How should the show handle Yaz being a cop?

(Well, consider this so late to the party, they bulldozed the building, set up offices and then reconverted the offices into gentrified apartments that charge 100k per square inch!)

I had thought of returning to this thread every now and then over the years, as I think elka brought up something interesting here, but also because I think my OP was underexplained and vague. Now with the centenary approaching and it looking there's not much more to be done with Yaz, I figured why not: since 2020 and George Floyd, anyone paying attention has seen no shortage of major scandals with American and British police forces (I'll focus more on the latter since that's what's more relevant) relating to systemic racism and sexism, with the last year here in the UK arguably being the ugliest: Sarah Everard's murder, the leaking of emails and whatsup chats of UK police forces displaying a culture and work environment of almost cartoonish bigotry and abuse, the repeated failures of investigations (or lack thereof) into the Conservative government's corruption during the pandemic, and most recently, a horrifying story of a 15 yr old black girl, back in 2020, who was strip searched in her school by cops, with no other adults present, finally being disclosed to the public. The Met, and by extension a lot of the UK's police force, has its image in ruins and it seems unlikely the tide'll turn anytime soon.

While I had taken elka's point that there are obviously POC cops who do love the job and want to help, I think that's kind of missing the wood for the trees (no offense to your friends, of course) in this specific discussion: for many, the police are not a symbol of comfort and security, but rather cruelty, abuse and mistreatment, and while that may not impact us specifically, there is no shortage of people for whom, Yaz is in a contradictory position: an empowering Muslim woman on a kid's adventure show that (whatever can be said about how Chibnall actually used her in his three series) isn't yet another jihadi or abuse victim like they are so often portrayed, and also a member of a major organization whose history with people like her is increasingly being displayed as shaky, to say nothing of more of the history coming to light. Because Chibnall's era started out endeavouring to be far more socially conscious and topical, it was always going to leave itself open to these kinds of criticisms, that was always the risk if something changed is social attitudes, and by opting to pull away from that in favour of cosmic adventures like Flux, now is stuck with a part of Yaz's identity that, regardless of individual opinion, has particular connotations for the groups she ostensibly represents and speaks to. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic in saying that those kids who watch the show now and grow up one day to be our next writers, creators, essayists and historians of the franchise may have a complicated relationship to Yaz because of the confluence of series and cultural events. That in turn could well inspire them to address that dissonance in their own articles and, more importantly, stories, since (through what was a really bad run of luck for him dogging his whole era, with unfortunate timings/unforseen events impacting the show) Chibnall didn't or couldn't by the time he left.

Mandip herself will be fine, I think, legacy-wise: she will still be respected for breaking the barrier in the first place. Obviously the actress is not the fictional character. Nonetheless, what started out as clearly a well-intended gesture, something to inspire and aspire children from a particular background, well, changes meaning because that's how society interacts with art. We bring our our POVs and contexts to it.