The Way of All Perps

About 10 minutes into the premiere episode of Steven Bochco's initially thrilling CBS crime series, Brooklyn South, I found myself wishing deeply unpleasant tortures--specifically, tortures involving the nonbusiness end of a toilet plunger--upon the psychopathic black perpetrator who commits the heinous crimes that open the show. This, of course, is what the reactionaries who work on the Bochco police-drama assembly line want me to feel: Nothing like a vicious black perp to get the fear-juice of white America flowing. Read more

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/1997/09/the-way-of-all-perps/8206/