The Hawkins police: the station, its three men, and everything they never saw

The Hawkins police station and its four faces

The station fits in a corridor. An office for the chief, a glass door, a switchboard at the entrance, a board where the missing-person notices are pinned. Hawkins is a small town in Indiana, and its police force is that size: three officers and one dispatcher. Everything else comes from outside, and rarely to help.

Jim Hopper is the chief's name. Watch the word: he is not a sheriff. A sheriff runs a county department and stands before voters; Hopper runs the municipal police, a town administration, with a town's means. The nuance looks thin. It explains all the rest: faced with the federal state, this station weighs nothing.

Around him, two deputies. Calvin Powell, played by Rob Morgan, is the more solid of the two: he asks the right questions, he takes notes, he holds the line. Phil Callahan, played by John Reynolds, is the comic counterpoint: talkative, a bit clumsy, always one step behind Powell. On the story's first morning, they are playing cards when their chief arrives late.

At the front desk, Florence, whom everyone calls Flo, played by Susan Shalhoub Larkin. She runs the switchboard, sorts the messages, and talks to her chief as to a badly raised son. She is the one who takes Joyce Byers's calls and who sends the cars. She accompanies the first three seasons, then leaves the story without explanation.

A fourth name arrives in March 1986: Officer Glenn Daniels, played by Jeff Sprauve. He holds a roadblock, checks identities, takes down names. It is the role the story reserves for its officers: to be there just before everything tips, and to understand nothing.

1983: the Will Byers case, from the minimized report to the morgue dummy

On November 6, 1983, Will Byers, twelve, disappears on the Mirkwood road while riding home by bike from a role-playing game. The next morning, his mother comes to the station. Hopper listens to her badly, answers her with statistics, explains that children end up coming home. This police force's first reflex: minimize.

Then he finds the bike, lying in the leaves at the side of the road, intact. A twelve-year-old boy does not abandon his bike. The chief launches a proper search: volunteers, flashlights, the Mirkwood woods combed. It does not bring the child back. It brings back a piece of hospital gown, picked up near the national laboratory's fence.

A few days later, a child's body is pulled from the quarry. The town mourns, the television announces it, the file closes. Hopper, for his part, picks up three details. The usual medical examiner was sent home, replaced by doctors come from the state. The autopsy lasted a few hours. And the state officer who says he found the body, David O'Bannon, had no business there: the quarry is private property.

The next night, the chief forces the morgue door, neutralizes the officer on duty, and opens the body bag with a knife. Under the dummy's skin, cotton. In two minutes, the case stops being a disappearance and becomes a cover-up. And a small-town station has no tool against a state cover-up.

1. November 6, 1983 The bike on the Mirkwood road

   Will Byers disappears while riding his bike home. The machine stays lying in the leaves, without the slightest trace of an accident.

2. November 7, 1983 The report the chief minimizes

   Joyce Byers comes to the station. Hopper answers her with statistics and fills out the form without conviction.

3. November 7, 1983 The search in the woods

   Volunteers and flashlights comb Mirkwood. The chief comes back from it with a piece of hospital gown picked up near the laboratory.

4. November 1983 The body pulled from the quarry

   A child has come out of the water in front of the town. The television announces Will's death, and the investigation closes that same evening.

5. November 1983 The two flaws in the report

   The usual medical examiner was set aside in favor of state teams. And the quarry, private land, had no reason to be patrolled.

6. November 1983 The morgue broken into at night

   Hopper goes in alone, pushes the guard aside, and opens the bag. Under the skin, stuffing. The body is a dummy.

When the police becomes the target

Hopper does not stop at the dummy. He enters the national laboratory, goes down to the bottom of the complex, and sees what is kept there. He is spotted, overpowered, put to sleep, then brought home without a scratch and without a piece of evidence. The message is clear: they do not arrest him, they put him away.

When he wakes, he takes his trailer apart. Furniture turned over, drawers emptied, ceiling light torn out: he is looking for a microphone, and he finds one, lodged in the lamp. The police chief is listened to at home by an administration he is supposed to be able to question. At Joyce Byers's, he imposes silence until he has searched the rooms.

