May|June 2004 L.A. Lawlessness The lying, cheating, murdering elite of the new LAPD cop shows and movies. THERE WAS NOTHING ELITE ABOUT JOE FRIDAY. The no-nonsense Los Angeles police sergeant portrayed by Jack Webb on the TV show Dragnet was as ordinary as can be. If his name made him sound like an unidentified body in the county morgue, his demeanor confirmed the suspicion. Friday wasn't about to pretend that there was anything special about walking a beat, and in an episode that ran in 1967, he said as much: You're a cop, a flatfoot, a bull, a dick, John Law. You're the fuzz, the heat; you're poison, you're trouble, you're bad news. They call you everything, but never a policeman. . . . It's not much of a life, unless you don't mind missing a Dodger game because the hotshot phone rings. Unless you like working Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays at a job that doesn't pay overtime. . . . And you're going to rub elbows with the elite: pimps, addicts, thieves, bums, winos, girls who can't keep an address, and men who don't care. Liars, cheats, con menthe class of Skid Row. . . . Underfed kids, beaten kids, molested kids, . . . sick kids, dying kids, dead kids. The old people nobody wantsthe reliefers, the pensioners, the ones who walk the street cold, and those who tried to keep warm and died in a three-dollar room with an unventilated gas heater. . . . You'll draw duty in a lonely car with nobody to talk to but your radio. . . . You'll learn to live with doubt, anxiety, and frustration. . . . But there's also this: There are over 5,000 men in this city who know that being a policeman is an endless, glamorless, thankless job that's got to be done. I know it, too. And I'm damn glad to be one of them.It's hard to imagine a less romantic portrait of police work. As Friday tells it, the LAPD is made up of men who are remarkable only because they've chosen to do the unremarkable: to clean up the mundane messes made by a sprawling city. Friday's Los Angeles may not be glamorous, but in his vision, thanks to the underappreciated work of cops, things are under control. Dragnet, which opened with the somber announcement that "the story you are about to see is true," passed itself off as nonfiction. But while Webb (who produced as well as starred) enjoyed nearly unfettered access to LAPD files and personnel during Dragnet's production, what was broadcast to America was the LAPD's version of the truththe truth as the LAPD wanted the public to see it. The show was a love letter to the authoritiesthanks for being so stoic about those missed Dodger games, guys!and an attempt to portray L.A. as a city with routine problems and routine solutions. This may have been the image of Los Angeles that William Parker, who presided over the department during the years when Friday was walking a beat, wanted beamed over NBC's airwaves, but it was not the way he himself saw things. On the contrary, Parker was convinced that L.A. was perpetually on the brink of social collapse and could be saved only by a police force that responded vigilantlyand, when necessary, violentlyto the first signs of decay and lawlessness. It was Parker who coined the now-famous phrase "the thin blue line" to describe the membrane separating cops from the criminals they pursue. In his view, policing was nothing less than daily warfare between the forces of good and evil. The television series S.W.A.T., which ran during the mid-1970s, after Dragnet was off the air, was a much closer approximation of Parker's vision of the LAPD than Dragnet ever was. S.W.A.T. featured an elite task force, the Special Weapons and Tactics division, called on to deal with especially dangerous situations that beat cops and regular detectives weren't equipped to handle. Far more violent than any predecessor, it was the first cop show to suggest that Los Angeles was less a typical big city with typical big-city problems than a battlefield on which a war between order and anarchy was being waged. In the show's somewhat paranoid moral arithmetic, the exceptional perversity of L.A.'s criminals (the S.W.A.T. team was forever running up against Satanists, murderous pill-popping hippies, and the like) demanded an equally exceptional response. S.W.A.T. was the first cop show to casually excuse the use of excessive force, the breaking into of residences without a search warrant, and other constitutionally questionable methods of keeping the peace. S.W.A.T. had a short run. It was on the air for only a season and a half, perhaps because an America still reeling from nightly news footage of its soldiers desperately fighting the Vietcong wasn't quite ready to regard its cities as Manichaean battlefields and its peace officers as special forces. By the 1980s, the films in the Lethal Weapon series, one of Hollywood's biggest franchises, matter-of-factly showed L.A. cops crossing the line of propriety and justified any excesses as necessary responses to changing times. The antics of Lethal Weapon's Sgt. Martin Riggs, whose loose grip on his own sanity "freed" him to take the craziest of risks in catching criminals, were always played for laughs. With his permanent bed-head and pigsty trailer home, Riggs (played by Mel Gibson over the course of four films) may have been a savage, but he was a noble savage. In recent years, however, depictions of the LAPD have focused less on the uniformed cops who patrol the city answering calls from their dispatchersthe subjects of fondly remembered TV shows like Adam-12, The Rookies, and Police Storyand more on the elite cadres of officers, the ones whose expertise