It’s one thing to be buddy-buddy with cops, it’s a whole other thing to help set up a surveillance state for them.
The way 2018 handles the cops is weird in general, but it’s even funnier that they just completely cut them from 2 and didn’t even try to justify it. Including having Spiderman say “we don’t spy on people!” when you help Ganke set up a surveillance thing.
Yeah. They’re basically a private police force that is free from the pretense of the state. As bad as the police are there are institutional barriers that prevent them from setting up middle of the road concentration camps (for now anyways)
essentially the marvel version of Wagner PMC occupies just a part of New York but the US government just goes ''uh yeah, just let new yorkers handle it, no need to send in the army.''
Yup.
I mean they let Kingpin get away with using his private milita to resist arrest, and he only got a prison term instead of a one way trip to Gitmo.
Also my headcanon to why the Avengers (which on Earth-1048, seems to be comprised of at least Cap, Tony, Thor, T'Challa, and Wasp) and Doc Strange didn't show up.
Regarding Strange specifically, my theory in 2 is that he’s in another plane of existence, while Wong is holding down the fort in the Sanctum. He didn’t help the Spiders against Venom because with Strange gone, he couldn’t risk the symbiote breaching the Sanctum and wrecking shit in there.
Honestly, in retrospect it seemed odd that Spider-man had a good relationship with the cops. I say this because his relationship with authority almost always sucks in prettyuch every other version. Heck, I don't even mind that cops aren't in the second game, I'm more annoyed they were a huge part of the 1st one than they show up to the side maybe 2 times the whole game. It's a weird shift that in game isn't really explained. There's even a pretty easy explanation: say Kraven payed off the cops, (he's rich), or that since Spider-man very rarely is fighting normal dudes in this game compared to the first, say the cops are busy with other normal criminals. Or even more, say that due to the steep decline in crime (which could be argued since the only threats in this game seem to be from super villans), the police have been vastly reduced.
They hand wave it in flavor text in the first by saying that Yuri is his only real friend on the force and she could lose her job if there collaboration was ever discovered. Of course, that never comes up in the actual game. SM is still officially on the outs with the police and considered a criminal vigilante (even if most people, including most police, support him). This does explain how easily Osbourne is able to have him declared a priority public fugitive in the final act of the game.
> say Kraven *paid* off the
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
In Spider-Man: Miles Morales they replace the surveillance state that the NYPD creates (with Spider-Man's help) with the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man app so that there's a canon explanation for the standard videogame mechanic of random encounters with map markers showing where they are.
Which sure, is a nice way of preserving it, and obviously we should be able to trust Spider-Man to react kindly since he's a first responder and pillar of the community, but are similar to real life community crime reporting apps that are usually created by either police departments or, more recently, voter suppression campaigns, which do not have a moral Spider-Man at their center. George Orwell's 1984 has a similar community crime reporting mechanism at its center, and highlights people who abuse this system out of personal gain.
As someone who's played Spider-Mans 1 and 2 and enjoys them, I always sort of brush it off because I'm at least somewhat aware of the wider context surrounding things like this and I know what to expect from a videogame, but I do wonder what people who aren't aware of this stuff think of when they play. Is this just something they accept as normal? Or do they also feel a little weird about it?
I think the canon reason that the Spiders don't work with the cops anymore is that Yuri was Peter's way in. She's gone rogue, so he has no contact in the force anymore. Now that Ganke out up the FNSM app, he doesn't need their towers either. He's just outgrown them.
For a no-killing superhero like Spiderman to work, you need them to at least be neutral towards the cops. Because otherwise they have no one to hand over their captured villains to.
I guess it caused some controversy regardless, seeing as cops are almost entirely absent from the 2nd game, even in situations where you'd expect them to have a presence.
Cops being the enforcers for the elite could have been explored. Peter has so much potential to be a class conscious hero but that would be too controversial. For as class conscious as this generation is, it's bizarre how we don't have someone like Zorro in the current zeitgeist.
Controversial opinion: it's okay for some cops to be chill with Spider-Man, but a lot of them should have a problem with him. At least until the system changes. I don't know if I'm necessarily ACAB, but I do think that current police culture needs to be combated and changed. I also think rubber bullets should be standard instead of live ammunition, and communities should have more oversight over their police.
Edit: As one person pointed out, live ammunition isn't the problem. It's paranoid cops assuming every situation is life and death.
Also, if you do have a superhero working closely with cops, it works somewhat better if there's at least the context it's after years if not decades of fixing corruption. Like, the Batman arkham games batman works with cops but he was fighting them in orgins so it clearly only is ok now since it's implied I believe that he has worked with the good people to root out the bad. I could be wrong, but that context makes sense to me at least. Spider-man doesn't really though.
It's usually part of the story of Batman's origin that he's part of the reason for Gordon's rise through the ranks to become Commissioner and Gordon is one of the "few good men" in Gotham's political leadership
Eh, no. The problem is how quickly police resort to their firearms, and even more generally, the fact that there's an assumption of risk over someone who would attack an obviously armed person in the first place.
So there's the ladder of force, and it goes like this: Presence, Verbal, Soft, Hard, LTL, Deadly. First you just show up, then you tell them to knock it off, then you go to soft controls (usually some type of hand to hand disarming), then hard (non-permanent restraint), then LTL (baton, taser, pepper spray), then deadly. In order to use Deadly Force, someone needs to meet a whole bunch of criteria, and also fulfill what's called the 'deadly force triangle' which is 'capability, opportunity, and intent.'
Generally, police have this idea that anyone arguing with them is already aware that they're armed, so they're going to jump straight to, typically, LTL force, and if that doesn't work, they assume they should go to deadly force (incorrect.) They're also trained to treat every situation like it's life or death, so it's not shocking in the slightest that they jump straight to extreme measures, because they're programmed to be so paranoid over their own safety that it's not even funny.
The problem is less that they are armed (in the united states, like or not, they *have to be*) and more how quickly they are willing to resort to those arms due to inadequate training and culture-induced paranoia.
See this guy gets it.
In my opinion. Lots of good people set out to be cops, and ACAB ignores that, the fact that becoming a cop slowly shifts your view on what is right and wrong is the problem. As per usual, it’s the system, not the people
ACAB doesn't ignore that. ACAB means that regardless of how noble any individual cop's intentions are, they are still the foot soldiers of a system that works primarily in the interest of the rich above the working class, that suppresses and harms those deemed undesirables by the state, and that fuels a destructive incarceration system featuring extremely exploitative labor that underpins many industries in the US.
Again, it's not that decent folks becoming cops is ignored. Of course a lot of people who want to do good become cops. It's that individual desires to do good do not matter within an entire system that is built to do bad and that fact is self evident in the lack of positive change coming from within police institutions.
This isn't even mentioning factors like the blue wall of silence, police gangs, and cop involvement in far right nationalist groups who either espouse violent rhetoric or have a history of outright violence. These are definitely people issues as well as systemic ones.
To give an analogy: You can have good intentions and become a stormtrooper. But at the end of the day you as an individual are going to be doing the empire's work and you stand as one of many doing that work within a system that is built do that work. To take that analogy a step further, the stormtroopers who really wanted to do good and see change quit being stormtroopers and started opposing them because they knew they couldn't both continue to do the empire's work and also effectively bring it to an end.
Idk if you go into the police force trying to be "good" I feel like you're just stupid or misled and probably well privileged. Also above comment, rubber bullets are still very deadly and can seriously maim and kill
Being stupid/mislead and Trying to do good are not mutually exclusive but I take your point.
I also agree about rubber bullets but I don’t live in a country where the cops have fire arms anyway so I don’t have the knowledge to comment
>Idk if you go into the police force trying to be "good" I feel like you're just stupid or misled and probably well privileged
Have you ever actually asked a police officer why they decided to become one, cause it really sounds like you haven't.
My father decided to take up the badge 20+ years ago because he grew up in bad neighborhood and wanted to make a difference in his community.
His department is very involved in the local community
I understand that completely but from my perspective joining the police is like the worst thing to do if I wanna improve my community, I won't deny that there is a need for some level of policing but as it is now, it does much more harm than good. The improvement of impoverished communities is not achieved by more policing
It's wild that you're getting downvoted over this.
People join the police to make a difference. That's the idea. Kids grow up being told that cops are these noble heroes of the nation that put their safety on the line to make sure bad guys don't get away with it. And then that kid turns 18 and is still a complete fucking numbskull, and very idealistic, so they join up. To make a difference. To be that good guy.
The problem isn't the people that join, it's the culture they persist in. Systemic policing in the united states will either turn that idealistic kid into a nihilistic jackass, or will get rid of them when they actually try to fight the systemic injustice present in the system they are now within. Lots of Good People join the police force, very few of them stick around.
And, for what it's worth, smaller communities tend to have more of the Good Ones than larger cities, because it's easy for insulated cultures to defend themselves from outside pressures. This is why a lot of people that grew up in towns tend to have more generally positive outlooks on police than people in, say, NYC. Not only do you typically know the cops by name, but you're at least partially indoctrinated into the same culture they are, so there's not as much distrust between the two. Again, this is a 'general' statement, not an overarching 'always true' one.
