Why We Are Not Publishing Cop Stories

Roger Nokes - Editor-in-Chief, Rock and a Hard Place

Rock and a Hard Place Magazine bills itself as a chronicle of bad decisions and desperate people.

While this magazine tries to transcend the genre of literary noir, we do so purposefully. The commission of a crime, for example, does not have to occur in a story in order for us to include it. Though we love endings where everyone loses, we’ll allow an occasional win here and there.

However, the roots of this magazine are in literary noir, so we have chosen to retain certain aspects of this broad, easily misunderstood, but ultimately inspiring, compassionate, and meaningful genre.

The principal aspect we choose to retain deals with power. Literary noir examines people with little power. With concentrations of wealth and power being so extreme today, especially in the United States where this magazine is based, examining the decisions people make when they have so few options available was one of the principal motivators behind creating this magazine.

It is important to note here how varied definitions are for literary noir. That is fine. I recognize that not everyone views it as I do. We have taken what we have seen as inspiring from this genre and used it as a foundation. I understand and respect that others may define noir as being about morally ambiguous characters regardless of how much power they have. Again, that is okay, but that is not what this publication is about.

Continuing on. When reviewing submissions we realize that not all protagonists sit in the same positions of power and privilege. Some have relatively more power than others. For example, a white male with a criminal record recently released from prison — a frequent character in these pages — may still have more power and privilege in society than so many others.

As an editorial board, we have made the decision to include stories of people who are in desperate situations — desperate situations either the result of their own terrible decisions or through no fault of their own. This magazine features many stories of people in abusive relationships, from broken families, struggling with addiction, or coping with mental illness. Some of these characters have done nothing wrong and some of them have committed awful crimes. What connects them is not their innocence but their general relationship with the rest of society. They are outside of it and have little power.

Because we are concerned with power and how people without it survive, we choose not to publish stories about characters that have an abundance of power and privilege. We have therefore chosen not to publish stories that feature police officers as main characters. We recognize that police officers are not the most privileged members of society — they are not billionaires. However, even though they are able to make bad decisions and face difficulties in their lives, they are very much in a privileged position. They maintain the status quo and in reality and in popular culture they are rewarded for doing so on a whole.

To include stories with cop protagonists would be to create a false equivalency saying that their desperate situations are in the same realm as others. We are a fiction magazine, yes, but we do still seek to publish truth and to publish pieces that do not acknowledge the extreme privilege and power of police officers stretches the truth too much for us.

The decision to not publish stories with cops as protagonists comes not only from our dedication to our view of literary noir (not film noir), but also from our concern over the very real impact of popular culture on society. It is not possible for me to watch current scenes of police violence across the country and to see justifications for such violence everywhere, including from people I know and from fellow crime writers, without recognizing the role crime fiction has played in creating an image of police officers as intrepid protectors of the greater good by any means necessary.

In an excellent piece in the New York Times titled “How White Crime Writers Justified Police Brutality,” the author John Fram writes, “Most Americans have never been stopped and frisked, or had their door kicked in by an officer serving a warrant, or been put in a chokehold. Their exposure to the police comes from books and TV shows, and these stories condition them to think police violence is normal. Think about ‘Dirty Harry,’ ‘Lethal Weapon,’ ‘Blue Bloods’ — police officers are always beating people up to get information out of them. That can translate into people thinking excessive force is justified, perhaps especially if a suspect is black.”

This image is at odds with history and with some of the origins police departments have as tools to stifle worker uprisings and to control slaves. It is at odds with what we witness every day. It is too much at odds with truth and reality for us to publish even as fiction.

Some will say that, by focusing on those in society without power, and not considering stories from those who are often the first to respond in many incidents described in the stories we do accept, that we are artificially limiting the reach and possibilities in the stories we publish. We do not believe this to be the case, and would instead counter that, by ensuring our voice is aligned with those outside of power, we'll be able to attract voices that may not feel comfortable contributing to other magazines that do not offer or publicly discuss such positions, and because of that, the stories offered in Rock and a Hard Place Magazine will actually offer more depth, more diversity, and more unexpected, powerful, and shocking stories from new writers, or writers our audience may not otherwise have heard of.

All of this is not to say that we have not received pieces featuring cop protagonists that are well written. It is not to say that we would not read them elsewhere. One of our editors even writes cop stories themselves. But, it is to say that we choose not to publish them here.

This is also not to say that every police officer has ill intentions or is a bad person. But when it comes to determining the impact of an institution on people, intentions are not all that matter.