But in 1986 the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit didn't buy the argument, saying in part, "Foot chases and the morale problems of policemen, not to mention the familiar figure of the Irish cop, are venerable and often-recurring themes of police fiction".
Adam Sandler of Daily Variety praised the cast, the hysteria and confusion conveyed in Gyllenhaal's direction, and the "themes of police insensitivity, victims rights and dysfunctional families" in the script.
In portraying black members of the police department ignoring legitimate evidence to protect a prominent member of Baltimore's African American community, "Blood Ties" touches simultaneously on themes of police misconduct and racism, however inadvertent, from the characters of Pembleton and Gee.
Most of the reporting for this Friday's episode, on the theme of community policing, was done in December, in Elgin, Illinois, partly because the town's work in this field has been hailed as an exemplum.
Centred around themes of poverty, police brutality, drug abuse and injustice in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination and with lyrics written from the perspective of a Vietnam war veteran, the film will document the making of a soul classic that "challenged America and the world to self-reflect, going on to inspire a generation of artists and music lovers", the producers told Variety.
Reason magazine's Ed Krayewski builds on this theme of a militarised police force as the spear-point of an intrusive government, causing more harm than good: "What's happening in Ferguson certainly looks like a counter-insurgency," he writes.
The need to make policing by consent the central theme in the training of police officers was highlighted by Scarman again after the Brixton riots in 1981.
Moffat focuses on themes of race, policing and failed justice, and for a while the timely subject matter and stellar cast are enough to sustain interest in the increasingly gnarled plot. .
The tension between being closely linked to communities and being an instrument for reforming them inevitably resulted in a struggle for political control of the police a struggle that was one of the dominant themes in the history of police in the United States.