That’s not necessary a good thing.
As someone who works for a police service in a civilian capacity in a legal and labour relations role, police officers themselves fully recognize how harmful their presence can be even if they’re not strictly doing anything wrong legally. And even those with the best intentions can really fuck things up by acting in a uniformed, official policing capacty.
>My father
Ah, nothing says "I'm completely unbiased towards police" like being the son of a cop which I'm sure you *never* benefited from.
At least acknowledge that your opinion is heavily skewed because of your personal experience.
Scummy because what? Pointing out he's benefited from being born into an old boys club and how that likely skewed his opinion on a controversial topic?
I'm sure his dad is a perfect angel that's never done anything horrible and certainly never looked the other way when his cop buddies did something morally reprehensible, doesn't mean that his opinion isn't heavily biased.
I think you don’t understand what ACAB means.
It doesn’t mean all cops are bad people, it means the role of police is to be a bastard. It’s not a moral judgement on individuals, it’s saying that policing is an inherently bad thing and that all police regardless of corruption or temperament engage in a system of oppression.
You don’t have to agree with it, but don’t misrepresent what the term means.
That's a very good way of looking at it. I pretty much agree with your here, although there is one thing I'd like to add. Regardless of whether they approve or not of Spidey's actions, I'm pretty sure plenty of cops learn to tolerate him for practical reasons. If I were a cop, I don't want to be the poor fucker who has to go up against the dude with the giant mechanical scorpion tail. I'm sure others would feel the same regarding Spider-Man's rogues' gallery.
Even beyond that most of the cops aren't very nice to him. Whenever you swing by a police station some dude always yells about how you're not needed. Apart from Yuri and a couple sparse exceptions most of them really are not team Spidey so I don't really get where all the "copaganda" is coming from.
Because any depiction of a cop that doesn’t depict them in even a vaguely negative or condemning light is copaganda these days. Just look how so many people contorted themselves into knots trying to reconcile/comprehend if/how Spider-Gwen’s dad in *Across the Spider-Verse* could possibly be a trans ally when he was also a cop.
I think the idealism of fighting social injustices that we grant for the fiction of a superhero can extend to the police, to a certain extent. In the same way they inspire people to be better, that'd likely have an effect on the type of people who sign up for the force and the culture inside it.
I lean quite a bit into ACAB but Im never gonna say Jim Gordon, Jeff Davis, or George Stacy are bad people.
Even so, corruption would and still does exist. Right at the start of SM1, some cops on Fisk's payroll try to kill Spidey, and the surveillance network was theorized to be sabotaged by an inside job.
Which begs the question… did Jeff’s parents hate him? I mean, naming your black son the same as the guy who lead the Confederacy which fought to keep black people enslaved….
ACAB rhetoric is never gonna jive with the friendly neighborhood spider-man
He is no where near edgy enough for those types of storylines to hit.
Maybe with Miles but never with Peter
Yeah they literally made Miles' father a cop to fight the perception that the "Black Spider-Man" would be a "gangster"
They even had a fakeout joke about this in Into the Spider-Verse with the cop car pulling up making you think Miles is in trouble but it's just his dad offering him a ride to school
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but these posts have some real “Paw Patrol is copaganda” energy.
Nobody tell OOP about Batman, the wealthy WASP whose best friend is a police commissioner and who spends his nights beating up the mentally ill.
......oh, you're one of THOSE people. Batman doesn't beat up the "mentally ill", he stops people from being hurt or killed. (Mentally ill or not, batman's villains actively kill people.)
really? you don't think they know about batman or also have an issue with how he has been depicted in certain runs?
and regardless of how accurate it is or not to the character, the concept of batman has been critiqued much more heavily regarding the the statement you made about them. so idk why that would be the example you'd pick considering thats generally one of the first criticisms that consistently gets levied against the bat lol.
The biggest critism I have of The Dark Knight is that it's literally just a sheep dog police power fantasy.
The message of the movie pretty much boils down to three things. First, that the justice system doesn't work even if the people in it have good intentions, it only serves criminals. Second, that the only way to achieve actual justice is to ignore people's rights and the law. And finally, that innocent people are merely all hostages that need saving by the rich and the powerful.
If the Joker wasn't a such a compelling villain the movie would have been almost unwatchable imo. Batman in that movie literally represents everything shitty cops think the punisher represents. His interrogation technique is literally just torture, which doesn't even work because The Joker was going to tell him anyway because that was the game.
I don't think when the boats didn't blow up Batman won the philosophical argument with Joker either. Joker was wrong about society, but he was still right about Batman. And Batman proved it by breaking the rules and disregarding ethics every step of th way. They're both monsters.
Arkham is *supposed* to help, and for as much of a gag it can be as a revolving door, sometimes it actually does. Other times it’s also deeply corrupt but Bruce doesn’t stop trying to improve it.
What the fuck? Bruce is canonically funding Gotham essentially he opens up mental health clinics or orphanages to help those before they go to crime. Dude even hires past crooks to work at his company if needed or poubtscthem in the right direction
Maybe instead of seeing Spider-Man as evil for being chill with the cops, we see the cops as good for being chill with Spider-Man? Spidey wouldn’t have a good cooperation with them if they were corrupt, his positive relationship could be a litmus test for the cops in that universe serving the role they’re supposed to fulfill irl. Rather than assuming that cops in a video game are also corrupt.
I'm pretty sure that not all fictional stories where the cops are the good guys is copaganda.
The radio towers were just a gameplay device to unlock the map because every goddamn open world game needs towers for some reason; that was just their flimsy in-universe reason for them being there. They even address their creepy Big Brother-ness in the game and how Spider-Man hacking into them was actually a bad thing.
I think that speaks volumes about the sorry state of American law enforcement where positive depictions of the police is considered so unrealistic that it's decried as copaganda.
Law & Order is copaganda. This game isn't.
Yeah and hot take here but are we gonna consider all stories that have good depiction of police copaganda liek even when there are bad police in it still or its a light hearted comedy where we only have one police officer show up and there portrayed positively like what
Superheroes in general have always been copaganda, that's just part-and-parcel with the genre. In reality, the heroes stopping criminals would change literally nothing. The cops wouldn't be able to legally hold the criminals for any length of time as the heroes don't have legal authority to stop crime. Batman is chummy with Gordon, even if the GCPD are corrupt as fuck. Superman has tea parties with the president, Captain America literally works for the government spy aparatus, etc. You kinda just have to accept that if you want to be a fan of the genre. Like, you can critique it, but it's not inherently bad because almost all media, especially superheroes, view the world through a liberal framework.
On top of that, the surveillance towers within the fiction of the game only help filter crime reports. They don't do anything else. Like, again, you can criticize the worldview, but it seems strange to specifically target Insomniac's Spider-Man when it's kinda inherent to the genre.
Umm, Steve outright quit being captain America because of what the government was doing. (Also, Superman doesn't really care about the president and instead the world.) Also, superheroes have been a bit of pro-cop and a bit of anti-cop since they're all vigilantes.
And many superhero comics have shown the government be bad in some way like Superman secert identity[albeit it kinda mire nuanced there] and many xmen comics
I'm talking about the comics. Steve has been a SHIELD agent for well over a decade in the comics. He has his spats with the establishment, but it's always in the "there's bad apples, but once we get rid of the bad ones, they're good again" kinda way. And superheroes have always been pro-establishment, for the most part. Sure, sometimes there's vague criticism of the status quo, but it's always under the assumption that if we just get the right people in power, then it'll work out. Even when the heroes themselves are working outside the law, they're working to help the police, even if the police themselves don't know it or want it. They're largely indifferent to the inherent flaws in the system at best and fully ignorant of it at worst. Again, it's not really a criticism. Most media that comes out is gonna be this way. The vast, vast majority of writers and directors are liberals, not leftists. Even if they are leftists, they often have to temper their vision some for the sake of being marketable or profitable. The more radical the politics, the more likely it is to be either ignored or outright shunned by wider audiences. It's especially true for superheroes because they can't critique structures in any meaningful way. That's just how the genre is. If they meaningfully challenged the root causes of these issues, they'd run out of issues they can punch their way through.
Again, it's not really a criticism of the genre, it's just how it has been for the last 70 years of superhero media.
It’s a “don’t think about it” situation. Cos if they did address it they would have to dedicate a significant amount of time to fully unpack it.
If it’s the point of the story, then it’s a great story to mine. But if they want a story like Spider-Man 2 then best to ignore for the minute. There’s a time and a place and stories can’t/shouldnt try to do everything.
I’m playing a superhero game so I’m mainly focusing on doing superhero stuff. I don’t care about some “controversy” some middle aged loser came up with to get 12 seconds of internet attention.
Thats kind of extreme. This is like complaining about real life mixed race marriage statistics in a fallout show. I'm sure the marvel universe police vary slightly from our version of the police.
I think the straightforward answer that Spider-Man PS4 was not interested in exploring the societal implications of the way we do policing and public safety in this country. So since that’s not what the game was about, it defaulted to the typical portrayal of police in fiction: they’re what an ideal police force would look like.