It is not an isolated case. In the Wheelers' living room, a team plants microphones while the lady of the house serves them coffee. And when Benny Hammond, the restaurant owner who had taken in a child on the run, is shot by a lab agent, the scene is dressed up as a suicide. The station receives a suicide report.

The first season closes this logic with a bargain. To enter the other world and bring Will back, Hopper agrees to forget what he saw, and gives up the hiding place of Eleven. A police chief negotiates with the people he should be pursuing, and pays with a child. The story does not excuse him: it makes it the character's founding fault.

1984 and 1985: the rotting fields, a smothered file, a mayor bought off

On October 30, 1984, a farmer, Merrill Wright, comes to the station: his pumpkins have blackened all at once, across whole fields. Hopper first treats the case as a neighborhood dispute, with a rival suspected of sabotage, then goes to the site and digs the ground. He falls into an organic tunnel that leads back toward the laboratory. A farm complaint has just led the police under the town.

The same station nevertheless carries an empty file. Barbara Holland disappeared on November 7, 1983, at the edge of a pool, during a high school party. When Nancy Wheeler comes to report her, Powell and Callahan suggest a runaway out of jealousy and invite her to go home. The police will never go any further. A year later, it is her parents, a private investigator, two teenagers, and a tape recorded in secret who will pull an explanation out of it.

The summer of 1985 changes scale. The town has a mayor, Larry Kline, who sold land to raise a brand-new mall, the Starcourt, and took the money of foreign buyers without asking a question. Hopper questions him in his office, hits him, crushes his fingers in a drawer, and threatens to reveal his mistress. Kline confesses.

It is the character's most discussed scene: a police chief who tortures an elected official, filmed like a settling of scores. Kline gets his revenge by handing Hopper and Joyce Byers over to the people tracking them. The mayor will end up arrested for corruption. The chief disappears on July 4, 1985 in the explosion that destroys the mall. The town buries him.

1986: Powell as station chief, three deaths, and a town that names its culprit

With Hopper held to be dead, Calvin Powell is promoted police chief. Callahan stays his second, as he always has been. It is the only promotion the story grants this station, and it falls at the worst possible moment.

On March 21, 1986, Chrissy Cunningham dies in Eddie Munson's trailer, at Forest Hills park. The next morning, Powell and Callahan are the first on the scene. They record a body with broken limbs and eyes pushed in, in a trailer whose only witness has fled. No known procedure describes that.

The police then does what it knows how to do: it sets up roadblocks. It is at one of them that Officer Glenn Daniels recognizes Fred Benson and reminds him of the car accident the high schooler fled. His visions start in front of the officer; Fred dies that same evening at the side of the road. Then it is Patrick McKinney, lifted above Lovers' Lake in front of about ten witnesses.

Three deaths in a few days, a chief named not long before, two men in uniform, and a town that does not wait. Jason Carver, captain of the basketball team, names Eddie Munson and his role-playing club, raises a militia, and turns the high school upside down. The police does not disarm it: it is looking for the same suspect. A small town has just stopped waiting for its officers.

What the police in Stranger Things says about a small town

The station has never identified a single creature. The Demogorgon of 1983, the Mind Flayer of 1984, and Vecna in 1986 are not the same thing: they are three distinct entities, which must not be confused, and the station has named none of them. It produced credible reports on false facts.

It is the story's most constant pattern. The truth never arrives through the badge. It arrives through a mother who refuses a coffin, through two teenagers who develop a photo, through children with a walkie-talkie. The officers arrive afterward, and most often to tidy up.

The story does not make them villains for all that. Powell and Callahan are two ordinary civil servants of an ordinary town, outmatched by a file that belongs to another floor of the state. It is their normality that is unsettling: a whole administration can lie without a single officer having needed to lie.

The final season pushes the idea all the way. In November 1987, the town lives under military quarantine, commanded by an army scientist. The checkpoints are no longer held by municipal patrol cars. It is the only season in which neither Powell nor Callahan appears: the institution was not reformed, it was replaced.

The question viewers ask most often remains: which officer dies in the show? No Hawkins officer is killed on screen. The only police death the town believed is that of its chief, on July 4, 1985. It was false.

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