Homeland Security on ABC has been on my TV appointment list ever since it debuted. I thought it was going to be a show like Third Watch (NBC, 1999-2005), where it shows fictional composite officers and situations of the real-world Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and other Homeland Security Department-supervised Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs).
As it turns out, the show does focus on those real-world agencies, but it’s more like COPS than Third Watch, in that they show you the real thing. Still, I like it.
Evidently, the show has had an effect, so much so that the open borders rabble protested the ABC studios in Burbank this past weekend, and the few Patriots left in Southern California were there to counter-protest.
Before you so easily take sides, heed an opinion of the show that I have recently formulated.
Shows like CSI and Law & Order are almost always at the top of the ratings charts. And it has become quite a problem for real world prosecutors — more and more, jurors are more hesitant to return guilty verdicts, because they see how well the fictional cops do it on CSI, and therefore expect the real world cops to do just the same. You know, they’re supposed to ask just the right question in just the right way to just the right person, and find just the right hair in just the right room after hours on end of searching, in order to bag a murder suspect.
And it gets worse. Criminals watch CSI, too, and some of them are beginning to cover their tracks well enough such that even if the real world cops were as good as the ones on CSI, they couldn’t bag the doer. More and more murders are going unsolved because of this.
Perhaps the writers and networks, in the spirit of the public interest, want to promulgate the notion that the cops always get their man, so don’t even try to commit a crime. The sword is actually cutting in the other direction.
I think Homeland Security is suffering from something similar. I could easily understand how some average shmuck who doesn’t live in an Aztlan border state can watch this show and think the immigration problem is far more under control than it actually is. If you watch Homeland Security week in and week out, like I do, and wouldn’t know any better, you would think that CBP/ICE/TSA always get their man, always preclude every attempt at illicit border entry, always round up border jumpers not far from the actual border, always nab every bag of weed and brick of crack boobyhatched in cars and SUVs coming from Mexico, and always turn away at the airport ne’er-do-wells from Pakistan with bad intentions.
If that’s the case, then explain all the illegal drugs and illegal aliens in the country. Explain 9/11.
And, similar to the CSI Effect where criminals cover their trails far better, I bet there are going to be a lot of drug runners and human smugglers and other ne’er-do-wells who will watch Homeland Security, and pick up on the methods that CBP/ICE/TSA use to weed out suspicious people and behavior, and alter their tactics to slide by the authorities.
To net it out, ABC is trying to deball the right wing on the immigration issue, by promulgating the notion that the real authorities have the problem far more under control than it actually is, and that there are actually very few illegal aliens living in the interior of the coterminous U.S. Therefore, no need to elect right-wingers, because Bush/Obama are doing just fine, you see at 8/7c every Tuesday night.
The open borders left should love this show, and the Patriots really shouldn’t be defending it. Even if they like it.
UPDATE 3/14: ABC is tabling “HLS” for now, and may not ever bring it back. Its ratings are poor, but when your competition is American Idol, NCIS, Biggest Loser and Reaper, anything you put up on that time slot is going to have poor ratings. I have mixed feelings about what looks to be “HLS’s: cancellation, for as I said, I like it, but I’m aware of the propaganda angle.
[...] The Prospect of Cops Actually Enforcing the Law Is Just Too Much For Some People 11 03 2009 Open borders rabble in Morristown, N.J. doesn’t want the City’s Finest to get 287-g authorization. They give some cock-and-bull excuse about “creating rifts” and “making immigrants reluctant to report crimes” (even though every jurisdiction that matters has anonymous tip lines). The real reason is that the Morristown P.D. might actually help enforce immigration law, whereas if it were up to the Feds alone, they wouldn’t do it very much. In spite of what you see on ABC every Tuesday night. [...]