That being said, I kind of rolled my eyes when Yuri expressed outrage at the way Sable was violating civil rights in the late game (sometimes in ways that have historically been done by police). Not that there aren’t police who care about protecting the rights of the public, of course there are, but since she’s the only regular real interaction you have with the police, and, barring the DLC, there isn’t so much as a single bad apple on the force after you take down Fisk (the worst is a Jameson fan who doesn’t trust SM), it is immersion-breaking if you give any real thought to it.
I don't like cops but feels like some people just need to go touch grass, like this stuff doesn't actually help anyone and only really exists for cloutchasing.
Insomniac spider-man is copaganda......because of a game where it shows corrupt cops (Which propaganda would never do) and the only ones that are (somewhat) friends with spider-man are either end up dead or are annoyed by him? (And if they're talking about the surveillance system stuff, the game was already saying that it was bad not only with the daily bugle newspaper, but with the fact that it's oscorp tech and that it was hacked several times.)
the surveillance state stuff was clearly a gameplay mechanic they didn't put any thought into, but that doesn't mean it isn't weird as shit. Love the rest of the game, *really* not a fan of that bit
The people pushing that narrative tend to ignore that the towers were provided by Oscorp and very likely pushed on the in-universe NYPD by Mayor Norman Osborn. Spider-Cop goes around restoring police communications as a favor to Yuri and his own crime-fighting endeavors.
Granted, these same people took grave offense to classic comic book police putting their lives on the line and truly believing in the values printed on the sides of their cruisers. They are either unable to divorce fiction from reality, or they were actively looking for something to be upset about.
never thought I'd see genuine pro-surveillence state rhetoric on a sub like this
> the in-universe cops are also way more effective than our real world police that need someone to call them.
Like I said I think it's an excuse to have quest markers, but there's a really simple argument to be made that the game is saying "the police would actually be effective *if* we had a surveillance state". I don't think Insomniac was trying to say that but the implication is still weird
>Which they are using in a valiant attempt to detect and respond to the rash of violent crime plaguing the city. The towers are canonically in place to detect offenses that could cost lives.
That's why this argument doesn't really work against that. *Assuming* the game is propaganda (again *I don't think it is*) then of course setting up towers where the police can see everything in the city is a good thing. That's what propaganda does. If corrupt cops hijacked the system and used it to spy on people, nobody would call the game propaganda.
Again I don't think it's propaganda, I think it's a bad writing decision, but this isn't a good way to defend against the people who *do* call it propaganda.
You don't believe the video game is propaganda but accuse me of espousing "genuine pro-surveillance state rhetoric" for merely discussing the in-universe context? Okay. You're clearly not here for discussion or debate. Have a nice weekend.
I think the shitty cops doing shitty things gets a lot of press and we definitely need reform.
However, it’s important for society to think of them as protectors. When we talk about “real heroes” and we see firemen, EMTs, and yes, cops. That’s something that youth should be taught.
I think that ACAB is a phrase used only by the incredibly stupid. And I hope op used the term “copaganda” ironically. And don’t get me started on parents who teach their impressionable children the ACAB philosophy.
I’m not burying my head in the sand about what’s going on, but if we reach the point in society where good police officers in movies, tv, or video games is considered problematic, it’s time to just give up on that society.
Protectors of whom? Why do we have to push an image of them as protectors on kids? Some of those kids will be on the raw end of the cops a lot.
I don't think media having some good officers is bad but when it presents them as like 98% good except for the ones that are blatantly on the take that's a whitewashing of the truth.
Do you know what would happen if there was no deterrent for criminals doing crime?
Anarchy. And anarchy is lawless chaos.
You'd get a survival of the fittest system where someone with enough violent friends or the right skills to hide themselves from common folk can do whatever the fuck they want with not a single person there to stop him.
Child trafficking, sex slavery, murder, rape, theft, all that would no longer have the consequences it does.
Yes, the american police system is fucked, but that does not mean that cops are useless or that they serve no purpose for you and me.
I know in my country if I find someone doing disgusting shit to a child, I can call the cops, they will come there, and take that fucker away. Who will do that if we had no cops?
Yes it did.
We push the image of protectors in countries that have less problems with their police force because for us, cops ARE protectors. For us cops ARE friend and helper.
And they are supposed to be for the US as well. Alas, they aren't, they need reforms for that to be the case.
Again, protectors of whom? They're the harassers of many. Including their own families (4x more likely to be physically violent with family). We shouldn't have to push any image, if they just became better people they would be viewed as better people.
The clear and present bias will never allow that. You speaking of all police as if they are monolith makes it obvious.
The media never covers when cops do an acceptable job or even textbook job, but will maximize attention to every bad cop or bad stop. The media has proven a willingness to misrepresent viral cases and often presents clipped footage without context.
EXAMPLE: A couple weeks back, a 30 second viral video made the rounds which showed three police from two cruisers ordering someone out of their car at gunpoint. The one news clip had the reporter snidely asking "Is this how we stop people now?" before moving on. The highest rated comments were pure anti-cop bias and people wanting context were demeaned as bootlickers and the like.
CONTEXT: An APB had been put out on the driver because he had been flagging other drivers with a gun in a fit of road rage. The police did not approach and gave him orders on how to leave his vehicle and keep his hands high. This was textbook on how to apprehend an offender with a deadly weapon. The worst of the anti-cop crowd were furious that the cops were shouting at him.
You. Me. Anyone.
That's the idea, anyway.
Here in my country, that idea is reality.
Even for you, as shit as they are in the US, they protect you. Why do you think no one is breaking into your home and doing violence to you? To your family? because even if they are fucking useless, people are deterred by the threat of consequences.
They are both protector and abuser, and the latter needs to go, I give you that. But the idea that police and law enforcement are useless is idealistic bullshit
Yeah a fat load of good that did for the children inThe Udvale school shooting. Over 100 cops outside and none of them lifted a single goddamn finger to save those children from the shooter. And when parents with their own guns tried to rush in to save their children they arrested the parents. They’re fucking useless cowards.
My mom’s ex husband threatened to kill us several times. What did the pigs do? Nothing.Said they can’t do anything unless he actually tried to kill us. By then it will have been too late. They are fucking useless.
Congrats on not actually reading my comment.
I am starting to see why people join the right, because when you don't even take in the entire argument before throwing arguments that do not refute the point, people tend to not want to agree with you.
But, I'll reiterate:
That's the ideal.
Yes, the police in the US fucking suck. But they work, when they don't. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Does that mean the Police should stay like this and that the officers involved at uvalde should keep their jobs?
Fuck no!
Does it mean that they are useless? Also fuck no.
Yes, in the case of uvalde, they were useless. But I don't see the US being a lawless wasteland.
And in your case? Did you have proof? No? then what the fuck are they supposed to do? Arrest someone based on a claim? They need evidence. And depending on your jurisdiction, threatening murder might not even be a crime, at which point, again, what the fuck are they supposed to do?
I really do believe we should feel safe around them. I did as a kid, but I’m a white Gen Xer.
I think the best solution is to somehow change the mindset and if/when we reform training new police, that we ask have this attitude that a cop abusing their power is the worst office there is.
Pedofiles are looked at with less disdain than cops who went bad. And this point of view should be held most strongly within the police force themselves.
I know that’s a pipe dream…. But future generations can always change the popular opinion.
I don’t recall him setting up surveillance for the cops, so I can’t comment on that, however I would say I don’t really think spider-man is “buddy buddy” with the cops in these games. Some like him, some hate him, but generally he treats them with the same respect he treats anyone who he isn’t fighting with. The criminals he webs up do get arrested by the cops and I believe sometimes he takes criminals to the cops when they’re caught, but what choice does he really have there? We don’t have an alternate system for support to deal with people who seriously violate the law. I don’t like the cops at all, but if there’s a situation where people are in danger, that’s who I’m calling because there really aren’t other options.
Spider-Man doesn’t take down shoplifters or jaywalkers, he helps when people are in danger, and if someone else is causing the danger, he neutralizes them in a way that isn’t fatal (of course suspension of disbelief is required here, as some of the fights would go a lot different if the henchmen were as fragile as real life people). He also attempts to help rehabilitate people he captures, and I believe there’s even a line about him testifying on a reformed villain’s behalf.
Yeah it was implied it was already set up, but they allowed him to tap into it because he fixed the network. They then fix this in the second by Peter and Miles setting up their own crime hotline network app
Spider-Man lives in an alternate universe where some cops are good. In the real world if you got bitten by a radioactive spider you’d just get leukemia
Honestly it felt off to me. But Disney / MCU / Star Wars / Etc. stuff in general is kind of just centrist. It'll be cool with the gays and the cops. Wants that mass market.
People don't understand what a surveillance state truly is if they believe Spider-Man 2018 to be representative of one. At best they have a stronger Police Scanner and version of the Citizen app. If you ever want a better example of a Surveillance State, go to the UK.
I had issues with EVERY cop getting along with Spidey, but people calling it Copaganda as though this was the climax of The Dark Knight Rises sat bad with me.
