“Die Hard” Is The Best Case for Abolition
By: Jason Brown
Tags: Die Hard, Abolition, Harry Potter, Christmas, Culture

Abolition is a system built around the fact that police are not only ineffective at upholding public safety, but harmful to the populations they ostensibly purport to serve. Whereas the crux most fundamental to abolition is crime prevention, policing neither addresses nor prevents criminal activity; in fact, it exacerbates, and often causes, crime.

Die Hard exemplifies this disturbing reality in a number of ways.

Law enforcement entities—initially, the Los Angeles Police Department, to be later supplanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation — are portrayed throughout the film as woefully incompetent, and while their blatant shortcomings serve largely as either choric humor or additional obstacles for John McClane’s heroics to overcome, a closer examination of each collective instance offers corresponding glimpses into the extant failures of the system of policing as a whole.

As with their real-world counterparts, Die Hard’s police consistently make decisions that effect horrendous situations, or directly worsen existing ones (to whose origination they may have already negatively contributed).

The initial response to viable allegations of terrorist threats is egregiously underwhelming, as the reserve police channel begrudgingly sends one officer to inspect the scene, only doing so because a pregnant woman’s cravings happen to position a “black and white” down the street. A reluctance, or downright refusal, to respond to pressing civilian concerns with urgency is an experience with which many Americans are all too familiar; such inaction led directly to the repeated sexual assault, and eventual murder, of Oluwatoyin Salau.

Even once sent, Al Powell — depicted as one of two competent cops in the film — conducts an indefensibly insufficient investigation of the premises, an apathetic appraisal that actively endangers all affected lives. Similar prevailing mindsets allow dystopian nightmares such as hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits sitting in precincts across the country and white supremacists comprising police forces to become horrifyingly real.

The movie itself acknowledges the ubiquity of police incompetence; it is such a bankable phenomenon that Gruber’s heist depends entirely on the ineptitude and predictability of law enforcement. The plan about which the FBI Johnsons are positively giddy leads directly to a montage of the villains’ elated faces set to a triumphant crescendo of the most famous song about happiness to which the plot, score, and soundtrack have collectively been building for the previous 103 minutes. “Police action was . . . as it happens, necessary,” to the point that Hans is concomitantly comfortably disinterested with the proceedings outside Nakatomi Plaza and able to weaponize such an inevitability to his insurmountable advantage; the history of white Americans knowingly threatening innocent members of the Black community with police violence is as long as it is disgusting.

As is so often the case when interacting with members of the Black community, the reaction of police to each and every situation presented to them in Die Hard is an escalation of violence. This violence is repeatedly dispensed through the use of military-grade weaponry that consistently fails to achieve anything in the way of meaningful progress, despite its undoubtedly lofty price tag for Los Angeles taxpayers.

A verbatim description could be applied to major police departments around the country with appallingly alarming accuracy.

John McClane is by no means exempt from such practices, enragedly employing incendiary equipment for which he demonstrably has no training. While McClane’s unpracticed usage of a comical amount of C-4 results in an impossibly lucky beneficial outcome, it could have easily ended the lives of thirty hostages — including his wife — in a number of ways; John’s blatant disregard for civilian life in favor of retaliation spurred by fury at seeing fellow officers attacked is a spectacle that has been infamously unfolding across the United States for the past six months.

The deprioritization of lives is nothing new for the institution of policing; in fact, it is fundamentally woven into law enforcement history. Policing in America was established to return those who had escaped slavery to its bondage, and the system never underwent vast structural changes following its white supremacist inception, the ramifications of which can be seen in practices today.

As slaves were viewed as property at the time of its founding, policing has, throughout its existence, dealt first and foremost with the protection of property, often to the exclusion of all humanity. An ideology particularly integral to police conduct could hardly be absent from a movie in which law enforcement is so prominently featured; accordingly, the only thing about which Deputy Chief of LAPD Dwayne T. Robinson cares more than property damage is his career.

Dwayne’s primary concerns lie not with a safe resolution to the strikingly dire situation, but with the event that effects the most positive outcome for his future professional aspirations, not unlike Dick’s eponymous character in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Police General Felix Buckman’s immediate reaction to the death of his wife, aside from admittedly unexpected grief, is a realization that the affair necessitates an attribution of blame if his indulgent self-furtherance is to continue. His sister has died, a man’s life has all but been destroyed, and his sociopathic attention is exclusively fixated on how he might spin this debacle into a professional advantage; Dwayne’s response to an attempted solution is different only in its framing.

While the plan of the FBI — whose representatives Dwayne is demonstrably desperate to impress — is hopelessly misguided, it’s clear that Dwayne is in no position to know as much; his first thoughts are nevertheless turned toward the safe citizens who will be mildly inconvenienced on Christmas Eve.

The FBI for which Robinson bears such a vocational affinity is at no point represented as deserving of any level of admiration, let alone to the degree with which Robinson lavishes it. Their camp hypermasculinity is laughably toxic, and their seemingly compensatory aggressiveness accomplishes little more than intimidating a few civic engineers. In spite of their propensity for abject failure, the federal agents — as well as the local law enforcement that precedes them, albeit to a less braggadocious extent — are unreasonably self-assured in their haplessness. Even granted the morbid understanding that hostage safety is not of chief import, Die Hard’s law enforcement personnel display an inexcusable inability to perform various aspects of their jobs that the situation with which they are faced requires of them. Replacing a system that addresses an imposing breadth of issues poorly with experts and programs meticulously tailored to each encompassing field is not only intuitively sensical; it is an approach that proves more effective and efficient.