Every time I see police markings on American cars, they look to me like the cops are trying to be cool and hip with their sick fonts. But to me it just screams unprofessional.
They didn’t used to look like this. The shift happened sometime in the late '90s - early aughts. The fonts and designs until then were gradually modernized but it was similar to corporate letterhead. They also shifted from baby blue shirts to all black around the same time.
The image went from stressful/powerful bureaucrat in a funny uniform to GI Joe action figure.
The shift happened in direct response to the ruling of Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. That case fucked up a lot of things, because SCOTUS was, unknown to them, handed an illegally amended version of the law in question that was relevant to the case. The law is § 1983 of the federal code. When an unnamed secretary was tasked with copying the Congressional Record of 1871 into the Federal Register in 1874, said unnamed secretary illegally removed a 16 word clause that completely reversed the intent of the law.
I mean, I guess you can make the case that it was that one particular thing.
This is a major cultural shift away from peace officer to Judge Dredd. It’s more than just the one, admittedly terrible, court ruling. You can just as easily make the argument that right wing talk radio of the time was the major driver of the change.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Consider when Jeeps started showing up with all the off-road accessory options. I’ve seen some that were just short a Cobra/Joe logo on the side. Gen-X is has been in the management and disposable-capital age bracket for a while now, making all the decisions that drive these aesthetics, and we were all raised on that stuff.
Around that time, the show “Cops” became one of the most popular shows on television and people believed it was real and unedited. As well as a slew of “realistic and gritty” cop shows hit the airwaves (ask your parents what an “airwave” is) and there was a wave of pro-cop sentiment after the LA riots because media selectively showed cops being “heroes against the mobs” which at the time, was very new to see playing out on live-ish television.
There was some pushback because of the Rodney King beating and others that were being caught on video, the term “police brutality” became a buzzword, but it also seemed like it was a small, isolated problem that went away because people carried cameras all the time and “a few bad apples” and all that. (Not shown before body-cams: cops beating or shooting the people carrying cameras.)
I’ve occasionally seen early episodes of Cops, the difference in uniform is notable. Don’t know how you’d ever measure it, but I bet Cops is actually responsible for a lot of deaths due to the cultural shift.
Can confirm. I moved from the US to Canada nearly ten years ago, and it’s been approximately that long since I found a cop’s presence intimidating. I don’t ever feel like the RCs are out to get me.
Every time I see police markings on American cars, they look to me like the cops are trying to be cool and hip with their sick fonts. But to me it just screams unprofessional.
They didn’t used to look like this. The shift happened sometime in the late '90s - early aughts. The fonts and designs until then were gradually modernized but it was similar to corporate letterhead. They also shifted from baby blue shirts to all black around the same time.
The image went from stressful/powerful bureaucrat in a funny uniform to GI Joe action figure.
The shift happened in direct response to the ruling of Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. That case fucked up a lot of things, because SCOTUS was, unknown to them, handed an illegally amended version of the law in question that was relevant to the case. The law is § 1983 of the federal code. When an unnamed secretary was tasked with copying the Congressional Record of 1871 into the Federal Register in 1874, said unnamed secretary illegally removed a 16 word clause that completely reversed the intent of the law.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230520080201/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
I mean, I guess you can make the case that it was that one particular thing.
This is a major cultural shift away from peace officer to Judge Dredd. It’s more than just the one, admittedly terrible, court ruling. You can just as easily make the argument that right wing talk radio of the time was the major driver of the change.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Consider when Jeeps started showing up with all the off-road accessory options. I’ve seen some that were just short a Cobra/Joe logo on the side. Gen-X is has been in the management and disposable-capital age bracket for a while now, making all the decisions that drive these aesthetics, and we were all raised on that stuff.
Around that time, the show “Cops” became one of the most popular shows on television and people believed it was real and unedited. As well as a slew of “realistic and gritty” cop shows hit the airwaves (ask your parents what an “airwave” is) and there was a wave of pro-cop sentiment after the LA riots because media selectively showed cops being “heroes against the mobs” which at the time, was very new to see playing out on live-ish television.
There was some pushback because of the Rodney King beating and others that were being caught on video, the term “police brutality” became a buzzword, but it also seemed like it was a small, isolated problem that went away because people carried cameras all the time and “a few bad apples” and all that. (Not shown before body-cams: cops beating or shooting the people carrying cameras.)
24 was another one that legitimized brutality.
I’ve occasionally seen early episodes of Cops, the difference in uniform is notable. Don’t know how you’d ever measure it, but I bet Cops is actually responsible for a lot of deaths due to the cultural shift.
Can confirm. I moved from the US to Canada nearly ten years ago, and it’s been approximately that long since I found a cop’s presence intimidating. I don’t ever feel like the RCs are out to get me.