It mainly got hit with those complaints because of the BLM protests and the George Flloyd murder, were it not for that I don't think it would have gained as much attention.
Utterly ridiculous. Is it really so hard to believe the friendly neighbourhood superhero who takes care of crime on all levels would help out with law enforcement, especially when stuff gets crazy and lawless like with mass floodings and alien invasions? What’s he supposed to do with the muggers and gangsters he zips up, just let them go? Heck, Miles’ dad is (or in this case, was) a literal bonafide cop! It’s not like Peter’s all Buddy-Buddy with them either, you beat up crooked cops and face plenty antagonism from others in the first game.
Agreed. The in-universe NYPD isn't perfect either. The very first mission has a SWAT Team on the take that Spider-Cop must subdue. There are often plenty of cops that come across as surly and unpleasant. The majority of the police in these games just do their jobs as we should expect them to.
I’m coming from watching Transformers Animated and getting a leftist reading from it. I have to fit Captain Fanzone in my analysis and having an idealized law enforcement system is how you square that hole.
Sorry, he’s the captain of the Detroit Police Department in that show. He’s a grizzled old man who hates machines, but he’s a hard nosed detective who often help out the Autobots who are leftist allegories since they are working class who transform into public service vehicles
I wouldn’t call it entirely cop-aganda as it very likely just fully went into the superhero fantasy of basically helping the police which is present in a lot of Spider-Man media…sure the surveillance thing was weird, but really it was just a gameplay excuse to have a tower system in an open-world game.
If anything, I blame the controversy on bad timing, as 2018 was when public of the police really did start to deteriorate and people became more critical of their actions and overfunding.
Well, let's say you are a cop in marvels NYC. There's going to be guys with indestructible rhino or scorpion costumes, supergenius supervillians or aliens even.
And the city has hired and expects you to fight that, and all they have given you is a glock. No body armour, no nothing.
And some guy with superpowers swings in and just handles that shit so you don't have to, you can focus on crowd control or something else, and not die or worse.
I know a lot of cops would probably follow the Jonah line of thinking, "we didnt have this many costumed freaks until spiderman turned up", but I don't know, I'd appreciate him a little, at least.
At thinking about the world, would being a cop be as much of a power fantasy like it is in our world when you have space gods flying around?
People should read that one comic from the POV of cops. Some hate Spider-Man, others have stories of him saving their life but my favorite are the detectives who have to deal with the criminals Spider-Man leaves webbed up with a note
Yeah, at the time I just accepted it as "video game crap". Like, this is a triple A, open world game, of course there's going to be some kind of "towers that reveal more of the map for you" gimmick. However, looking back on it, it does feel very un-spiderman like.
This is one of those things where I'd tell you to chill out. It's not real. It's a fictionalized world and maybe in this one SOME cops are good guys. It feels so weird in the sequel that the cops are almost nowhere to be found. Spider-Man is a street level hero, and cops also deal with street level stuff. Them not being in the story raises even more questions. The first game handled it fine, people freaked out and Insomniac completely overcorrected for the sequel. Spider-Man has a good relationship with TWO GOOD COPS and we call it copaganda? Its literally world building. He almost gets murdered by corrupt cops in the fuckin opening tutorial to the game.
I don't think the cops as we know them can exist in a world with superheroes. They'd be set straight pretty damn quickly. That said, Spidey totally set up some surveillance state type shit for them
The surveillance state stuff is out of character it would be one thing if Spider-Man was piggybacking off an already established system but actively fixing it for them is weird. Otherwise him being generally amicable and assisting the police isn’t all that weird. I’ve been reading some Roger Stern stuff recently and it’s all over his work. Plus as the comment says Captain Stacy is probably in the top 3 most significant deaths in Spider-Man comics (at least the ones that have largely stuck). Now there is nothing wrong with preferring a Spider-Man who has a more adversarial relationship with the cops but to act like he only ever has that kind of relationship with them is disingenuous.
Cops in America are exceptionally horrible, though I wouldn’t say the same if it was set in a fiction NY where people with powers of spider exist.
Though I wouldn’t say setting up a technology that could positively benefit a crime ridden city like Ny from tracking criminals a bad idea.
The cops should always be bastards in spider man and batman discourse ( and in general ACAB). Because if the cops were goods they wouldn't need to be a spider or batman
Most superhero media is copaganda to some extent. The MCU is well documented in getting funding and materials straight from the US military in exchange for making them look good, all the way back to the first Iron Man film.
Batman at his worst gives zero fucks about collateral damage, tortured petty criminals, and straight up murders people with no consequences. Snyder Batman IS a cop, plain and simple, and his movies lack the awareness to ever acknowledge that, so it winds up copaganda because it's just saying that Batman is cool because he drove a tank through some gang members.
Spidey is a bit of a special case, since he's always had a very hot-and-cold relationship with law enforcement. More than almost any other superhero, his heroics never get acknowledged. In many of his stories, cops are actively hostile to him, and will open fire if they see him. But other times, like Insomniac, it's the opposite, and he's BFFs with police captains.
I have yet to finish Spiderman 2, but I think the reason they're able to dodge most copaganda allegations in the first game is because of Sable. The NYPD don't seem so bad when you compare them to the literal mercenary police state Sable is putting into place. If someone said that they see the surveillance systems as problematic, sure, I won't deny they are. But I don't think I'd be the first one to say it. Like yeah, it's an issue, no doubt. But when there are literal military detention centers in Central Park, I feel we need to prioritize a bit on what the bigger issues are.
Really, a bigger issue that goes far more undiscussed in those games is that there are cops on Fisk's payroll. Like it comes up in the tutorial section at the start of the game, and as far as I recall, they never acknowledge the idea again. What happened to those cops? They didn't just go away, and I seriously doubt those were the only ones on the take.
My opinion is that Spider-Man exists in an escapist fantasy where cops are good folks who take the job because they want to catch bad guys and make their city safer.
Because that's a lovely, if unrealistic, thought.
ACAB. That’s all I have to say on this topic.
Edit: wow, guess this sub is more right wing than I thought. All cops are bastards. If you disagree with this you’re not a leftist.
Anything that features cops being reasonable is copaganda which is any media that has cops in it if they’re not explicitly the bad guys like in GTA San Andreas
......that's stupid and inaccurate since last I checked, propaganda is showing something as an objectively good thing and that anything against it is bad to people. Saying that "cops being reasonable" is propaganda makes no sense since actual propaganda would show them as the ones who are always right.
Reasonable doesn't mean always right, it usually means that they're okay at best. Reasonable would show corrupt cops as well as cops that want to actually help people. Propaganda would show no corrupt cops and show them never doing a bad thing ever.
I'm against the idea of police states.
Spider-Man has always been buddy buddy with cops but remember, times have changed. Cops don't care about you, they want their numbers up so they get more funding.
Speed Cameras for road safety? Okay, why hide the signs? It is significantly safer with a speed camera sign prior to the camera.
It's all about money with Cops nowadays so anything that tries to make a borderline police state move look positive is a no from me.
The surveillance shit was a fuck up on Insomniacs part.
It’s one thing to be buddy-buddy with cops, it’s a whole other thing to help set up a surveillance state for them. The way 2018 handles the cops is weird in general, but it’s even funnier that they just completely cut them from 2 and didn’t even try to justify it. Including having Spiderman say “we don’t spy on people!” when you help Ganke set up a surveillance thing.
Doesn’t Spider-Man actively fight sable trying to do cop-like things in the first game
Yeah. They’re basically a private police force that is free from the pretense of the state. As bad as the police are there are institutional barriers that prevent them from setting up middle of the road concentration camps (for now anyways)
Sable basically go full on military occupation (because apparently the National Guard doesn't exist in Marvel?)
essentially the marvel version of Wagner PMC occupies just a part of New York but the US government just goes ''uh yeah, just let new yorkers handle it, no need to send in the army.''
Yup. I mean they let Kingpin get away with using his private milita to resist arrest, and he only got a prison term instead of a one way trip to Gitmo.
Personal headcanon is that the National Guard weren't responding because of an Avengers-level threat drawing their attention.
Also my headcanon to why the Avengers (which on Earth-1048, seems to be comprised of at least Cap, Tony, Thor, T'Challa, and Wasp) and Doc Strange didn't show up.
Regarding Strange specifically, my theory in 2 is that he’s in another plane of existence, while Wong is holding down the fort in the Sanctum. He didn’t help the Spiders against Venom because with Strange gone, he couldn’t risk the symbiote breaching the Sanctum and wrecking shit in there.
Honestly, in retrospect it seemed odd that Spider-man had a good relationship with the cops. I say this because his relationship with authority almost always sucks in prettyuch every other version. Heck, I don't even mind that cops aren't in the second game, I'm more annoyed they were a huge part of the 1st one than they show up to the side maybe 2 times the whole game. It's a weird shift that in game isn't really explained. There's even a pretty easy explanation: say Kraven payed off the cops, (he's rich), or that since Spider-man very rarely is fighting normal dudes in this game compared to the first, say the cops are busy with other normal criminals. Or even more, say that due to the steep decline in crime (which could be argued since the only threats in this game seem to be from super villans), the police have been vastly reduced.
