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Monday, March 08, 2004

THE CASE FOR THE SHIELD

Oh, so much easier than Nader. First, here's Oliver's, uh, right-on-the-money take.

I'm a fan of police procedurals, probably owing to the fact that I grew up around detectives and the HPD, and I don't know of any TV show that's captured the politics of policing quite like The Shield has.

Oliver's spoken about the acting and the characters a bit--to which I'd only add that the show's take on masculinity is as nuanced as anything since, say, Scorcese's "Raging Bull" and "Good Fellas".

No Lethal Weapon/Law and Order hey-buddy stuff here. Aside from Mackey, whose complexity alone should set off a flotilla of cultural-studies readings, there's Shane's father-adoration of Mackey, Dutch's desperate loneliness and self-loathing, Aceveda's sense of destiny and entitlement, and Julien's complicated black gay male denial. In itself, this makes The Shield one of the most eye-opening shows ever to hit a network.

The series also has a lot to say about 21st century policing. When it debuted, the model for the Strike Team (which remains the driving narrative force of the show) was clearly Rampart Divisions's sick corrupt CRASH unit. Farmington is clearly a composite of the Pico-Union/Westlake 'hood around Macarthur Park.

Aceveda, a Chicano, has city-council ambitions--after all, his district has become largely Latino in the last decade--so he must deal directly with the tides of pressures exerted from above. This may take the form of an independent audit, pressure to add a person of color to the Strike Team, and most importantly, Mackey and Aceveda's show-to-show haggling over what the new price of corruption will be.

The upshot is that Aceveda leaves Mackey largely autonomous if he can deliver high-profile or high-quantity busts. Mackey works the interstices of official policy, between the statistical reports that the politicians demand and the constantly changing, always profitable forms of criminal (often ethnic) enterprise being developed on the street. Honorable, ethical cops like Claudette Wyms are marginalized in this kind of a system.

This is exactly what police reform opponents have been talking about for years. No one will deny that police are often outgunned and outflanked. The potential for corruption erupts at every corner. But the solution to corruption is to reform a culture that continually rewards the gamers. Time and again, it's been shown that the ultimate result of that style of command is the gangsterization of policing itself.

In any case, answers are not simple. Here is where The Shield becomes timeless. Since the rise of television, LAPD has been the epitome of the complexities and contradictions of modern policing, and indeed its representations--from Dragnet on through--reflect the changing generational consensus about such policing.

(An aside: it would be interesting to see someone develop a show based on the New Orleans police department...)

The Shield captures the good, and the mostly bad and ugly, without blinking sentimentality, what we want and need these days. Forget Starsky and Hutch. It's all about Wyms and Mackey this spring. Check it out tomorrow.

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