Drug czar Bill Bennett says that he would have no moral problem imitating Saudi Arabia and beheading drug dealers but that such a solution would be too unpopular to implement in America.

In the 2012 remake of “21 Jump Street,” Schmidt and Jenko didn’t exactly cut dashing figures. During one climactic chase with the drug dealers they are chasing, Schmidt was wearing a Peter Pan outfit, and they were driving a student-driver car equipped with an extra set of brakes, rather than Bullitt’s Ford Mustang. But they overcame these stylistic deficits to take down the biker gang that bedeviled them starting in the movie’s earliest moments. By the final scene, Schmidt exultantly declared, “We’re, like, in the end of ‘Die Hard’ right now, but it’s our actual life!”

There’s a sobering reality behind that exuberance. Police work may be, as Joseph Wambaugh described it, “endless hours of boredom, punctuated by terror.” But both the entertainment industry and law enforcement have tried to turn it into something else, a profession where police officers are so tough that their partners muse about registering them as lethal weapons. And sometimes, it seems as though both Hollywood and heavily armed police departments would be lost if they won the drug war, or any war on crime.

In pop culture, it’s fun for individual cops to beat individual villains. But if police defeated crime on a national or international level, they would choke off the sequels and reboots that have become Hollywood staples. Without the rise of ecstasy to replace heroin in Miami, there’s no “Bad Boys II.” The enterprising chemists behind the designer drugs in the “Jump Street” movies guarantee that Schmidt and Jenko will get to go from high school to college and beyond. Last year, after four “Die Hard” sequels, Fox announced that it is developing a story about a young McClane so that he can keep fighting crime even after Bruce Willis ages out of the role.

In a similar way, the drug war and militarized policing acquired their own internal momentum. As military equipment and SWAT teams spread across the country, departments had to find some use for them rather than acknowledge that they were simply caught up in what Balko called a “masculinity-infused arms race.” And when they didn’t have villains with the grandeur of the “French Connection” smugglers or Hans Gruber, they crashed through doors in pursuit of small-time criminals instead.