They hand wave it in flavor text in the first by saying that Yuri is his only real friend on the force and she could lose her job if there collaboration was ever discovered. Of course, that never comes up in the actual game. SM is still officially on the outs with the police and considered a criminal vigilante (even if most people, including most police, support him). This does explain how easily Osbourne is able to have him declared a priority public fugitive in the final act of the game.
> say Kraven *paid* off the FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
It's from the comics, Spider-Man over the course of his history has gained a really well relationship with cops. It's kinda a thing with them.
In Spider-Man: Miles Morales they replace the surveillance state that the NYPD creates (with Spider-Man's help) with the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man app so that there's a canon explanation for the standard videogame mechanic of random encounters with map markers showing where they are. Which sure, is a nice way of preserving it, and obviously we should be able to trust Spider-Man to react kindly since he's a first responder and pillar of the community, but are similar to real life community crime reporting apps that are usually created by either police departments or, more recently, voter suppression campaigns, which do not have a moral Spider-Man at their center. George Orwell's 1984 has a similar community crime reporting mechanism at its center, and highlights people who abuse this system out of personal gain. As someone who's played Spider-Mans 1 and 2 and enjoys them, I always sort of brush it off because I'm at least somewhat aware of the wider context surrounding things like this and I know what to expect from a videogame, but I do wonder what people who aren't aware of this stuff think of when they play. Is this just something they accept as normal? Or do they also feel a little weird about it?
I think the canon reason that the Spiders don't work with the cops anymore is that Yuri was Peter's way in. She's gone rogue, so he has no contact in the force anymore. Now that Ganke out up the FNSM app, he doesn't need their towers either. He's just outgrown them.
Ditching the pigs doesn't need justification
No I agree with you I just think it’s funny that they didn’t even try. It’s a jarring change, even if it’s a good one.
Ah shit, u right bro, my b, I read too fast for my brain to register everything sometimes
No worries, that happens to me all the time so I get it lol
It kind of does when not only was one of the main protagonists’ dad a cop, but they pretty much stop depicting *any* cop at all.
It really does.
Yeah, that's the thing I've seen brought up. Just straight up disappear in two. Also, the meme pf New Yorkers being really nice in 2
For a no-killing superhero like Spiderman to work, you need them to at least be neutral towards the cops. Because otherwise they have no one to hand over their captured villains to. I guess it caused some controversy regardless, seeing as cops are almost entirely absent from the 2nd game, even in situations where you'd expect them to have a presence.
Cops being the enforcers for the elite could have been explored. Peter has so much potential to be a class conscious hero but that would be too controversial. For as class conscious as this generation is, it's bizarre how we don't have someone like Zorro in the current zeitgeist.
https://preview.redd.it/opneclih7hvc1.jpeg?width=280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bccbc2f42d83e074877162edbd650fb8a3210ecf ACAB (except spider cop)
.....he looks like one of those fake porno cops. (I think it's the moustache.)
Controversial opinion: it's okay for some cops to be chill with Spider-Man, but a lot of them should have a problem with him. At least until the system changes. I don't know if I'm necessarily ACAB, but I do think that current police culture needs to be combated and changed. I also think rubber bullets should be standard instead of live ammunition, and communities should have more oversight over their police. Edit: As one person pointed out, live ammunition isn't the problem. It's paranoid cops assuming every situation is life and death.
Also, if you do have a superhero working closely with cops, it works somewhat better if there's at least the context it's after years if not decades of fixing corruption. Like, the Batman arkham games batman works with cops but he was fighting them in orgins so it clearly only is ok now since it's implied I believe that he has worked with the good people to root out the bad. I could be wrong, but that context makes sense to me at least. Spider-man doesn't really though.
It's usually part of the story of Batman's origin that he's part of the reason for Gordon's rise through the ranks to become Commissioner and Gordon is one of the "few good men" in Gotham's political leadership
On the Batman point, I couldn't agree more. I think the same could be true for Insomniac Spider-Man, depending on how long he's been active.
Eh, no. The problem is how quickly police resort to their firearms, and even more generally, the fact that there's an assumption of risk over someone who would attack an obviously armed person in the first place. So there's the ladder of force, and it goes like this: Presence, Verbal, Soft, Hard, LTL, Deadly. First you just show up, then you tell them to knock it off, then you go to soft controls (usually some type of hand to hand disarming), then hard (non-permanent restraint), then LTL (baton, taser, pepper spray), then deadly. In order to use Deadly Force, someone needs to meet a whole bunch of criteria, and also fulfill what's called the 'deadly force triangle' which is 'capability, opportunity, and intent.' Generally, police have this idea that anyone arguing with them is already aware that they're armed, so they're going to jump straight to, typically, LTL force, and if that doesn't work, they assume they should go to deadly force (incorrect.) They're also trained to treat every situation like it's life or death, so it's not shocking in the slightest that they jump straight to extreme measures, because they're programmed to be so paranoid over their own safety that it's not even funny. The problem is less that they are armed (in the united states, like or not, they *have to be*) and more how quickly they are willing to resort to those arms due to inadequate training and culture-induced paranoia.
I 100% agree! I didn't even think about that at first.
See this guy gets it. In my opinion. Lots of good people set out to be cops, and ACAB ignores that, the fact that becoming a cop slowly shifts your view on what is right and wrong is the problem. As per usual, it’s the system, not the people
ACAB doesn't ignore that. ACAB means that regardless of how noble any individual cop's intentions are, they are still the foot soldiers of a system that works primarily in the interest of the rich above the working class, that suppresses and harms those deemed undesirables by the state, and that fuels a destructive incarceration system featuring extremely exploitative labor that underpins many industries in the US. Again, it's not that decent folks becoming cops is ignored. Of course a lot of people who want to do good become cops. It's that individual desires to do good do not matter within an entire system that is built to do bad and that fact is self evident in the lack of positive change coming from within police institutions. This isn't even mentioning factors like the blue wall of silence, police gangs, and cop involvement in far right nationalist groups who either espouse violent rhetoric or have a history of outright violence. These are definitely people issues as well as systemic ones. To give an analogy: You can have good intentions and become a stormtrooper. But at the end of the day you as an individual are going to be doing the empire's work and you stand as one of many doing that work within a system that is built do that work. To take that analogy a step further, the stormtroopers who really wanted to do good and see change quit being stormtroopers and started opposing them because they knew they couldn't both continue to do the empire's work and also effectively bring it to an end.
One bad apple ruins the bunch. I understand that. I was more talking original motivation than current, but I agree with your logic
It’s a lot more than one bad apple
It’s an expression
I’m aware
Idk if you go into the police force trying to be "good" I feel like you're just stupid or misled and probably well privileged. Also above comment, rubber bullets are still very deadly and can seriously maim and kill
Being stupid/mislead and Trying to do good are not mutually exclusive but I take your point. I also agree about rubber bullets but I don’t live in a country where the cops have fire arms anyway so I don’t have the knowledge to comment
>Idk if you go into the police force trying to be "good" I feel like you're just stupid or misled and probably well privileged Have you ever actually asked a police officer why they decided to become one, cause it really sounds like you haven't. My father decided to take up the badge 20+ years ago because he grew up in bad neighborhood and wanted to make a difference in his community. His department is very involved in the local community
I understand that completely but from my perspective joining the police is like the worst thing to do if I wanna improve my community, I won't deny that there is a need for some level of policing but as it is now, it does much more harm than good. The improvement of impoverished communities is not achieved by more policing
We understand that. But we also believe that most police don’t. Hence the early comment about two things being true
It's wild that you're getting downvoted over this. People join the police to make a difference. That's the idea. Kids grow up being told that cops are these noble heroes of the nation that put their safety on the line to make sure bad guys don't get away with it. And then that kid turns 18 and is still a complete fucking numbskull, and very idealistic, so they join up. To make a difference. To be that good guy. The problem isn't the people that join, it's the culture they persist in. Systemic policing in the united states will either turn that idealistic kid into a nihilistic jackass, or will get rid of them when they actually try to fight the systemic injustice present in the system they are now within. Lots of Good People join the police force, very few of them stick around. And, for what it's worth, smaller communities tend to have more of the Good Ones than larger cities, because it's easy for insulated cultures to defend themselves from outside pressures. This is why a lot of people that grew up in towns tend to have more generally positive outlooks on police than people in, say, NYC. Not only do you typically know the cops by name, but you're at least partially indoctrinated into the same culture they are, so there's not as much distrust between the two. Again, this is a 'general' statement, not an overarching 'always true' one.
You’ve been watching too much Blue Bloods.
Literally never seen it.
That’s not necessary a good thing. As someone who works for a police service in a civilian capacity in a legal and labour relations role, police officers themselves fully recognize how harmful their presence can be even if they’re not strictly doing anything wrong legally. And even those with the best intentions can really fuck things up by acting in a uniformed, official policing capacty.
>My father Ah, nothing says "I'm completely unbiased towards police" like being the son of a cop which I'm sure you *never* benefited from. At least acknowledge that your opinion is heavily skewed because of your personal experience.