confers upon them the aura of exceptionalism that makes for better drama. But things have changed since the days of S.W.A.T., when the larger moral justifications for the occasional head-bashing or due-process-skirting were never in question. The most critically acclaimed and talked-about cop show currently on the air is The Shield, which chronicles the trajectory of a murderous rogue cop, the leader of a special task force within one of the LAPD's grittier precincts. (The series, which just began its third season on the FX cable network, earned its star Michael Chiklis a best-actor Emmy in 2002.) And in the last three years, three different major motion pictures have focused on special units within the LAPD: Training Day (2001), starring Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke; Dark Blue (2003), starring Kurt Russell; and the feature-film remake of S.W.A.T. (2003), with Samuel L. Jackson and Colin Farrell. In each of these movies the notion of the elite Los Angeles policeman set apart from his peers is turned on its head. All three films feature officers whose cultural isolation from the rank and file inevitably gives rise to delusions of grandeur; from there it's only a few short steps to self-righteous tyranny. In the past, movie cops like Riggs who refused to "play by the rules" did so as a kind of protest against the strictures of police bureaucracy, when it stood in the way of fighting crime and serving justice. But their violations were always in the service of the greater good, as even their crusty precinct captains were grudgingly willing to concede just before the closing credits. No more. Riggs's Lethal Weapon antics seem positively benign compared to the cold-blooded transgressions of Vic Mackey, the character around whose malice The Shield revolves. Mackey is the leader of the Strike Team, an elite unit called on to keep the peace by any means necessary on the gang-filled streets of a central Los Angeles neighborhood. In the show's first few episodes, he gives a prostitute with whom he's friendly a few hits of crack to smoke in the Strike Team's private office (he tells her to open a window first); locks two feuding rap moguls in a storage bin overnight, leading to the death of one of them; and kidnaps a star of the New Jersey Nets in an attempt to prevent him from making it to the Staples Center for a basketball game while a partner places a bet on the Lakers. The event that defines Mackey occurs at the end of the premiere episode. He believes (correctly, as it turns out) that a fellow officer has been ratting him out to the precinct's captain. When a cornered drug dealer aims his pistol at the officers during a bust, they return fire, killing him instantly. Mackey gingerly removes the gun from the dead dealer's hands, aims it at the officer who's been snitching, and pulls the trigger. THE DURABILITY OF THE ARGUMENT that L.A. requires a special force-within-a-force to keep its redoubtable criminal class in check is William Parker's legacy. "It's a philosophy of policing that goes back to Parker," said David A. Sklansky, a law professor at UCLA. "He thought that policemen were this elite group that was holding society back from chaos." Of course Hollywood, being where it is, has always been especially curious about the culture of the LAPD, which is one reason so many cop shows and movies have been set in Los Angeles. But as times and tastes changed, it needed a catalyst to move beyond the shopworn stereotypes of LAPD cops as either by-the-book straight arrows or rakish, rule-breaking mavericks. (As Miles Corwin, the author of Homicide Special: A Year With the LAPD's Elite Detective Unit, has pointed out, if Hollywood had simply peered over the walls around its studios and listened to the city's communities, its epiphany would likely have arrived much sooner: "Everybody in South Central and East L.A. knew that the LAPD had a reputation for brutality," he said. "They just didn't know about it on the West Side.") That catalyst came in the form of the most famous movie ever made about Los Angeles cops. When the 68-second videotape of officers beating motorist Rodney King during a traffic stop went into worldwide circulation, the myth of Friday's LAPDor even Riggs'sinstantly became untenable. A cavalcade of embarrassments followed: Four years later, O.J. Simpson's trial resulted in an acquittal, thanks in no small part to Mark Fuhrman, the LAPD detective whose cheerful, liberal, and amply documented use of the n-word opened the door for the defense to suggest that evidence had been planted. A couple of years after that, the Rampart scandal broke. It was named for an inner-city precinct in which a cell of rogue cops operated with all the manners of a street gang: beating suspects, doctoring crime scenes, framing innocent people, lying under oath, even shooting an unarmed man. Though it received less media attention than the King and Simpson cases, Rampart has probably done more than either of them to inform the recent depictions of the LAPD on the big and small screens. Instances of police brutality and racism are certainly horrible, and Rampart contained its share of them. What this scandal had that others lacked was the added element of graft: One officer implicated in the scandal, Rafael Perez, was eventually convicted of taking nearly a million dollars' worth of cocaine from an evidence room. Perez had belonged to an elite antigang unit known as CRASH&$0151;Community Resources Against Street Hoodlumswhose job was to neutralize the influence of street gangs in affected neighborhoods. Once upon a