One late night while trolling my antenna-limited TV channels, I came across a movie called Dark Blue, with Kurt Russell and (pre-meat merchant) Ving Rhames. The movie was in line with my previously declared obsession with police stories, which started with Steven Bochco’s Pittsburgh-influenced drama, Hill Street Blues. When visiting with my brother in Pittsburgh, I take advantage of his superior antenna, and watch Rookie Blue, and NYPD Blue. I used to regularly watch “mustache Tom” on his show, Blue Bloods, mainly because I used to work with Bridgette Moynahan when she was a model in New York City, and I like seeing that “New Kid On The Block,” Donnie Wahlberg, glower and rage. I decided to wean myself off the show because of my discomfort with some of the “blue family, right or wrong” attitudes. I am an eager consumer of Law and Order and all of its children: “”SVU,” and “Criminal Intent,” and was a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan. But finding Dark Blue made me wonder how the color (not purple, but) blue came to be identified with police departments in this country. As my “journo” sister once told me, “Google is your friend,” so I did a shallow dive into the origin of the thick blue line.
According to one Web site, in 1829, the London police department was the “first modern law enforcement (agency)” and chose a dark blue color for its uniforms to distinguish the police from the British military, who wore (at the time) red and white. The blue color was adopted by the first law enforcement agency in the United States, the 1845 New York City police department, which replaced its hapless system of constables. Another Web site avers that police uniforms of that early time were not copying British uniforms but were utilizing leftover Union army clothing. However the color came to signify “police,” it would be difficult to dispute that it does. The Collins English dictionary defines the term “the boys in blue” as a phrase that indicates that “the boys” are police. The Boys In Blue is also a 1982 British comedy about some bumbling policemen who, when their little station is threatened with closure due to a lack of crime, decide to manufacture some; while doing so, they discover a massive art theft.
An episode of Sesame Street that I was watching with my 16-month-old granddaughter explored “the blues” as an emotion, with the counteracting activity being to play “the blues” on the harmonica. Of course, this sometimes led to someone who was not “blue” to become so once she heard the blues being played. “Blue” can be a complicated color. If blue skies are a positive, how did one feeling blue become a negative? Granted, lightly “melanated” people turn blue when too long deprived of air, especially when having their throats wrung (I have no personal, intimate knowledge of that, though). On the positive side again, the children’s show Blues Clues has a human host inviting kids to work with his animated puppy, Blue, to find clues to something they are trying to figure out. And again, on the positive side, there is the artist Thomas Gainsborough, whose masterpiece, “The Blue Boy,” who was most definitely not one of “the boys in blue.”
In this country, the blue line (which used to be a printing proof) is connected to the police departments whose members stand as guardians against the crush of crime and the breakdown of order. I’m certain that the color was chosen for benign reasons, long time before anyone had claimed the color for a mood.
cjon3acd@att.net