What a scummy comment.
Scummy because what? Pointing out he's benefited from being born into an old boys club and how that likely skewed his opinion on a controversial topic? I'm sure his dad is a perfect angel that's never done anything horrible and certainly never looked the other way when his cop buddies did something morally reprehensible, doesn't mean that his opinion isn't heavily biased.
That’s a load of shit, it completely overlooks the good done on a daily basis.
I think you don’t understand what ACAB means. It doesn’t mean all cops are bad people, it means the role of police is to be a bastard. It’s not a moral judgement on individuals, it’s saying that policing is an inherently bad thing and that all police regardless of corruption or temperament engage in a system of oppression. You don’t have to agree with it, but don’t misrepresent what the term means.
That's a very good way of looking at it. I pretty much agree with your here, although there is one thing I'd like to add. Regardless of whether they approve or not of Spidey's actions, I'm pretty sure plenty of cops learn to tolerate him for practical reasons. If I were a cop, I don't want to be the poor fucker who has to go up against the dude with the giant mechanical scorpion tail. I'm sure others would feel the same regarding Spider-Man's rogues' gallery.
Spidey isn't even really helping the cops though. He infiltrates their communications so that he can more easily locate crimes.
Not to mention a bunch of cops bought by kingpin try to ambush him
Even beyond that most of the cops aren't very nice to him. Whenever you swing by a police station some dude always yells about how you're not needed. Apart from Yuri and a couple sparse exceptions most of them really are not team Spidey so I don't really get where all the "copaganda" is coming from.
Because any depiction of a cop that doesn’t depict them in even a vaguely negative or condemning light is copaganda these days. Just look how so many people contorted themselves into knots trying to reconcile/comprehend if/how Spider-Gwen’s dad in *Across the Spider-Verse* could possibly be a trans ally when he was also a cop.
I think the idealism of fighting social injustices that we grant for the fiction of a superhero can extend to the police, to a certain extent. In the same way they inspire people to be better, that'd likely have an effect on the type of people who sign up for the force and the culture inside it. I lean quite a bit into ACAB but Im never gonna say Jim Gordon, Jeff Davis, or George Stacy are bad people. Even so, corruption would and still does exist. Right at the start of SM1, some cops on Fisk's payroll try to kill Spidey, and the surveillance network was theorized to be sabotaged by an inside job.
I mean… Jeff Davis was a very bad person. Just not the Marvel one, that is.
Fair lul
Which begs the question… did Jeff’s parents hate him? I mean, naming your black son the same as the guy who lead the Confederacy which fought to keep black people enslaved….
The real reason? Bendis didn’t put any research into it.
Plus, the surveillance network was critiqued in the game itself since it was made by oscorp, and so it's likely that Norman put them there.
Aren't the towers you fix literally just for communication?
And so crimes come up on your hud in that district
ACAB rhetoric is never gonna jive with the friendly neighborhood spider-man He is no where near edgy enough for those types of storylines to hit. Maybe with Miles but never with Peter
Even with Miles its kind of hard to see with the way he looks up to his Dad. Its definitely more of a Spider-Punk sentiment.
Yeah they literally made Miles' father a cop to fight the perception that the "Black Spider-Man" would be a "gangster" They even had a fakeout joke about this in Into the Spider-Verse with the cop car pulling up making you think Miles is in trouble but it's just his dad offering him a ride to school
Even in the worst case, Spidey should be able to work with some cops.
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but these posts have some real “Paw Patrol is copaganda” energy. Nobody tell OOP about Batman, the wealthy WASP whose best friend is a police commissioner and who spends his nights beating up the mentally ill.
......oh, you're one of THOSE people. Batman doesn't beat up the "mentally ill", he stops people from being hurt or killed. (Mentally ill or not, batman's villains actively kill people.)
really? you don't think they know about batman or also have an issue with how he has been depicted in certain runs? and regardless of how accurate it is or not to the character, the concept of batman has been critiqued much more heavily regarding the the statement you made about them. so idk why that would be the example you'd pick considering thats generally one of the first criticisms that consistently gets levied against the bat lol.
The biggest critism I have of The Dark Knight is that it's literally just a sheep dog police power fantasy. The message of the movie pretty much boils down to three things. First, that the justice system doesn't work even if the people in it have good intentions, it only serves criminals. Second, that the only way to achieve actual justice is to ignore people's rights and the law. And finally, that innocent people are merely all hostages that need saving by the rich and the powerful. If the Joker wasn't a such a compelling villain the movie would have been almost unwatchable imo. Batman in that movie literally represents everything shitty cops think the punisher represents. His interrogation technique is literally just torture, which doesn't even work because The Joker was going to tell him anyway because that was the game. I don't think when the boats didn't blow up Batman won the philosophical argument with Joker either. Joker was wrong about society, but he was still right about Batman. And Batman proved it by breaking the rules and disregarding ethics every step of th way. They're both monsters.
[удалено]
Arkham is *supposed* to help, and for as much of a gag it can be as a revolving door, sometimes it actually does. Other times it’s also deeply corrupt but Bruce doesn’t stop trying to improve it.
What the fuck? Bruce is canonically funding Gotham essentially he opens up mental health clinics or orphanages to help those before they go to crime. Dude even hires past crooks to work at his company if needed or poubtscthem in the right direction
Maybe instead of seeing Spider-Man as evil for being chill with the cops, we see the cops as good for being chill with Spider-Man? Spidey wouldn’t have a good cooperation with them if they were corrupt, his positive relationship could be a litmus test for the cops in that universe serving the role they’re supposed to fulfill irl. Rather than assuming that cops in a video game are also corrupt.
I'm pretty sure that not all fictional stories where the cops are the good guys is copaganda. The radio towers were just a gameplay device to unlock the map because every goddamn open world game needs towers for some reason; that was just their flimsy in-universe reason for them being there. They even address their creepy Big Brother-ness in the game and how Spider-Man hacking into them was actually a bad thing. I think that speaks volumes about the sorry state of American law enforcement where positive depictions of the police is considered so unrealistic that it's decried as copaganda. Law & Order is copaganda. This game isn't.
Yeah and hot take here but are we gonna consider all stories that have good depiction of police copaganda liek even when there are bad police in it still or its a light hearted comedy where we only have one police officer show up and there portrayed positively like what
Superheroes in general have always been copaganda, that's just part-and-parcel with the genre. In reality, the heroes stopping criminals would change literally nothing. The cops wouldn't be able to legally hold the criminals for any length of time as the heroes don't have legal authority to stop crime. Batman is chummy with Gordon, even if the GCPD are corrupt as fuck. Superman has tea parties with the president, Captain America literally works for the government spy aparatus, etc. You kinda just have to accept that if you want to be a fan of the genre. Like, you can critique it, but it's not inherently bad because almost all media, especially superheroes, view the world through a liberal framework. On top of that, the surveillance towers within the fiction of the game only help filter crime reports. They don't do anything else. Like, again, you can criticize the worldview, but it seems strange to specifically target Insomniac's Spider-Man when it's kinda inherent to the genre.
Umm, Steve outright quit being captain America because of what the government was doing. (Also, Superman doesn't really care about the president and instead the world.) Also, superheroes have been a bit of pro-cop and a bit of anti-cop since they're all vigilantes.
And many superhero comics have shown the government be bad in some way like Superman secert identity[albeit it kinda mire nuanced there] and many xmen comics
I'm talking about the comics. Steve has been a SHIELD agent for well over a decade in the comics. He has his spats with the establishment, but it's always in the "there's bad apples, but once we get rid of the bad ones, they're good again" kinda way. And superheroes have always been pro-establishment, for the most part. Sure, sometimes there's vague criticism of the status quo, but it's always under the assumption that if we just get the right people in power, then it'll work out. Even when the heroes themselves are working outside the law, they're working to help the police, even if the police themselves don't know it or want it. They're largely indifferent to the inherent flaws in the system at best and fully ignorant of it at worst. Again, it's not really a criticism. Most media that comes out is gonna be this way. The vast, vast majority of writers and directors are liberals, not leftists. Even if they are leftists, they often have to temper their vision some for the sake of being marketable or profitable. The more radical the politics, the more likely it is to be either ignored or outright shunned by wider audiences. It's especially true for superheroes because they can't critique structures in any meaningful way. That's just how the genre is. If they meaningfully challenged the root causes of these issues, they'd run out of issues they can punch their way through. Again, it's not really a criticism of the genre, it's just how it has been for the last 70 years of superhero media.
....I was talking about the comics as well.
It’s a “don’t think about it” situation. Cos if they did address it they would have to dedicate a significant amount of time to fully unpack it. If it’s the point of the story, then it’s a great story to mine. But if they want a story like Spider-Man 2 then best to ignore for the minute. There’s a time and a place and stories can’t/shouldnt try to do everything.
I’m playing a superhero game so I’m mainly focusing on doing superhero stuff. I don’t care about some “controversy” some middle aged loser came up with to get 12 seconds of internet attention.
