Showtime’s Chicago-based drama The Chi veered into the anti-cop narrative currently being pushed by the political left when a teenaged character disappears and her family and friends attack the police for ignoring the case.
Throughout the July 5 episode “Buss Down,” characters disparage the police, claim the police are racist, and even say that the “community” does not need police because they can fend for themselves. It is no surprise that the series has turned entirely against the police since the series creator, Lena Waithe, recently told UPI that she is a supporter of the Defund The Police movement.
“Even before all of this happened, when I pitched Season 3 to the network and studio, I said, ‘I don’t want any cops this season. Why do police have to be in the black community narrative at all?'” Waithe said in the June 23 interview.
“My amazing showrunner, Justin Hillian, basically said, ‘Well, you know how to make cops go away? Make a black girl disappear.’ So that’s what we did,” she added. “We focus on how the community comes together, leans on each other, and doesn’t necessarily need police to be in their community,” Waithe added.
The July 5 episode makes that all pretty clear. For instance, during one scene, the characters are shown discussing the case of Kiesha Williams (Birgundi Baker), a girl who is said to have disappeared the previous week. During a meeting of concerned mothers, Tracy Roxboro (Tai Davis) insists that black children are treated unfairly by society, and when black children go missing, no one cares.
“Why our kids always gotta be saints all the time? I see white kids do crazy shit every day. But if one of them goes missing, it ends up on CNN,” Roxboro says.
In another segment of the scene, Roxboro adds, “Y’all know the police ain’t gonna do shit” about Kiesha’s disappearance. And then continues insisting, “Y’all know we can’t depend on the police to protect our kids.”
As Newsbusters notes, some of the teenaged characters in the episode — one of whom is transgender — also gather to set out on a quest to find the missing girl. During their hunt through the neighborhoods, the teens end up in a den of underage prostitutes. There the show depicts young girls being sexually abused, some violently. Yet while the teens casually look for their friend as they also ignore the abuse going on around them.
Apparently, the teens’ “community spirit” doesn’t extend to protecting young girls being prostituted right inside their own neighborhood, as the teens tout their desire to find their friend during the episode. These teen “heroes” also don’t call the police and report the abuse.
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