Do firefighters and cops really hate each other?
Judging by TV, they do. Every cop show deals with bitter rivalry with the fire department at some point.
On Blue Bloods Season 10 Episode 8, it was Frank’s turn. He handled it with class and honor, but sheesh.
Frank is a busy man who surely had better things to do than deal with that ridiculous rivalry.
From the incident report he discussed with Garrett and Gormley, neither the cops nor the firefighters acted like adults.
The cops rushed in a while handling what seemed to be a spurious noise complaint, and the firefighters fought back.
Frank: If you stop anyone on the street and ask them who the NYPD and FDNY commissioners are, what would they say?
Abigail: Frank Reagan and… I don’t know.
Frank: Exactly. If I were the Commissioner of I Don’t Know, I’d have a chip on my shoulder too.
A lesser man would have chalked it all up to excessive testosterone and done nothing.
But not Frank. Frank went out of his way to understand FDNY’s point of view before demanding his officer apologize for his part in things.
That’s true leadership, and it was impressive that Frank was able to secure a truce between the NYPD and FDNY, given the long-standing rivalry.
Hopefully, the peace between the two departments will last so that Frank doesn’t have to waste his time with that nonsense anymore. There are more important things for him to focus on.
For example, Jamie’s conflict with Eddie after calling IAB in on her partner’s suspicious behavior.
Eddie: Phelps is a murderer, and Troy has dedicated his life to enforcing the law. It’s not the same.
Jamie: You’re right. Troy’s worse.
Eddie: How do you figure?
Jamie: Because he took an oath. He swore to uphold the law.
Critics of the police often complain about the “thin blue line.” They feel that good cops put loyalty to bad cops above doing what’s right, leading to more corruption.
Jamie did the opposite, putting integrity over loyalty, and showing once again that he has the same inner moral compass as his father.
He was right: if Troy planted evidence to give himself an excuse to search the vehicle, that was more important than the perp’s guilt.
On a practical level, the perp was going to walk anyway. His defense attorney would use the same evidence Jamie did to argue that the vial of drugs got planted and that there was no basis to search the car.
And as the cop in charge, Jamie’s reputation would have gotten tainted if that happened.
People would be asking why Jamie didn’t investigate it and whether he looked the other way because he’s married to one of the officers involved.
So even if Jamie believed in putting loyalty to officers over behaving ethically, he still had to call IAB to cover his own butt.
Jamie: 99 times out of a hundred, I go by the book. I make that call to IAB.
Eddie: I know.
Jamie: The one time I didn’t was when it came to you.
It was disappointing that Eddie didn’t understand the problem with Troy’s behavior.
Her concerns about how the rest of the cops would treat her after Troy was found out were valid, especially because she is a female cop in a mostly male division.
That may make it twice as hard for her to be accepted by her fellow cops, and the last thing she needs is to be ostracized.
But surely Jamie could use his leadership position to discourage retaliating against cops who speak up against corruption if it came down to that.
His apology to Eddie was sweet, and I loved that he puts her first. Nevertheless, he did the right thing and shouldn’t have had to apologize for it.
Also, there was no mention of what happened to the perp. Was the arrest considered valid or not?
Surely Troy retiring all of a sudden right after making a major collar will make people wonder if he did it to avoid punishment, especially if the perp claims that vial wasn’t his.
If so, could Jamie’s decision come back to bite him later?
Meanwhile, Danny seemed to have an awful lot of time on his hands to constantly go running over to rescue Karen Davis from her volatile husband.
Normally, he’s a homicide detective — so what was he doing at the scene of a domestic disturbance where there was nothing to investigate?
And where was Baez?
Danny desperately needed another perspective on the whole conflict with Henry, and she was nowhere to be found.
Danny was right that Henry was acting like a social worker. It’s a side of Henry we haven’t seen much of, and the social worker in me liked it, though it was odd.
Henry kept defending the guy and getting him out of trouble.
He also seemed to have a lot of time on his hands, since he was standing right there every time Danny turned around.
Danny: You’re acting all chummy. You’re acting more like a social worker than a cop.
Henry: I wasn’t there as a cop. I was there to protect the best interest of the family.
The thing is, though, that the guy couldn’t get an infinite number of second chances. He promised Danny he wouldn’t angrily confront Karen again, then did just that.
Danny had promised to arrest him if it happened again, so he had to follow through. Plus, the guy’s behavior was disturbing the peace and frightening Karen.
The argument Danny and Henry had over whether the ex-husband had violated the protective order by answering a text was silly, though.
First of all, that text likely came from the kid, who was attached to his dad, not from anyone trying to cause trouble. Why nobody thought of that is beyond me.
And the question of whether there was any text at all could be resolved by checking the ex-husband’s phone. No need to argue about whether he made it up.
Anyway, once Danny found father and son enjoying a hockey game together, he decided Henry was right and didn’t arrest the ex-husband — but the fact remained that the man had taken the kid without permission and in violation of the order of protection.
Something had to be done to make sure the kid went back to his mom and that things like that stopped happening, and neither Henry’s look-the-other-way solution nor Danny’s overeager-to-arrest one was going to accomplish that.
Elsewhere, Erin running for DA might be interesting, especially since Mayor-Elect Chase and whatever staff member that was that Erin kept dealing with both seemed weird.
Chase was obsessed with getting Erin to run for DA, and his staffer was full of weird, cryptic advice.
Plus, Erin’s fear of her boss finding out seemed to evaporate once Frank pointed out that the family would be under scrutiny
But knowing Blue Bloods, that issue’ll come back in a big way in a later episode.
What did you think, Blue Bloods fanatics?
Did Jamie do the right thing? What about Danny?
And did you enjoy Frank getting in the middle of the NYPD/FDNY spat, or did you think he should have better things to do?
Share your thoughts in the comments, and don’t forget you can watch Blue Bloods online if you missed anything.
Blue Bloods airs on CBS on Fridays at 10 PM EST/PST.
Jack Ori is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.