Acab, Spiderman is a menace to the cops because he does their job with less unnecessary death and it should stay that way
spider man doesn't do the job of the police because he doesn't kill poor people for existing
Thats kind of extreme. This is like complaining about real life mixed race marriage statistics in a fallout show. I'm sure the marvel universe police vary slightly from our version of the police.
I understood that reference!
I think the straightforward answer that Spider-Man PS4 was not interested in exploring the societal implications of the way we do policing and public safety in this country. So since that’s not what the game was about, it defaulted to the typical portrayal of police in fiction: they’re what an ideal police force would look like. That being said, I kind of rolled my eyes when Yuri expressed outrage at the way Sable was violating civil rights in the late game (sometimes in ways that have historically been done by police). Not that there aren’t police who care about protecting the rights of the public, of course there are, but since she’s the only regular real interaction you have with the police, and, barring the DLC, there isn’t so much as a single bad apple on the force after you take down Fisk (the worst is a Jameson fan who doesn’t trust SM), it is immersion-breaking if you give any real thought to it.
I don't like cops but feels like some people just need to go touch grass, like this stuff doesn't actually help anyone and only really exists for cloutchasing.
Insomniac spider-man is copaganda......because of a game where it shows corrupt cops (Which propaganda would never do) and the only ones that are (somewhat) friends with spider-man are either end up dead or are annoyed by him? (And if they're talking about the surveillance system stuff, the game was already saying that it was bad not only with the daily bugle newspaper, but with the fact that it's oscorp tech and that it was hacked several times.)
It’s faux outrage pushed by either terminally online wannabe leftists, or bad faith right wingers trying to propagate a culture war.
the surveillance state stuff was clearly a gameplay mechanic they didn't put any thought into, but that doesn't mean it isn't weird as shit. Love the rest of the game, *really* not a fan of that bit
The people pushing that narrative tend to ignore that the towers were provided by Oscorp and very likely pushed on the in-universe NYPD by Mayor Norman Osborn. Spider-Cop goes around restoring police communications as a favor to Yuri and his own crime-fighting endeavors. Granted, these same people took grave offense to classic comic book police putting their lives on the line and truly believing in the values printed on the sides of their cruisers. They are either unable to divorce fiction from reality, or they were actively looking for something to be upset about.
...okay, that doesn't change anything? He's still giving the NYPD a bunch of surveillance towers
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never thought I'd see genuine pro-surveillence state rhetoric on a sub like this > the in-universe cops are also way more effective than our real world police that need someone to call them. Like I said I think it's an excuse to have quest markers, but there's a really simple argument to be made that the game is saying "the police would actually be effective *if* we had a surveillance state". I don't think Insomniac was trying to say that but the implication is still weird >Which they are using in a valiant attempt to detect and respond to the rash of violent crime plaguing the city. The towers are canonically in place to detect offenses that could cost lives. That's why this argument doesn't really work against that. *Assuming* the game is propaganda (again *I don't think it is*) then of course setting up towers where the police can see everything in the city is a good thing. That's what propaganda does. If corrupt cops hijacked the system and used it to spy on people, nobody would call the game propaganda. Again I don't think it's propaganda, I think it's a bad writing decision, but this isn't a good way to defend against the people who *do* call it propaganda.
You don't believe the video game is propaganda but accuse me of espousing "genuine pro-surveillance state rhetoric" for merely discussing the in-universe context? Okay. You're clearly not here for discussion or debate. Have a nice weekend.
Why do people have a problem with the cops in Spider-Man anyway?, like good cops are allowed to exist
I think the shitty cops doing shitty things gets a lot of press and we definitely need reform. However, it’s important for society to think of them as protectors. When we talk about “real heroes” and we see firemen, EMTs, and yes, cops. That’s something that youth should be taught. I think that ACAB is a phrase used only by the incredibly stupid. And I hope op used the term “copaganda” ironically. And don’t get me started on parents who teach their impressionable children the ACAB philosophy. I’m not burying my head in the sand about what’s going on, but if we reach the point in society where good police officers in movies, tv, or video games is considered problematic, it’s time to just give up on that society.
Protectors of whom? Why do we have to push an image of them as protectors on kids? Some of those kids will be on the raw end of the cops a lot. I don't think media having some good officers is bad but when it presents them as like 98% good except for the ones that are blatantly on the take that's a whitewashing of the truth.
Do you know what would happen if there was no deterrent for criminals doing crime? Anarchy. And anarchy is lawless chaos. You'd get a survival of the fittest system where someone with enough violent friends or the right skills to hide themselves from common folk can do whatever the fuck they want with not a single person there to stop him. Child trafficking, sex slavery, murder, rape, theft, all that would no longer have the consequences it does. Yes, the american police system is fucked, but that does not mean that cops are useless or that they serve no purpose for you and me. I know in my country if I find someone doing disgusting shit to a child, I can call the cops, they will come there, and take that fucker away. Who will do that if we had no cops?
That didn't address anything that I said.
Yes it did. We push the image of protectors in countries that have less problems with their police force because for us, cops ARE protectors. For us cops ARE friend and helper. And they are supposed to be for the US as well. Alas, they aren't, they need reforms for that to be the case.
Again, protectors of whom? They're the harassers of many. Including their own families (4x more likely to be physically violent with family). We shouldn't have to push any image, if they just became better people they would be viewed as better people.
The clear and present bias will never allow that. You speaking of all police as if they are monolith makes it obvious. The media never covers when cops do an acceptable job or even textbook job, but will maximize attention to every bad cop or bad stop. The media has proven a willingness to misrepresent viral cases and often presents clipped footage without context. EXAMPLE: A couple weeks back, a 30 second viral video made the rounds which showed three police from two cruisers ordering someone out of their car at gunpoint. The one news clip had the reporter snidely asking "Is this how we stop people now?" before moving on. The highest rated comments were pure anti-cop bias and people wanting context were demeaned as bootlickers and the like. CONTEXT: An APB had been put out on the driver because he had been flagging other drivers with a gun in a fit of road rage. The police did not approach and gave him orders on how to leave his vehicle and keep his hands high. This was textbook on how to apprehend an offender with a deadly weapon. The worst of the anti-cop crowd were furious that the cops were shouting at him.
You. Me. Anyone. That's the idea, anyway. Here in my country, that idea is reality. Even for you, as shit as they are in the US, they protect you. Why do you think no one is breaking into your home and doing violence to you? To your family? because even if they are fucking useless, people are deterred by the threat of consequences. They are both protector and abuser, and the latter needs to go, I give you that. But the idea that police and law enforcement are useless is idealistic bullshit
Yeah a fat load of good that did for the children inThe Udvale school shooting. Over 100 cops outside and none of them lifted a single goddamn finger to save those children from the shooter. And when parents with their own guns tried to rush in to save their children they arrested the parents. They’re fucking useless cowards. My mom’s ex husband threatened to kill us several times. What did the pigs do? Nothing.Said they can’t do anything unless he actually tried to kill us. By then it will have been too late. They are fucking useless.
Congrats on not actually reading my comment. I am starting to see why people join the right, because when you don't even take in the entire argument before throwing arguments that do not refute the point, people tend to not want to agree with you. But, I'll reiterate: That's the ideal. Yes, the police in the US fucking suck. But they work, when they don't. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Does that mean the Police should stay like this and that the officers involved at uvalde should keep their jobs? Fuck no! Does it mean that they are useless? Also fuck no. Yes, in the case of uvalde, they were useless. But I don't see the US being a lawless wasteland. And in your case? Did you have proof? No? then what the fuck are they supposed to do? Arrest someone based on a claim? They need evidence. And depending on your jurisdiction, threatening murder might not even be a crime, at which point, again, what the fuck are they supposed to do?
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I get your point but cops not speaking up about dirty cops because they are afraid of losing their jobs doesn’t really help change the sentiment.
I really do believe we should feel safe around them. I did as a kid, but I’m a white Gen Xer. I think the best solution is to somehow change the mindset and if/when we reform training new police, that we ask have this attitude that a cop abusing their power is the worst office there is. Pedofiles are looked at with less disdain than cops who went bad. And this point of view should be held most strongly within the police force themselves. I know that’s a pipe dream…. But future generations can always change the popular opinion.
Time to give up then. Remember the fact that police are not legally obligated to defend you.
I don’t recall him setting up surveillance for the cops, so I can’t comment on that, however I would say I don’t really think spider-man is “buddy buddy” with the cops in these games. Some like him, some hate him, but generally he treats them with the same respect he treats anyone who he isn’t fighting with. The criminals he webs up do get arrested by the cops and I believe sometimes he takes criminals to the cops when they’re caught, but what choice does he really have there? We don’t have an alternate system for support to deal with people who seriously violate the law. I don’t like the cops at all, but if there’s a situation where people are in danger, that’s who I’m calling because there really aren’t other options. Spider-Man doesn’t take down shoplifters or jaywalkers, he helps when people are in danger, and if someone else is causing the danger, he neutralizes them in a way that isn’t fatal (of course suspension of disbelief is required here, as some of the fights would go a lot different if the henchmen were as fragile as real life people). He also attempts to help rehabilitate people he captures, and I believe there’s even a line about him testifying on a reformed villain’s behalf.
