Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Breaking Bad episode S2E7 builds on two themes I've written about recently: portrayals of law enforcement as venal and characters being generally unsympathetic. This episode shows another portrayal of cops, different cops, as venal, sloppy, and yet simultaneously full of themselves.

In this episode Hank gets a promotion that sends him to the (larger) DEA field office in El Paso to act as a liaison. His team back in Albuquerque are proud of him. To them it's a big promotion. Hank earned it for his bravery and accomplishment in killing drug gang leader Tuco Salamanca in S2E2. We viewers, of course, know that Hank stumbled into that by accident. Though while he exercised no shrewdness or insight there, he was legitimately brave in attempting to apprehend an armed fugitive.

Hank doesn't fit in in El Paso. The agents on the field team there all speak Spanish fluently, and they ridicule Hank for not having the skill. Hank's a bit of a cowboy agent back in El Paso, but the El Paso team takes playing fast and loose to a degree that shocks Hank. In one pivotal scene they're openly bribing a gang member informant, played by film actor Danny Trejo in a scene-chewing cameo, by letting him pick gimmicky gifts out of a SkyMall catalog. Hank interrupts, "Cut the crap and tell us what you know!" The other agents quickly shut him down and start making fun of him in Spanish.

The team then suits up— body armor and assault weapons— and goes out into the desert. They're acting on information Trejo's character provided to catch drug cartel members conducting a high-level trade. The agents' field work is sloppy. Hank, ordinarily not one of the detail-oriented agents back in Albuquerque, is the only one really paying attention here and taking it seriously. The El Paso agents carry on like 10 year olds playing Cops and Robbers, except with real badges and guns.

The agents' sloppiness has real consequences here. While they're clowning around they fail to spot a deadly trap. One agent is killed, one is maimed, and everyone else but Hank is injured.

The upshot of all this, by the way? The team of clowns in El Paso decide that Hank is the unprofessional one. They send him back to Albuquerque.

Now, you might wonder why this matters. It's just a TV show, right? A fictional TV show. Except fiction, when well done, holds up a mirror to reality. These negative portrayals of federal agents working along the Southwestern border have a lot of basis in fact. There have been a lot of allegations of widespread use of racial slurs against agents and suspects, and agents basically making up their own rules to enforce.

Last week I wrote briefly about the trial of Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd during an arrest. I asserted that this time is different despite what the doubters and SNL satirists say. Now I'll explain why it's different. Here are Five Things:

1. The evidence is highly visible. We have videos and multiple eyewitnesses to the circumstances of George Floyd's death at police hands on May 25, 2020. This isn't so much a thing that's different about Floyd's death but about many cases of police violence in recent years versus farther in the past. Farther in the past there rarely was objective evidence like a video. Thank ubiquitous cell phones for that. And thank ubiquitous Internet access both for helping such videos be seen and helping witnesses be heard. In the past witnesses could not reach millions of people with their statements as readily as they can today. By and large their statements were heard by investigators who kept it bottled up— or weren't even given to investigators, as people in oppressed communities feared speaking to the police.


2. There has been a sustained outcry for justice. Floyd's death at the hands of police not only sparked outrage in the community, it sparked outrage nationwide. And that outrage has lasted beyond the immediate days after the killing. Protests occurred in many cities over the summer. There was even a protest march in my hometown 1,600 miles away from Minneapolis. I joined it.


3. The Chief of Police and Minneapolis Mayor both condemned Chauvin's actions, swiftly. The norm in the past has been for leaders to first cover up the facts of what happened, then play the "Well, I don't know..." card to excuse taking action. Instead, here, local leaders acted quickly and decisively. Within 24 hours of the alleged crime Chauvin and 3 other officers were all fired. This has set a new precedent for political leaders to have to confront the ugly reality of police violence when it occurs in their jurisdiction and be accountable for their actions— or inaction— against it.


4. The district attorney followed swiftly with charges against Chauvin and 3 officers who allegedly witnessed his actions and failed to stop him. This alone is a huge change. The sad norm in police violence cases even in recent years has been to let the offenders off without charges. District attorneys hide behind claims of insufficient evidence or pass off responsibility to grand juries that decline to indict— despite the fact that a competent prosecutor can get a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich," in the legendary words of New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachtler— or to administrative review boards that do nothing and bury the results in red tape.


5. Police experts testified for the prosecution in the trial. It was striking in this trial that multiple respected policing experts stood up and said what Chauvin did was wrong. In the past the "blue line" of police officers siding with their own has rarely been broken.

Does any of this mean Chauvin will be convicted? After all, convicting a police officer for unlawfully killing a Black man in custody is the main "Will it be different this time?" question people are asking. It's impossible to guarantee as the verdict is in the hands of the jury now. But even if they do acquit— or if a mistrial is declared and the jury in a subsequent trial acquits, or a jury convicts but is overturned on appeal— the above 5 things that are already different about this case are significant and show progress is being made. As Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."