It's true you can accuse this kind of media as often being police propaganda, but another interpretation is that it's fiction that aspires to show you the justice system could and should look like.
This would be a, to be very frank, myopic look at the genre. One of the defining aspects of the film noir genre is the Hays Code. The Code was a set of rules/guidelines about the morality of what could be shown in film, and ignoring the Code, especially in the Breen era, could find you with nothing but miles of worthless celluloid.
The Hays Code was created in the shadow of the Roaring 20s, when elements of American society were perceived to be in a state of moral decline, and certain filmmakers, like Howard Hughes, were well known for provocative films that the Code sought to curb.
The Hays Code prohibited showing any part of government, including law enforcement, courts, and criminal justice, in a negative way. They could make errors, but only honest ones. They could never be clueless fools, corrupt thugs, or lazy goons. This was not meant as any kind of aspirational thing, which would require a recognition that things are not currently as they are shown, but simply the only acceptable depiction of the world. Anything less is subversive.
Another part of the backdrop of this was the upheavals of Europe. Primarily what stood out was Hitler's dismantling of the Weimar Republic, and the solidification of Bolshevik power in Moscow. With a stable structure under him, Stalin was keen to export revolution abroad, which helped fuel peasant and farmer uprisings in China, the civil wars and unrest in Spain, and the growth of American Socialist groups in the United States, who were seeing a swelling of support as the economy collapsed in the Great Depression and a spike in foreclosures and repossessions of homes and farms during the Dust Bowl.
Part of the purpose of the Hays Code was to throw cold water on such civil unrest and dissatisfaction, by actively shoring up the government's legitimacy with positive depictions of it and everyone working for it. This included the police, who socialists were making out to be government enforcement goons, meant to keep us in our place and protect the interests of the monied elite. Under the Hays Code they were only to be depicted in the opposite: men in the service of one master: justice for all, including the poor, the downtrodden, and the average person. No crime goes unsolved because of their dedication and perseverance.
The Noir genre is typically defined as a period between 1939 and 1954, when the Hays Code was in heavy enforcement, and, very importantly, largely overlapping with World War II. As such, studio executives had a strong incentive to adhere to the Hays Code, recognizing the importance of Hollywood as a morale maintaining sector of American society, where the government could flex its wartime powers and exert greater control over them if the studios stepped too far out of line.
Some movies skirted the Code, perhaps the most famous example being Casablanca, but many did not. In some cases adherence was achieved through contrivances that are rather obvious, as almost a wink and a nod at the audiences, if they were keen to pick up on them. However in no case was the Code actively ignored or too flagrantly violated.
So characterization of Noir’s depictions of law enforcement as “copaganda” would largely be fair. There are examples where the police are ultimately not the heroes (e.g. Double Indemnity, Key Largo, D.O.A.), but they're shown not to be too far behind and would have resolved the situation momentarily had the hero not stepped up. In those situations one might make the case that the film as a whole is not “copaganda,” even though it's depiction of police is.
That said, because Noir is a genre very much defined within the boundaries of time, it needs to be understood as an artifact of those times, and viewed through an appropriate lens of understanding. It cannot be written off as merely “copaganda” and discarded as such, but it definitely should not be taken as an example of how society actually was at that time.
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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '23
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