore that Reeves isn't modeled after Musk? Would that kind of product placement have hurt the show's credibility? Big technology money as opposed to big industry money is a product of many of the worlds largest companies.. (which the show does touch on at the beginning then flushes instead of showing it in practice). It isn't single men with vendettas (I'm on the fence about this conspiracy that Trump isn't just a man with a personal vendetta towards persecuting people of the Muslim faith). Are we meant to ignore it I mean because his cohorts and rivals also aren't mentioned. Helps keep the production focused on Chicago and its crime problem. Typical shallow about big topics Fox.
How to talk about this show without doing the whole how does this tie into the video games mentioned above, and how this is all really great free* marketing for Microsoft's as ever upcoming Crackdown 3 on their new Scorpio Xbox (I didn't register any product placements for Microsoft even though Westworld spelled out how to push tablets, like Microsoft Surface, without it getting too in-your-face) if the show does well.. and also how this show might not come close to the relevance and awesomeness of Person of Interest which was a really great and similar story of big money putting resources into fighting crime.
Thing is Person of Interest didn't do the beat cop thing for that long. That's what police are for. It costs too much to upgrade the entire police force. You help the police force though by dissolving the bigger criminal organizations. But that only happened as a consequence of helping the little people. If you're going to be the police, then just be the police. I'm seeing how this show might fail to ramp up that middle and big crime dissolution part without losing its way. I mean I love Person of Interest but there were many ways that that show went too far in the wrong direction and spent way too much effort supporting its alternate reality while trying to keep it relevant for viewers in this reality. Yes they mostly stuck to the serialized format of helping the randoms here and there, the bigger arcs hit too big and too silly. The deeper you go the less focused you can be with that main task, helping the little people and the police. And I would have preferred that Person of Interest did franchise out. Not meaning that the show itself should have had spinoffs but that they could have had groups of people around the country reporting to Finch.. in a sense they did but they didn't do it properly.
There was never a sense that they meant to work with any established gov't bureau. They didn't make enough of an impression that there's something missing in between municipal cops and actual federal law enforcement agencies. They never became incorporated as that grey area that shines the light on the darkest shadows that aren't big enough crime to challenge national security. Of course what does that even mean anymore when individuals are capable of being extremely high national security threats?
And I'm not saying the Bureau as in the FBI. But just the ATF. Person of Interest's main interest became for the most part what the ATF and similar 'middle crime' agencies are there for. Then by the end it was all top end fantasy BS.. the really hard to believe stuff that the gov't is behind everything. The gov't as in the gov't and gov'ts around the world that have nothing better to do but to stir shit up at home. Then the argument moved from how do we protect ourselves when criminals always have a leg up.. when the gov't is always running some horribly sinister plot. Oh and how their main tool was some crazy sentient AI which was the only moderately stable one to survive.. or something.
I'm not seeing APB aspiring to anything that grandiose or convoluted and thankfully no one is questioning that the gov't is against us anymore. It's all fill in the blanks at this point. How one rich man and the powerful resources he has at his disposal can help the common man. Mostly that crimes being reported generates big data and with the right algorithms you can reduce big data down to actionable plans. Now APB benefits from an inception in an age where all of this big data is available AND there are systems that can in practice turn that data into those plans we need to protect our cities, crime demographic information. What's needed though is just an understanding of what's happening on the streets and why. Hitting home that some crime happens because people are too poor and police coverage is too sparse and frayed to properly overcome what becomes forgone eventualities. People pushed to the edge by wanting things they have no means to get for themselves.
In its first episode APB tries to set both feet firmly into all of that without a whisper that anything they are doing has anything to do with anything big politics.. as long as they keep pushing that bottom line that the types of crime and problems they are trying to solve is powered by people (reporting valid data) then you don't need a beat cop solution. You can put public services in place. Shelters. Drug clinics. Better afterschool programs.. investments into libraries etc etc etc you get the picture. Invest in the city and the people rather than just an expensive brute for crime fighting solution. Aka RoboCop. You put enough money into fighting crime and in theory anyway you just enable and empower an arms race that creates a better bread of criminals.
But an argument can be made, and I hope the show hits on it more than a quick quip in passing, do the 'criminals get toy guns too?'.. that yes, anything the cops have the criminals can get their hands on too. Those types of criminals are the career mobster types that the show needs to be aimed at.. like in Crackdown. The ones that have the means to tool and skill up to take advantage of better communities that are easier to depredate. Citing that hey, our cities are incredibly large and its a wonder the established police functions at all given that they are just men. The show states it very clearly. The police brotherhood might not want to acknowledge that they feel like each day they wake up thinking they'll get injured in the line of duty or killed, but that's the job. You keep ahead of that and you get to keep your head. You get too far ahead of that and you risk becoming a criminal yourself etc. When they wake up each morning thinking that no one really polices the police and what they say and do is the law.. yeah we the people have a reply to that.. you are just people too and you're as bound to the law as civilians.. Who's basic civil rights must be protected. The introduction of body cams and the ability for the people to help the police rather than just be served whatever protections are offered is what's feeding real change.
Since you can't do that in one episode.. if you don't live there you can't understand what a police district in Chicago really is. They'll tell you how many people live there and show you what it looks like on a map.. But you can't get a good sense of what it is. How big it is.. what the problem really is. No aspect of the city changes in 1 episode.. policing can't be modified that easily. The show can grow to be more than Elon Musk versus the bad guys. But unless you want to show real crime on television, besides on the news.. all the mistakes that are made helping to degrade the public trust in policing... then no.. you can't overcome a simple bit of street wisdom. Don't call the cops. IF they show up they are likely to judge you and give you shit, or shoot you dead, than see what the actual problem is and fix it. Some people say the cops are more familiar with street wise criminals than regular people. There are too many incidences of bad policing in the last few years.. Decades.. Several decades.. and too many dead people because of excessive force, corruption, lack of service even, to think that people are going to be so willing to accept that the police have changed.
Chicago always getting such a bad rap too.. too poor, too corrupt.. to desperate that they have to jump at any glimmer of hope a solution can be found to the crime problem. Not the policing and problems with how the city is run and funded and where the well paying jobs are going to come from.