They are saints and sinners, sometimes in the same skin, sometimes in the same day. They can be fiercely devoted to each other and to their city and, in the flash of an instant, do something inexplicably brutal and destructive, to themselves, the department and the people they serve. At a time when America is demanding reforms in law enforcement, Springfield's department lives in a time warp, trapped in old-school institutional behavior that makes change difficult, hamstrung by long interpersonal relationships between officers that sometimes stretch clear back to grammar school. There is a code of silence. Whistle blowers are despised.
Passions run deep.
The job is their life, the personal and the professional barely separable. And when things go awry, payback can careen from one to the other. In most police departments, everyone has something on everybody else. It was a married cop's anger at another cop who was sleeping with his girlfriend that led to an internal investigation of off-duty cops doing drugs and the eventual indictment of 14 officers in 1984. The shit that people do here.