Hawaii 5-0: A Carte Blance Police Force

     TV cops have a long standing reputation of closing cases in 45 minutes (except for the O.J. case). How they go about it can sometimes be a stretch, and you know they have to cut some corners to do it. If today's media attention toward police screw-ups in any indication  If the judge is on the golf course, someone better contact his caddy to get that warrant, right? After a while I believe there's a fine line between defending justice and infringing on the rights of others. Maybe there's something powerful that draws the audience to situations like that. We love the thrill of the cat-and-mouse game, and nothing is more satisfying than capturing someone who really did something bad. But what if that person is supposed to be preserving the law?

     Some of my favorite moments in cop dramas have been about breaking the law. There's a memorable part of the Blue Bloods pilot where Det. Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) flushes a perp's face in a toilet to get information, which definitely falls under police brutality. Blue Bloods has long addressed issues of police conduct (and misconduct) and Police Commissioner Reagan (Tom Selleck) always supports his officers and policies until given reason to believe they are harmful to the public. There was at least one episode of Bones where Dr. Brennan (Emily Deschanel) an anthropologist partnered to an FBI agent, shot a perp. This happened in the pilot episode for chrissake! Her husband Booth (David Boranez) has shot multiple people over the years, and he shot a clown on top of an ice cream truck, which landed him in therapy. The first episode of Jennifer Lopez's Shades of Blue has J-Lo's Harley covering up her partner's shooting of an unarmed man that was playing single-shooter video games. Clearly, TV cops need some more regulation.

Image from Pintrest

    There is a much more corrupt group of cops on TV! What happens when you have a free-for-all police task force that is presided over by the Governor of the state? Then you have the Hawaii 5-0 and all hell breaks loose. These people are cops, but they have the worst luck when it comes to dating and getting people kidnapped. This police squad of misfits operates on their own with no oversight, and they have broken numerous laws to close cases. I also wonder how legal their desktop comoputer is. It's a computer screen the size of a desk that can search databases and find licenses in a matter of seconds.

     In this current season, Chi McBride's Lt.Grover, desperate to prove his old partner's guilt in murdering his wife, kidnaps his friend and holds him at gunpoint and threatens the guy's new girlfriend until he confesses. Don't sweat the small stuff, right? Grace Park's Kono married a reformed Japanese mob (Yakuza) kingpin at the end of last season, and by their honeymoon he is kidnapped, murdered innocent people in his escape, and is now in prison.  Last month, her cousin Chin Ho (Daniel Dae Kim) has a shootout with his deceased wife's brother. Chin gets a little wild and shoots the guy through a window of an abandoned building and he falls a few stories and lands on a car. Important to note, he is missing when the come to check on the body, so it's only an attempted murder. Was this a concerning turn of events for anyone else? Not so much. They were much more worried about Danno and Commander Steve McGarrett (Alex O'Loughlin) going to some partner training. When they arrived at the training session, they found out it was a couples' retreat and their witty banter really shown through as Danno suffered through a broken ankle in a three-legged race exercise. I'm not going to blame her, but even McGarrett's girlfriend Catherine saw 5-0 was a toxic environment. Catherine returned for Kono's wedding and just as McGarrett was about to propose, she packed her bags and left for a humanitarian mission (or maybe not, as we discovered last week that she is on a  classified mission in Nepal).
   
     Elsewhere, the FBI took aside Danno (Scott Caan) to investigate what happened to a half-million dollars his brother had in his possession before he was murdered. Somehow his mother got access to the money and the FBI thinks Danny knowingly helped his brother hide the stolen money as an accessory. If this is the FBI's in-road, they need to think again about their priorities. People near to the 5-0 are getting murdered left and right. Plus the group makes their own rules of what constitutes torture for their perps in the windowless interrogation room.  If anyone remembers, the first Governor of Hawaii who created the 5-0 (Jean Smart) got murdered and 5-0 leader McGarrett was framed for it, because who wouldn't believe the leader of a no-rules task force would eliminate the one person standing in his way. Now McGarrett is a pretty decent guy, but let's not forget his mother, renowned criminal Doris (and long thought to be dead) got away with tons of bad stuff because Steve failed to bring her to jail,  and she is still out there and is a hired assassin.

     Now with the FBI on their heels, the 5-0 is going to need to accept responsibility for their errors in judgment and reckless behavior. Inspector Abby Dunn,  (Julie Benz) a recent visitor to 5-0 from San Francisco has come to observe how the group works so she can start her own task force. So naturally with more eyes watching, the group should be making a good impression. But since she has been here, several bad things have happened (See Chin-Ho and the brother-in-law shooting). So imagine my surprise when Abby lied about a trip to San Francisco a few weeks ago, and then she turned up on the other side of Danno's police interrogation. Now, we found out she is an FBI plant to help disband 5-0. No why would anyone want to disband the 5-0 (aside from the above mentioned misconduct)? Of course, the lead investigator's brother was murdered and he has investigated 5-0 last season, so that's all we need in terms of a motive for this show. The reason I find this plot so amusing is that on the beloved 90's alien drama Roswell, Benz also played an FBI agent. Pretending to be the school guidance counselor, agent Topolsky got a little to close to the aliens and she died in a mysterious fire. Hopefully the same fate does not await her in Hawaii.