In 1966, Season 1 of Mission Impossible, on prime time TV, they said a very interesting thing. Watch the clip, then continue reading …
That was Mission Impossible, 1966. The “team” was posing as a group of agents who were to infiltrate America, so were being coached in detail on American customs. The guys holding the guns were some of the teachers and this was a surprise test. (Lt Sulu there — George Takei — was not yet on Star Trek, but soon would be; he was a guest star on this episode.)
That was a prime time TV show, geared to an above average audience, and that’s what they were saying about America’s Police back then.
Have times changed?
Was it only what was supposed to be true and was never really true?
What happened to “Officer Friendly,” and Joe Friday?
Trace it out; how did we get from there to here?
That show was before SWAT (alright, mostly before SWAT, which was invented by LAPD, by the way), before “terrorism,” before automatic rifles in private hands, before multi-billion dollar organized crime, before cocaine became a household word and the least of Bad Drugs, before the world reached 7.5 billion population, before 99 kinds of environmental pollution, before the degradation of the food supply, before the rise of corporate governments… it was before a lot of things. Some of those things I factor into “what happened” to the Police and some I don’t.
I’m not going to draw any conclusions here, because, frankly, all I can do on this one is speculate, as I have done, but I do find this fascinating…