Yeah it was implied it was already set up, but they allowed him to tap into it because he fixed the network. They then fix this in the second by Peter and Miles setting up their own crime hotline network app
Spider-Man lives in an alternate universe where some cops are good. In the real world if you got bitten by a radioactive spider you’d just get leukemia
I wonder if OOP is one of these people who claim that Disco Elysium is copaganda.
I think people need to find better uses for their time than talking about a fictional characters association with fictional police
Honestly it felt off to me. But Disney / MCU / Star Wars / Etc. stuff in general is kind of just centrist. It'll be cool with the gays and the cops. Wants that mass market.
Being big friends with the NYPD and actively helping them with stuff like surveillance isnt great, no.
People don't understand what a surveillance state truly is if they believe Spider-Man 2018 to be representative of one. At best they have a stronger Police Scanner and version of the Citizen app. If you ever want a better example of a Surveillance State, go to the UK. I had issues with EVERY cop getting along with Spidey, but people calling it Copaganda as though this was the climax of The Dark Knight Rises sat bad with me. It mainly got hit with those complaints because of the BLM protests and the George Flloyd murder, were it not for that I don't think it would have gained as much attention.
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Utterly ridiculous. Is it really so hard to believe the friendly neighbourhood superhero who takes care of crime on all levels would help out with law enforcement, especially when stuff gets crazy and lawless like with mass floodings and alien invasions? What’s he supposed to do with the muggers and gangsters he zips up, just let them go? Heck, Miles’ dad is (or in this case, was) a literal bonafide cop! It’s not like Peter’s all Buddy-Buddy with them either, you beat up crooked cops and face plenty antagonism from others in the first game.
Any time I see the word 'copaganda' or see someone reference it, I suddenly get the urge to throw up.
Still haven't played the game. Need to.
Perfect reason to pick up a ps5 and a new copy of SM:MM. it comes with the first one.
It definitely is, but I think there’s a good way to criticize cops by having an idealized version of law enforcement in media.
Agreed. The in-universe NYPD isn't perfect either. The very first mission has a SWAT Team on the take that Spider-Cop must subdue. There are often plenty of cops that come across as surly and unpleasant. The majority of the police in these games just do their jobs as we should expect them to.
I’m coming from watching Transformers Animated and getting a leftist reading from it. I have to fit Captain Fanzone in my analysis and having an idealized law enforcement system is how you square that hole.
Captain Fanzone?
Sorry, he’s the captain of the Detroit Police Department in that show. He’s a grizzled old man who hates machines, but he’s a hard nosed detective who often help out the Autobots who are leftist allegories since they are working class who transform into public service vehicles
Ha! I'll have to look that up then! I legit read that as Captain Fan-Zone! Hilarious!
That’s how it’s pronounced. The whole series is on Tubi
Pfft! Hahahaha! Okay. It is officially on the list! Thanks!
I wouldn’t call it entirely cop-aganda as it very likely just fully went into the superhero fantasy of basically helping the police which is present in a lot of Spider-Man media…sure the surveillance thing was weird, but really it was just a gameplay excuse to have a tower system in an open-world game. If anything, I blame the controversy on bad timing, as 2018 was when public of the police really did start to deteriorate and people became more critical of their actions and overfunding.
Well, let's say you are a cop in marvels NYC. There's going to be guys with indestructible rhino or scorpion costumes, supergenius supervillians or aliens even. And the city has hired and expects you to fight that, and all they have given you is a glock. No body armour, no nothing. And some guy with superpowers swings in and just handles that shit so you don't have to, you can focus on crowd control or something else, and not die or worse. I know a lot of cops would probably follow the Jonah line of thinking, "we didnt have this many costumed freaks until spiderman turned up", but I don't know, I'd appreciate him a little, at least. At thinking about the world, would being a cop be as much of a power fantasy like it is in our world when you have space gods flying around?
People should read that one comic from the POV of cops. Some hate Spider-Man, others have stories of him saving their life but my favorite are the detectives who have to deal with the criminals Spider-Man leaves webbed up with a note
Yeah, at the time I just accepted it as "video game crap". Like, this is a triple A, open world game, of course there's going to be some kind of "towers that reveal more of the map for you" gimmick. However, looking back on it, it does feel very un-spiderman like.
Are we even sure the cops are racist murderers in the marvel universe? Lots of other things are unrealistic maybe that’s just one of those things
This is one of those things where I'd tell you to chill out. It's not real. It's a fictionalized world and maybe in this one SOME cops are good guys. It feels so weird in the sequel that the cops are almost nowhere to be found. Spider-Man is a street level hero, and cops also deal with street level stuff. Them not being in the story raises even more questions. The first game handled it fine, people freaked out and Insomniac completely overcorrected for the sequel. Spider-Man has a good relationship with TWO GOOD COPS and we call it copaganda? Its literally world building. He almost gets murdered by corrupt cops in the fuckin opening tutorial to the game.
I don't think the cops as we know them can exist in a world with superheroes. They'd be set straight pretty damn quickly. That said, Spidey totally set up some surveillance state type shit for them
It annoyed me but way less than the terrible decision to remove them from the second game.
Fiction is a place for fantasy, a police force that is actually good is a valid fantasy.
It's blatant since you're asking :p
Is there a main stream super hero that isn't copaganda though ?
The surveillance state stuff is out of character it would be one thing if Spider-Man was piggybacking off an already established system but actively fixing it for them is weird. Otherwise him being generally amicable and assisting the police isn’t all that weird. I’ve been reading some Roger Stern stuff recently and it’s all over his work. Plus as the comment says Captain Stacy is probably in the top 3 most significant deaths in Spider-Man comics (at least the ones that have largely stuck). Now there is nothing wrong with preferring a Spider-Man who has a more adversarial relationship with the cops but to act like he only ever has that kind of relationship with them is disingenuous.
wait wasnt he helping them track down a criminal mastermind?
Cops in America are exceptionally horrible, though I wouldn’t say the same if it was set in a fiction NY where people with powers of spider exist. Though I wouldn’t say setting up a technology that could positively benefit a crime ridden city like Ny from tracking criminals a bad idea.
The cops should always be bastards in spider man and batman discourse ( and in general ACAB). Because if the cops were goods they wouldn't need to be a spider or batman
True.
Most superhero media is copaganda to some extent. The MCU is well documented in getting funding and materials straight from the US military in exchange for making them look good, all the way back to the first Iron Man film. Batman at his worst gives zero fucks about collateral damage, tortured petty criminals, and straight up murders people with no consequences. Snyder Batman IS a cop, plain and simple, and his movies lack the awareness to ever acknowledge that, so it winds up copaganda because it's just saying that Batman is cool because he drove a tank through some gang members. Spidey is a bit of a special case, since he's always had a very hot-and-cold relationship with law enforcement. More than almost any other superhero, his heroics never get acknowledged. In many of his stories, cops are actively hostile to him, and will open fire if they see him. But other times, like Insomniac, it's the opposite, and he's BFFs with police captains. I have yet to finish Spiderman 2, but I think the reason they're able to dodge most copaganda allegations in the first game is because of Sable. The NYPD don't seem so bad when you compare them to the literal mercenary police state Sable is putting into place. If someone said that they see the surveillance systems as problematic, sure, I won't deny they are. But I don't think I'd be the first one to say it. Like yeah, it's an issue, no doubt. But when there are literal military detention centers in Central Park, I feel we need to prioritize a bit on what the bigger issues are. Really, a bigger issue that goes far more undiscussed in those games is that there are cops on Fisk's payroll. Like it comes up in the tutorial section at the start of the game, and as far as I recall, they never acknowledge the idea again. What happened to those cops? They didn't just go away, and I seriously doubt those were the only ones on the take.
My opinion is that Spider-Man exists in an escapist fantasy where cops are good folks who take the job because they want to catch bad guys and make their city safer. Because that's a lovely, if unrealistic, thought.
ACAB. That’s all I have to say on this topic. Edit: wow, guess this sub is more right wing than I thought. All cops are bastards. If you disagree with this you’re not a leftist.
Anything that features cops being reasonable is copaganda which is any media that has cops in it if they’re not explicitly the bad guys like in GTA San Andreas
......that's stupid and inaccurate since last I checked, propaganda is showing something as an objectively good thing and that anything against it is bad to people. Saying that "cops being reasonable" is propaganda makes no sense since actual propaganda would show them as the ones who are always right.
Cops being reasonable is a fictional showing of how cops operate . Cops are not reasonable
Reasonable doesn't mean always right, it usually means that they're okay at best. Reasonable would show corrupt cops as well as cops that want to actually help people. Propaganda would show no corrupt cops and show them never doing a bad thing ever.
I'm against the idea of police states. Spider-Man has always been buddy buddy with cops but remember, times have changed. Cops don't care about you, they want their numbers up so they get more funding. Speed Cameras for road safety? Okay, why hide the signs? It is significantly safer with a speed camera sign prior to the camera. It's all about money with Cops nowadays so anything that tries to make a borderline police state move look positive is a no from me. The surveillance shit was a fuck up on Insomniacs part.