BEYOND TWO SOULS

the whole time i was playing this, i wished i could walk out of the theater

COPS in GRAND THEFT AUTO (V)



   every encounter I've had with the police in real life, like something out of a book (or maybe a movie) has been exactly as uncomfortable
and stressful as you could probably imagine, and this is coming from someone who tries to abide by the law as best he can.
not being able to account for some people and situations I've found myself involved with, this also means that the few times a gun has been
pointed at me, a police officer was on the other side of it.
now, I've come to understand that having a cop point a firearm at you is probably one of the worst experiences someone go through, especially considering there's a feeling that a cop would be more willing to shoot you than say, a mugger, but a cop would also make you
lay on the ground for an hour. I recall a story about a man in Arizona being "subdued" which is the most passive term i think whoever handles law enforcement's PR could come up with for being assaulted, maced and handcuffed they could probably come up with.
it happened in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of an Arizona summer, which means the pavement is literally hot enough to fry a sausage on with your choice of oil, maybe olive?
the conclusion of that story was the man in question receiving second degree burns on his face, because the officer 'subduing' him held him against the concrete the entire time, becoming more rough with him every time he tried to keep his skin away from the concrete.
being sure at least someone out there is going to refer to a story like that as "an isolated incident" or "a violent exception" police brutality happens all over the world on a daily basis, and most examples of it go unreported.

in Grand Theft Auto, you can't report police brutality, and generally the only person you ever see it happen to is yourself.
unless for story specific reasons, no other bystanders get arrested, or even commit crimes unless you're squaring off with a rival faction/gang/group of caricatures and even then, their final judgement is a bullet or a baseball bat. (if you're me, it's a baseball bat, always.)

Rockstars role in the game industry as Satirists has given them an incredible weight to which they make their worlds realized,
a fascination with personal ego and vanity is played up the point it's so ridiculous it rings horrifying and true, and then Rockstar takes it a little further so it can be exploited as a sort of dark comedy.
Nothing in GTA is more gamified and exploited quite like the police are. Criminalization of a person is turned into a point-based wanted system that's a brilliant hallmark of the series and an easy way for keeping track of how dangerous you are at any given moment.
there's a certain thrill to having five wanted stars, a shitload of guns and the infinite tank of gas that every car in GTA is provided with, even more so by a decision to make the police in GTA cartoonishly aggressive and almost robocop-like in their pursuing of the player.
more interesting writers have done pieces on why the police act that way in the first place, so the history is sort of irrelevant as it pertains
to the theme here, especially in GTA V which is a game about people really trying to find their role in the world. that role is important in GTA, as it pertains to how the player interacts with law enforcement in the real world. JiHyun Kwan theorizes in her paper
on police brutality by using empirical data to analyze real-world cases and concepts of police brutality. One such area of her paper discusses a theory that, to summarize, infers that police brutality is the concept of role-taking on both an aggressor
and victim sides of conflict. In GTA, the police, ultimately, have no power of the player (good!) in the open world-nature of the game. they exist as a hindrance, not a power
that can actually control the player, so the player is free to 'push back' against them as much as they want. There is no role of 'force of power' and 'crimedoer' and we're going to use crimedoer here because that is [i]the best term[/i]. Without those roles, the player isn't [i]afraid[/i] of the police
yet, possibly part of Rockstars satire on Law Enforcement, they try anyway. police in settings of the GTA series are still seen as crimefighters by
the 'public' in the game world and rightfully, they are. generally; the player is not supposed to empathize with the police.

violent (often antisocial) crime is
seen as an ultimate liberation for the player, a way of completely destructing the status-quo of the world. exemplary of that is the tiniest scratch on a police car setting them off into a frantic chase down a highway, or a midtown shootout in the middle of a bustling city.
the player enforces his own status quo, so, in effect, the police now operate in a position as less-powerful than the player character
and allied factions. they pursue and enforce like you would expect a football-player to in a hit teen rom com from the nineties. almost robotic like
with a fascination with arresting the player character.
is this, in term, a caricature of the police by Rockstar, blowing their already violent and fascist tendencies wildly out of proportion
in response to the comic-book levels of violence the player engages in
the real question i guess, is "Are Rockstar Great Satirists" and if so, how do you effectively make the police even more gang and fraternity like than they already are in real life?


-skeletons