time, the LAPD had embraced community policing, a policy that encouraged cops to become involved in the communities they were sworn to protect. In a perversely distorted echo of community policing, CRASH units were encouraged to get close to local gang members. What the program's founders hadn't counted on, however, was that the officers' immersion in this community could lead to the corruption of cops just as easily as it could lead to the redemption of gangbangers. The Shield's Strike Team is clearly modeled on the Rampart CRASH unit, with Mackey as a Perez-like moral free agent, unchecked by authorities (just as CRASH units worked with almost complete autonomy), and unbound to any kind of rulebook. Though he's unquestionably the show's villain, Mackey is also its most captivating character, and you can't help but miss him during subplots that don't call for his diabolical presence. His self-assurance, generated by his exalted status within the department, is complete; it's what guides him during his regular sorties across the thin blue line, from order into chaos and back again. These forays are also what animate the trio of recent filmsTraining Day, Dark Blue, and S.W.A.T.written by David Ayer. The attraction of the self-aggrandizing, amoral police officer is clearly a strong one for Ayer, whose career thus far has been an extended exploration of the nuances of this relative newcomer to the list of cop characterizations. Training Day is the movie for which Denzel Washington won the 2001 Academy Award for Best Actor. As Alonzo, a veteran of an elite LAPD narcotics squad, Washington is mesmerizing: Cunning and bloodthirsty, he glides through the streets of Los Angeles with his green-around-the-gills partner, Hoyt, played by Ethan Hawke. After a morning spent getting Hoyt high on PCP-laced pot ("A good narcotics agent should have narcotics in his blood," he assures his young charge) and violently assaulting handcuffed suspects in alleyways, Alonzo organizes a raid on a drug dealer's house. Alonzo dispatches the dealeran old friend of his, mind youwith a shotgun blast, then stages the nonfatal shooting of one of his partners to help sanitize the murder of the dealer, from whom Alonzo and his posse of rogues have been planning to steal a million dollars in cash. Hoyt, the only cop not in on the scheme, observes the proceedings with a mix of helplessness, incredulity, and horror. The day is only a few hours old, but it's only going to get worse. Throughout the film, Ayer and the film's director, Antoine Fuqua, make a point of reinforcing Alonzo's apartness from other cops, and, by extension, from methods of traditional policing. He's hardly ever shown around other officers (with the exception of his crooked-cop friends and Hoyt), and never in a marked squad car or down at the station. He speaks not in the level, sturdy bureaucratese that we associate with law enforcement but in the cocky, profanity-laden patois of the corner kingpin. Like The Shield's Mackey, Alonzo has convinced himself, with somewhat syllogistic logic, that whatever he chooses to do is, by definition, the right thing to do, since only those cops with the most integrity, the sharpest skills, and the clearest moral vision are selected to join the elite ranks of special detectives. A glimpse at his thinking comes during a brief tutorial that he delivers to Hoyt in defense of his tactics. "To protect the sheep, you've got to catch the wolf. And it takes a wolf to catch a wolf." Whatever his sin of the moment may be, Alonzo justifies his actions by citing his own private rules of engagement. Every shakedown, every cracked head is a step in the right direction toward the ultimate goal: bringing down the absolute worst of the bad guys. Should any of the pipsqueak bottom-feeders get roughed up or killed along the way, it's just not that big a deal. Dark Blue, which was released a year and a half after Training Day, starred Kurt Russell as an LAPD special investigations officer assigned to a quadruple homicide case in the highly-charged days leading up to the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Russell's Eldon Perry is a crass, self-important, mildly racist detective caught between loyalty to his commanding officer and his instincts, which are telling him that something is very wrong in his department. Perry's young partner, played by Scott Speedman, is the first to suspect that their captain's interest in their case is personal and that his suggestions on how to pursue the investigation are designed to prevent them from exposing his corruption. Like Hawke's character in Training Day, Speedman's character in Dark Blue is a naif whose crash course in the ways of modern policing renders him instantly disillusioned, accomplishing in days (or even hours) what used to take years spent suffering through Joe Friday's litany of woes. In Dark Blue, Speedman's character loses what's left of his dwindling faith in an alleyway during an attempted arrest, when his older partner pressures him to shoot and kill an unarmed suspect whom they both know to be innocent. While he crouches, his cocked gun aimed at the desperately pleading suspect's chest and his mentor urging him to pull the trigger, we can see the light of rectitude going out of the character's eyes. By the time he fires the gun, that light is extinguishedreplaced by a weary blankness. In the role of bad cop, Perry is less explicitly mercenary than Training Day's Alonzo, though no less frightening. What motivates Perry isn't greed or a God complex, but rather a kind of hyper-defensiveness: More so than any of