San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Good cops, bad cops
Onscreen portrayals reflect shifting attitudes about law enforcement.
The police have been in the news lately, mostly for reasons that are anything but good. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, followed by the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, have led to protests all over the country, charges of systemic racism and calls for police reform or outright defunding of law enforcement agencies.
This is a significant moment in our current history, one that will continue to evolve and play out over the coming years. From the limited perspective of movies, it illustrates yet another example of cinema as a kind of cultural seismograph. Movies pick up on issues that are sometimes, as in this case, already present, but they talk about them months and years before they dominate the consciousness of the entire country and the world.
For those aware of this predictive capacity of movies, it should come as no surprise that the past few years have seen a deluge of films about dangerous and/or racist police officers. In this, filmmakers of color have led the way, starting in 2013 with “Fruitvale Station,” Ryan Coogler’s powerful debut feature about the reallife killing of Oscar Grant by a BART policeman.
It was followed by fictional works such as “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018), Barry Jenkins ’adaptation of the James Baldwin novel about a wrongfully convicted Black man; “Blindspotting” (Carlos Lopez Estrada; 2018), starring Oakland native Daveed Diggs as a man trying to make it through his final days on probation; “Queen & Slim” (Malina Matsoukas; 2019), about a blind date interrupted by police violence; and “Black and Blue” (Deon Taylor; 2019), with Naomie Harris as a Black woman who finds herself working in a corrupt police department.
These filmmakers were joined by others expressing similar sentiments in Martin McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” which featured Sam Rockwell (in an Academy Awardwinning performance) as a racist cop, and “Detroit,” a Kathryn Bigelow film about the Detroit riots of 1967, both from 2017.
Of course, in a sense, these movies didn’t anticipate anything but were just responding to an issue that was already very much present. Thus, in “Blindspotting,” Collin, an Oakland man on probation played by Diggs, sees a white police officer gun down a Black man but doesn’t even consider reporting it, because he is sure it would do no good.
“We focused on how our community feels about police,” says Rafael Casal, who cowrote the film with Diggs and has a major supporting role. “How we feel like they are sharks in the water, hunting us. At no point do police feel like peacekeepers in our film. That side of policing is drowned out by how much more often you feel like prey in their presence. And I don’t think we feel that way accidentally. I think that fear and violence is in the DNA of our system of American policing.”
The treatment of police in film has varied since the beginnings of cinema, with cycles of glamorization and demonization, never without some realworld reason. The 191217 slapstick comedies featuring the Keystone Cops present incompetent policemen as objects of ridicule. And you’d have a hard time finding a sympathetic police officer in the films of Charlie Chaplin, who grew up in London in the most abject poverty.
Before today, the nadir for American cinema’s regard for the police came during Prohibition, when everyone in the country who bought liquor or went to a speakeasy was essentially an outlaw. During the ensuing period of the Production Code (193468), it was forbidden to present authority, including the police, in a negative light. But when that stricture was over, we got a flurry of weird 1970s films in which cops were presented as simultaneously horrible and heroic.
In the latter category, we find the triggerhappy “Dirty Harry” played by Clint Eastwood and the violent and plainly racist antihero of “The French Connection,” both films released in 1971.
What followed was a generation of movies in which a rogue cop was the good guy, and the captain who tried to apply restraints was either an impediment to justice or some secret criminal mastermind.
By contrast, killing isn’t casual in the recent films, not for the viewer, nor for the depicted victim, and sometimes not even for the perpetrator. “Blindspotting,” for instance, ends with the cop in all of his messy humanity, in his garage, broken, a life in shambles,” says Casal. “Daveed and I kept saying, ‘taking a life must take a toll.’ ”
While today’s police films are more sober in their intentions, it must be acknowledged, all the same, that movies are movies. By their very nature, they gravitate to the dramatic, which means going to the extremes of reality, rather to workaday reality, which is often too common and undramatic to hold our attention.
Or at least you might reasonably think that, until you’ve seen Peter Nicks’ “The Force” (2017), a documentary, in which Nicks followed the Oakland police for more than two years. It’s a detailed film, showing the good and the bad and every nuance in between that “really tells a true story,” says Johnna Watson, public information officer of the Oakland Police Department.
But documentaries play by different rules; just knowing something is real makes it a little bit interesting, after all. Fiction, because it’s not based in fact, is constrained to maintain an intense interest, and thus it’s impossible to make a movie about a police officer that lives in the community and goes 25 years without ever firing his or her gun.
There are few characters more ubiquitous throughout the entire span of movies than policemen. Indeed, if you throw into the category sheriffs in the Old West, you’re talking about every Western, plus all of film noir, every crime film, all police procedurals and every gangster movie ever made.
In conversations with law enforcement officers, every one of them cited these portrayals as unrealistic in the speed with which crimes are solved in movies and on television. “We don’t solve anything in three commercials,” Watson says. Or as San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto puts it, solving a crime “takes way longer than two hours.”
“One of the big things movies get wrong, especially in light of what’s going on now is that there are bad cops in every agency,” says Miyamoto. “They had a mov