Holding the police to a higher, older standard

Jack Webb was politically conservative. His police shows — Dragnet (1967-70), Adam-12 (1968-75) — were profoundly pro-police. They got production assistance from (and gave thanks/credits to) the Los Angeles Police Department, which, in the 60s-70s was billy-club conservative, too.

But, for all that, the shows were an expression of the ideal of “Protect and Serve.” They were, yes, propaganda for the LAPD as to what they wanted to be seen as, but, as such, they were aspirational. And I imprinted on them as what cops should be — not what they were, but what they thought they ought to be.

Dealing with the public for these 60s-70s cops was never easy. Sometimes it was just goofy civilians causing our heroes grief. Sometimes it was folk — good or bad — who were suspicious or disdainful of cops. Sometimes it was dangerous.

Through it all, our protagonists always maintained that public service, “To Protect and Serve” attitude. Even in the face of danger, known or possible, they were by the book, because that’s what made them policemen, not vigilantes.

The shows often touched on how the police regulated themselves, and it was fascinating. They dealt with rules. With procedures. Sometimes scary. Sometimes complex. Sometimes even unfair from a cop’s eye. But that was how it was — that’s what was needed to make cops, like Caesar’s wife, “beyond reproach.”

And the shows did deal with things like police brutality,  or even police shootings, as when Friday himself was accused of an unjustified killing in Dragnet. “I thought maybe he had a gun” wasn’t treated as sufficient to get Friday off. “I was in fear of my life” wasn’t an excuse for using a firearm.  Proving the other guy shot first was necessary for Friday to keep his job.

Or when Kent McCord, who went on to play Reed on Adam-12, played a cop accused of armed robbery. Friday gives a famous speech about how rough the life of a cop is, but how that’s what he signed up for and is glad he has.

The shows were unapologetically pro-police — but not because police were a special tribe, or uber-warriors, or beyond reproach, but because they were portrayed as dedicated, upright people of duty and honor, and because they policed their own.

There were no police union reps keeping accused cops from being questioned for days. No training films about kill-or-be-killed. No politicians nudge-and-winking abusive behavior against the out groups. No thin blue line of tribal silence when a cop did something illegal.

Civilians weren’t seen as potential threats until proven innocent. Racial prejudice was deemed profoundly unworthy of a protector of all the people. Choke holds and kneeling on someone’s neck would be unthinkable. Kitting up in paramilitary uniforms would have drawn a sneer and a snarky reference to military dictatorships.

Police were made out to be heroes in these shows because their actions, their ideals, their adherence to duty even dealing with disrespect, stress, frustration, judicial coddling of crooks, was beyond reproach. They were heroes, not in a Hollywood action sort of mold, gunning down the bad guys,  but because they had a moral and ethical code and they stuck to it, no matter how difficult. And if anyone stumbled, or questioned that code, the wise elders (Friday, Malloy) stomped on them. Hard. Because being a cop was a trust — and betraying that trust, in any way, hurt everyone.

And for all that Webb was politically conservative, he and his police officers held no truck with racism or authoritarianism. It was way too close to WW2 for that lesson to have been forgotten.

Sure, it wasn’t a realistic portrayal of how the LAPD actually was, let alone is. But it did portray the ideal of what cops should be, with the aid and abetting of an actual police department.

Which brings us to today.  Friday and Malloy (and Gannon and Reed) would all have been sorely tempted to take Derek Chauvin and his three buddies into an alley and thrash them within an inch of their lives, all the while lecturing them in Webbian tones as to how they had profoundly betrayed everything that made police better than thugs.

But  they wouldn’t have. They would instead have stepped up and slapped the cuffs on. If they had witnessed George Floyd’s killing, and been unable to intervene, they would have been the first to testify as to what they’d seen. Because they would know, in every bone of their bodies, that bad cops are worse than the worst criminals. Because they corrupt the body politic, they destroy trust in our institutions, they make us all less free, less secure, less protected. Because they are traitors to their badges, and profoundly wrong.

It is, I confess, arguably silly to use TV characters as exemplars of how the police should behave. Ditto for, when I see cops acting a certain way or doing certain things, judging them against Reed and Malloy, or Friday and Gannon. What would Joe do? 

But these were characters crafted by a man who believed in what the police should be, with the input and guidance of a police department who were willing to put that vision forward as what they strove to at least appear as (even if they fell far below that level). So it’s no less silly than simply shrugging and saying “The cops are always right.”

The Jack Webb shows are myths, if highly detailed ones — and myths always carry truths worth looking at. So I’d rather have a Joe Friday running the Minneapolis PD than its current administration (let alone its loathsome police union leader, Bob Kroll). There would doubtless be policy directions he took I wouldn’t agree with. But he’d also approach the job as a public service, where his goal is to protect and serve the people of the city, not the cops that work there. Where the ideal of being the weary but noble protectors of the people, not their “dominators,” would flower.