There’s no reason to be afraid of the police in Pawnee, Indiana. When a drunk, belligerent woman shows up unannounced at a cop’s home in the middle of the night, he kindly gives her a ride home. When an innocent man suspected of breaking into a van refuses to comply with an officer’s orders, the suspect ends up with nothing more than a bruised ego. And when a citizen expresses concern about cops potentially breaking into his home without a warrant, a politician dismisses the idea that any member of the town’s timid police department could be capable of any infringement of civil liberties.
Of course, Pawnee, Indiana, is not real. It’s the fictional town in which the sitcom Parks and Recreation takes place. Pawnee doesn’t represent reality. Sitcom stands for “situational comedy,” a perfect label for a show that often uses the setting of a small town in Indiana to create comedic moments. At times, that setting and its characters include police.
Take the first example I listed above — the drunk, belligerent woman is the show’s protagonist, Leslie Knope, and the cop is Officer Dave, the man she is scheduled to go on a first date with the next day. Leslie’s tendency to blow things out of proportion leads to severe anxiety about their looming date, so she gets wildly drunk to cope. Lacking appropriate judgement, she shows up at Dave’s house a night early, where he is just chilling alone on his couch. The out-of-control, anxious Leslie meeting in-control, calm Dave sets up an incredibly funny juxtaposition. On one hand, there is a crazy lady barging into a man’s house telling him, “You make a better door than a guy.” On the other hand there’s a down-to-Earth dude completely unrattled by her antics. In fact, the comparison between Leslie’s exuberance and Dave’s no-nonsense style serves as a well of comedy throughout the two’s relationship.
Even in situations where cops need to exert authority, they do so peacefully. Take the second example listed in the intro here. Government employee Tom Haverford accidentally locks himself out of a van that he is using for city business, so he has to break his way back in. A suspicious neighbor calls the cops. Dave arrives on the scene and asks Tom to show ID. Tom calls Dave “Paul Blart” and makes “your mom” jokes at him. There is a brief allusion to the fact that Tom, an Indian American, may be a victim of racial profiling. And the fact that Officer Dave arrests him for disorderly conduct despite Tom doing nothing beyond a few obnoxious insults would seem to prove that point. Regardless, the scene remains non-violent. While gently being handcuffed, Tom lets out a high-pitched scream disproportionate to the actual level of force being used. In this case, the comedy comes from exaggeration. Tom reacts as if he is in grave danger but really he is completely fine. He is released from jail the next day totally unharmed and with no adverse consequences to his career or life.
At the end of the day, the cops in Pawnee simply aren’t worthy of fear. In the final example I mentioned earlier, a concerned citizen speaks with Councilwoman Knope about the slippery slope of reinterpreting the town’s original charter. “You start by casually repealing a couple of old laws, the next thing you know, your jackbooted stormtroopers are kicking in my door and arresting my wife for no reason.” Leslie responds, “By ‘jackbooted stormtroopers,’ do you mean the Pawnee Police Department?” She then turns the man’s attention to the cop on duty at city hall. A goofy old officer named Clyde comes into focus. He kindly waves with his left arm, then raises his right arm to show off the delicious donut that he’s been eating. Clyde’s silly demeanor hammers home how funny it is that the concerned man in this scene is scared of the police posing any sort of threat, especially one as extreme as the situation he outlines.
In that specific conversation, Leslie props up Officer Clyde as an avatar of the entire department — an innocuous, wholesome, benign peacekeeper incapable of doling out any sort of harm to the town’s citizens. While hardly a central focus of the show, Parks and Rec frequently portrays police in this favorable light to elicit laughter. It is not the first nor the last show to do this; from The Simpsons to Brooklyn 99 to The Andy Griffith Show, American comedy has always found humor in situations involving police. I’m in no way criticizing any show for this: it’s funny and it’s fantasy.
That said, fantasies come from very real desires. Parks and Rec acknowledges the power that police have in Pawnee in a way that shows off the role cops ought to have in their community. For example, many people in the real world fear themselves or loved ones becoming victims of police shootings. In the world of Parks and Rec, Ben Wyatt is deathly afraid of cops specifically because they have guns and authority. Such a fear in reality is, unfortunately, rational. But in Pawnee, it is hilariously irrational. In any conversation with an officer, Ben gets visibly flustered even though, as we’ve seen, these cops are no threat to him or anybody else. In Pawnee, police use their guns only for good, never for evil. If only we all could live in such a world.
Part of the reason the Pawnee Police stay in line is because of the training they go through. In Season 5, the lovable but irresponsible mischief Andy Dwyer attempts to become a police officer. After years of role-playing as “Burt Macklin,” a loose cannon FBI agent who shoots bad guys and saves his wife Janet Snakehole from certain destruction, Andy wants to get a real badge and gun. He studies intensely for a written exam that quizzes him on every corner of the police manual that he’d be sworn to follow. Then he sits down with an officer for a personality test to ensure that he would handle his weapon responsibly, treat all citizens equally, and ultimately live out the true mission of protecting Pawnee. Andy aces the written test but stumbles on the personality test. In one made-up scenario, a kid asks Officer Andy if he can hold his gun, and Andy obliges. Ultimately, Andy fails the personality test, which is a good thing. There are clear standards of knowledge, morality, and responsibility that police in Pawnee have to meet before they earn their uniform.
Holistically, the police of Pawnee embody a fantasy where police live within the community they look after and go through effective training that prevents them from overstepping. To be fair, I am not saying that this is always necessarily fiction. I am open to the possibility that there exist places in America where police always stand up on the same side as the community’s civilians. And of course, I’m sure there are good-hearted officers embedded in just about every department nationwide. But as we’ve seen in the past months and years, there remain systemic forces that prevent police departments from resembling what we see in Pawnee.
Unlike the police in Pawnee, real cops do commit murder, abuse, and other violations of basic human rights at unacceptable rates. Particularly against African Americans and other racial minorities. Parks and Rec barely touches upon the racial component of police brutality because, at the core of the show, there is no brutality to begin with. In Pawnee, citizens worry about raccoons over-running their baseball fields, not police officers over-running their rights, dignity, and well-being. Hopefully one day a place like Pawnee will feel more like reality than fiction.
Mindful Entertainment 