The summer of 2025 was my last free summer before I was thrown into the abyss that is grad school. I left my job in May, and thought to myself– ah, yes! The summer I get to my TBR, a summer to truly read. But instead, I found myself learning how to swim and then spending the rest of the day watching Police Procedurals. From the depths of Amazon Prime and Netflix, I unearthed shows titled Rizzoli and Isles, Castle, Bones, and Cold Cases. All were set in the US, in different parts of the country– in Boston, New York City, DC, and Philadelphia. Police procedurals often begin with a rather predictable set of events. Rich civilian consultants who just love solving puzzles; a detective with a dead parent/sibling/partner; a vast conspiracy to shut down honest investigation, and of course, a sometimes lazy love story to give the female detective an opportunity to retain her appeal to the male viewers by appearing desirable and hot. 

This predictability, however, did not stop me from watching these shows in an almost haze-like obsession– morning, evening, afternoon, I would be stationed in my living room lying down on the couch watching one gory body after another. Forensic science and its advancements are reaching jarring levels of accuracy– murderers are being caught by the most recent breath they had taken. With every progressive season, the murders got more fantastic, the storylines deeper and more convoluted, and the government conspiracy bigger than before. And I would watch, nothing could turn me away from looking at the mangled bones, and the fountains of blood and bodily fluid that seemed to curate the space with an obnoxious level of detail. 

The violence of it all– of how the regular depiction of human carcasses– showed depravity in ways that allow us to access the sensuality of violence without having to be ‘ashamed’ by it. This part of criminality, so often shielded from the public by the clever use of verbosity, and censorship often renders victims of violence into discourse, obfuscating the obvious human denigration that the body itself went through. Reminiscent of Abu Ghraib, when the abuse was visible everywhere, these shows allow the public to enjoy that violence without the added layer of politicization that often follows death and desecration. Yet, the violence is sanitized, cleaned up for you. The bodies appear on slabs with cosmetic nicks, the grossness gone once the state intervenes. Sometimes you don’t even see the body; it is already in a burlap sack on its way to a lab– waiting to be dissected, prodded, drawn, and quartered. Pachirat argues that this is the ‘politics of sight’, where we hide what is too repugnant to contemplate. Much like a hospital, where the gruesomeness of the body is hidden far away from visitors, these shows make it clear that violence is not normal it is unexplainable and senseless.

The motivation to do violence, however, a different question. Separate from the violence. Criminality is a thing to be controlled, a thing to be adjudicated because it is not the norm. The morally upright police officer, fighting the big bad system for justice, so forlorn, so tired, and yet continues to rectify criminals and their criminality. To set the order back. Violence and criminality are an aberration to the system of order. This determinism, this formulaic set of notions, permeates these shows. The utter devotion to authority, the disregard for gun-related violence, and the ability to remain steadfast in the pursuit of justice at great personal cost. I noticed that almost all these shows, some more than others, depicted shadow governments– a set of low level buraeucrats and police officers that created a network of bribery and tomfoolery to protect the rich and the powerful, lining their pockets. It is not a surprise that this theme ran clear in these shows– afterall pretending to fight the system is what makes a good police officer excellent. The system is at once the thing to uphold and destroy. It is the rules and regulations that restrict power that also restrict the ability to do ‘good’, but it is also the authority from which these rules originate that must be respected and upheld. This amorphous moral authority, driven purely by reasons of personal vengeance and a can-do spirit. A police procedural is fiction at its finest, reducing the mundanities of regular policing into an exciting whodunnit.