the other characters in the rogues' gallery of Hollywood cops, Perry adheres to William Parker's steadfast belief that the police are all that stands between civil society and bedlam, and he resents the depictions of his fellow officers by the post-Rodney King news media as brutish thugs. As he awaits the verdicts on the white cops charged with beating King, Perry's mood grows anxious, his behavior erratic, his devotion to the badge and department traditions even more unquestioning. Over the course of investigating his case, Perry pulls out the pepper spray while making a false arrest, subtly blackmails another cop in order to obtain information, and orchestrates the aforementioned murder of an innocent man. But when a Korean bartender has the temerity to suggest that the cops "beat Rodney King"which, of course, they didPerry reacts with a rage that could almost pass for righteousness. (He deals with that rage, naturally, by dragging the bartender into an alley and beating him up.) Though Perry is a member of an elite detective unit, his allegiances are to the department as a wholenot just to his crew, as Mackey's are, or to himself, as Alonzo's are. S.W.A.T., the third installment in David Ayer's triptych, is much less of a character study and much more of a traditional action picture. Still, like its companion pieces, its story hinges on the members of an elite LAPD task force who succumb to a corrupting influencein this case, the promise of a multimillion-dollar payoff from a prisoner. Of the three films, none more clearly owes its narrative energy to the fears and fantasies from the Parker era. At one point in the movie, after the prisoner has announced in front of TV news cameras that he'll pay a hundred million dollars to whoever springs him from custody, the premonitions of anarchy that kept Parker up at night become reality, as would-be rescuers emerge from everywhere hoping to shoot their way through the prisoner's S.W.A.T. escort and claim their reward. During the prisoner's handoff into federal custody, Samuel L. Jackson (reprising the role of Hondo Harrelson made famous by the stone-faced actor Steve Forrest) actually warns one of his men to "stay alert. . . . They're coming out of the woodwork." Moments later, the very same forewarned officer pulls out his gun and, with the aid of a disgruntled ex-S.W.A.T. team member, whisks the prisoner away in a planned escape attempt. But in the end, thanks to a dizzying and honestly labeled variety of special weapons and tactics, this most elite squadron of urban warriors manages to recapture its quarry and hand him over to the Feds. The traitors are permanently silenced. A greed-driven public insurrection is avoided. The thin blue line is redrawn. WHAT DENZEL WASHINGTON'S ALONZO, Michael Chiklis's Vic Mackey, and Kurt Russell's Eldon Perry all have in common, aside from a shared Mephistophelean ancestor, is a gift for rationalizing even their most monstrous of actions. "To protect the sheep, you've got to catch the wolf. And it takes a wolf to catch a wolf." Alonzo's sophistry suggests more than the crude motives of a cartoonish "evildoer." Whether he believes his own words or not, Alonzo has learned well how to articulate a rationale that will play to a multitude of audiences: His new partner, the brass upstairs at headquarters, the media, and ultimately an America gripped by fear of a predatory criminal class. In The Shield, Vic spins his own version of the rogue cop's casus belli at the funeral for the federal informant he has just murdered, taking aside his jittery accomplice and assuring him that killing the snitch was the right thing to do: He tried to stick you and me both in a cage with the same goddamn animals we fight every day. Now, did I enjoy it? No. But did it need to be done? You're goddamn right it did.It goes without saying that if something looks like a wolf, stalks like a wolf, and kills like a wolf, it's no longer in the sheep family. But stories about sheep aren't terribly exciting. The "elite" cops in The Shield, Training Day, Dark Blue, and S.W.A.T. are mutants, professionally and morally altered by the forces at work within them. They're inside the LAPD and outside it at the same time. They're capable of being good and bad, simultaneously, and in the new genre of movies and television shows about them we recognize the difficulty of assigning categorically "heroic" attributes to the men and women who do the very dirty work of cleaning up our streets. We may also recognize something else: our own complicity in sanctioning the unsavory tactics used by some cops to fulfill their end of the covenant to serve and protect. Ultimately, what makes the current wave of movies and shows about this emerging elite so compelling is the frisson of righteousness that surrounds them. Their creators refuse to damn these figures completely for their sins. Joe Friday always kept his cool, and it's impossible to imagine him on the take, beating up a perp, or stealing cash from a drug dealer. But Joe Friday's Los Angeles was different. The chaotic elements he fought were predictable: numbers runners, dope peddlers, petty thieves, murdering spouses, bank robbers. In today's Los Angeles, as in many other places, chaos is ascendant and polymorphously perverse. In times such as these, when fear again enjoys the same currency it did in Parker's day, is it really surprising that audiences find themselves captivated by the image of an angry man with a gun who, honorably or not, promises to match the bad guys, evil for evil? |
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