Including police, families in the conversation
Last fall, co-creators and showrunners Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss had already been hearing rumors that some members of the Chicago Police Department were less than enthusiastic about their CBS series “The Red Line.”
“There are police blogs where officers have been aware of the show and have been commenting about it,” said Parrish. “That we’re going to get it wrong and we’re a bunch of liberals who are just going to come in and say every cop is a murderer. Or racist.”
Weiss said she talked with background actors who had overheard some rumblings as well. “We often rely on actual police to help out when we’re on location and — we’re not being officially shunned, but through the grapevine there was a little bit of unease that the background extras were reporting.
“Look, this show is not going to wind up being for everyone,” she said. “I think that people can relate to Paul’s story. If not his actions, then where he comes from. And the Chicago police in general would probably find that there’s enough nuance and humanizing of all of the cops on the show — white and non-white — that they would probably not feel as castigated as their concern suggests. I would hope not.”
Parrish and Weiss said that for purposes of background research, they did have extensive conversations with two Chicago police officers — one a black woman, the other a white man — that were facilitated with the help of friends working through unofficial channels.
“It’s kind of universally acknowledged, according to the cops with whom we spoke, that the Laquan McDonald shooting was a bad shooting,” said Parrish. “And whether or not there’s a united front and solidarity ... ”
“... public solidarity,” Weiss interjected. “… that’s not necessarily true behind the scenes,” said Parrish. “However, when it comes to the majority of shooting incidents — and this will come as no surprise — cops tend to be on the side of the cop involved.”
“Or,” Weiss said, “at the very least, if not on the side of that cop, which can sound sort of knee-jerk defensive, the thing that we heard was: I wasn’t there in that situation. Especially talking to a woman who is African American and who grew up on the South Side, it was interesting to hear her perspective, which did give a lot of benefit of the doubt to the police involved. Both cops we talked to were absolutely open to having a conversation with us. But understandably, based on their race and their gender, they had very different opinions about how the CPD actually operates.
“And whether or not there was a systemic problem.”
The show’s creators also had conversations with families who had lost loved ones to police violence. “A lot of what they wanted to talk about was the person they lost, rather than a broader soap box about what’s wrong,” Weiss said. “They wanted their loved ones remembered in a real and deep way. They felt that it was so important to tell the world who this person was and that was informative to us, too. Whatever their flaws were, nothing about their stories necessitated a death sentence in that moment or beyond.”
Or as Parrish put it: “They wanted their loved ones to be remembered for more than the way they died.”
— Nina Metz