what can I do to make my story more marketable?

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I don't mean to sound insensitive to real live events, when I ask this, but I am just asking from a writing standpoint. I was told that my screenplay, would not be marketable in the current climate, by people I know, and to therefore, stop working on it and just do something else. The script has police characters stepping outside the law to catch the villains, and because of how the world is now, no one is going to accept a story where the police step outside the law for to achieve a goal.

What do you think? Is the story now not do-able, because of current real life events? A couple of people suggest changing the police to another organization like interpol, but is that possible with this type of premise?

Nah, I wouldn't bother changing the story just to cope with current events. People will eventually get around to accepting that the police are the only thing protecting us from maniacs with guns and knives.

If not, the police will step back, and the maniacs with guns and knives will surge, and the media will then talk bad about the maniacs, and people will start loving on the police again.

The hating on the police is mainly because the main interaction people have with police is traffic tickets and minor incidents which never get solved due to lack of evidence.

Most people don't know about the serious violent felons that get picked up and taken off the street, the loaded guns confiscated, felonies prosecuted, gangs busted up. The media does not tend to report on that, instead isolated incidents, one out of a hundred million, get magnified and repeated 1000x in order to generate a completely false impression of the one force that keeps law and order in our society. All to further the agenda of certain selfish powerful figures in society that want to portray a certain image in order to influence the electorate.

Some suggestions that my Creative Writing 102 professor gave me:

• Make the main protagonist LGBT or Q, and throw in some gratuitous descriptions of sexual activity -- not too detailed, though; you are not writing a comparative anatomy textbook.

• Rewrite a book by another writer that was written in a different time period, and under completely different social conditions.

• Write a story about a real event that affected you (or someone you love) very deeply, sticking closely to every exact detail, and changing only the names of the people involved.

• Write in order to forward a cause or enlarge other people’s understanding of a contemporary social issue, as if you were trying to make the world a better, fairer place.

I can't see it going down too well in the current climate. Have you been on Twitter lately?

There were people suggesting ways to change that comedy show Brooklyn Nine Nine.

No I try to stay away from twitter actually for other reasons, but since the screenplay is pretty much finished, my goal was to make it into a feature film. I was going to start on that before covid hit but would like to start on it afterward. But I do not want audiences, or even people working on the movie to associate it with real life events. I want everyone to know that it's only a movie, and meant for entertainment... not to be compared to real life. But is there anything I can do to appeal to that mentality, as opposed to people not being able to separate fiction from real life?

What was Kiefer Sutherland's character in 24? He wasn't police, was he? I can't remember. It's been a long time.

Oh he was an agent of the counter terrorist unit in LA. But does changing the organization make a difference? Well in my story the crimes are a series of kidnappings and sexual assaults, so maybe another organization would handle that?

The problem of why this isn't marketable seems to me that a large part of society has figured out that actually, most thieves can be caught well within the confines of the law, and that cops breaking the law are by and large problematic.
Today's mood doesn't ask for a vop to break the rules for the greater good, it ssks fir the cops to stick to the f*****g rules for the greater good. It's a worn out trope that chimes only with the MAGA-crowd.

Then there's some huge injustices which are actually not even illegal - tax evasion, or having your multinational corporation get bailed out for the umpteenth time while st the same time handing out dividends to the shareholders. A film about a judge throwing a banker in jail - now that would be new!

24 was made in a different time: one in which a hero could commit torture and it was considered good tv, because it was to "fight terrorists". It was Iraq war propaganda.
Today, the show would be considered racist and its narrative innovations ignored by critics.

It's a bad time for cops ignoring their public accountability. Sorry, but you might have to wait for a different period in history.

Oh okay, well I want to sell it so that the reason why the cop breaks the rules is because the justice system is inept, and the villains keep using the system's technicalities to their advantage. So if the justice system is inept at catching the villains, can the reader accept the cops breaking the rules to get around the system's problems?

For example, about halfway into the story, the police trying doing things the honest way and it doesn't work and the villains get away with the crimes. So would that help the reader think that they have to break the rules, since the honest way didn't work?

Another thing I thought of, what if I just made it the FBI instead? Would that be better than making it to police in readers' eyes?

FBI is probably better thsn police, at the moment.
But people are not in the mood for accepting a corrupt judicial system - "it's time to finally address the brokrn system" seems to be the mood right now.

It's still the fact that your cops/agents break the rules because the rules don't fit their moral standards. The whole apparatus may well be portrayed as broken - but imagine a serious ehite supremacist. KKK. He'd see a system that gives black people any rights at all as a broken system, and encouraged by such stories to break the rules and follow his moral compass.

But as a liberal democracy, we are not controlling individual moral compasses. We do however have a class of academics, a supreme court and public oversight to influence the actual rules we want the law enforcement to adhere to.
The only way for a democracy to function is cops sticking the democratically agreed upon rules and processes.

Thieves getting away is injustice, but law enforcement breaking the rule is a threat for the legitimacy of the state itself.
Right now, people are very much questioning that legitimacy.

Oh okay, well I've always liked crime stories, where characters are forced to let the ends justify the means for example, so if I write it so that the means are not very high, then it feels like the protagonists didn't have to get their hands dirty at all to get the villains. It feels like they don't have to make as much of an effort because there is less moral conflict, if the you don't have to get your hands dirty to achieve the goal.

So if I write it that way, then it just feels like the effort is much less, and thus less thrilling, if that makes sense? So how does one write a story, where the protagonist doesn't have to get his hands dirty, when trying to achieve the goal and still have it be dramatic?

I still think that using rape as a plot point was not reading the room in the first place, but shlaifu has explained very well why a police vigilante story isn't going to go down well at the moment?

Don't rely on tropes. Think outside the box.

Are you reading and watching current film breakdowns and critique? What can you tap into that audiences are craving?

You don't want to end up with Samurai Cop... Or do you?

No, I don't want to send up with samurai cop. As for tapping into current films, it's hard to say because every movie is very different, and I don't think there is anything specific right now that people are looking for, is there? Isn't it more of a case, of some like this, some like that, etc?

How is the cop wanting revenge a trope exactly though? What makes it a trope?

Crime stories involving mysterious or unexplained disappearances where several suspects could be involved, mistaken or swopped identities, cold cases suddenly getting new evidence, environmental crimes causing public health concerns etc make for good reading. People always love reading about disappearances and speculating what may have happened.

Oh okay thanks. Well in my story there is still a mystery to figure out. Before the main character can get any revenge, he has to figure out who all the perpetrators are and piece things together. But does that help make it better?

Yes I think so. Best of luck with your project! I'm sure you can find a way to get it more marketable. I'm busy with my life story but the publisher whom I contacted on Twitter/FB, first said second half of March said I'd have to wait as the lockdown and other nonsense had started here, so I'm still waiting for her to give me the go ahead. Bookshops have reopened together with most businesses so hopefully she'll be ready soon.