Political Revery:

Scripting Cop Movie II

Sher Azad

Imagine one of those Hollywood Police films, the ones starring Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal or Danny Glover as the loose cannon maverick cop with a heart of gold.

The prototype of this type of motion picture was, of course the film starring Al Pacino, based on the true story of the honest New York Police officer Frank Serpico, but Hollywood changed the blueprint somewhat. The formula goes something like this:

The local gangster is terrorising the mean streets of New York (or Los Angeles or Philadelphia) and pushing drugs to the neighbourhood youth to finance his extravagant lifestyle. Our hero, the lowly cop with a small gun but a big heart, goes against the orders of his superiors and takes on the hooligan. Our hero does not get much support from the Police Commissioner, but perseveres. He tries to be reasonable, but then the scoundrel’s heavies start threatening his family, so he realises he must fight him.

Commercial success

After much carnage and many fire-fights our hero, armed only with his Smith & Wesson 38, corners the automatic-rifle-toting gangster in a brownstone front.

Finally, our protagonist emerges from the building into the light of day wounded, but having killed the villain and saved the neighbourhood.

At this point the film fades into the end titles.Generally, we are not told what happens afterwards, but we assume that the policeman goes back to what he was doing before.

Sometimes, if the film has been a commercial success, there is a sequel, and at its very beginning we find that our assumption has been correct. The sequel is usually a repeat of the formula of the original, with different villains and a slightly different plot twist.

But what if the sequel was to be based on what really does go on in the real world? The script of our imaginary but more realistic sequel would probably go something like this:

At the beginning, we find that our hero is trying to pull his neighbourhood together after the trauma it has been through. He is being the good community policeman, helping people reconstruct their lives, sawing wood for the new neighbourhood centre and so on. So far, so good. However, Police Commissioner Banks is not happy with our hero. He gets Internal Affairs to investigate him, and he is a little put out, to say the least.

Our hero points out to Banks that he has cleared up the mess and is helping people rebuild their lives, and that he is helping the former junkies to rehabilitate themselves.

He also points out that, on the other hand, Captain Gus and Lieutenant Luigi, two other senior cops, are tearing down the neighbourhoods in their precinct and that the collateral damage is quite enormous.

Gus and Luigi keep messing up, riling the populace, bringing in SWAT teams, deploying disproportionate firepower and generally making things worse. The neighbourhoods in their precinct are in far worse condition than before they started trying to clear up.

Internal Affairs

Our hero suggests that Banks is being unfair by investigating him but not Gus and Luigi. Undeterred, Banks persists in sending in the sleuths of Internal Affairs. The gung-ho detectives begin their inquiry by getting testimony from the gangster’s associates who - understandably - don’t have much good to say for our hero. It looks like they might recommend that our hero’s badge and gun be taken away from him.

The people in our hero’s neighbourhood are all upset. They feel that the Internal Affairs people might be getting the wrong end of the stick. They crowd into Banks’ office to protest, but he ignores them. In the meantime, Luigi manages to kill the children of another hoodlum while Gus shoots dead an unarmed gang godfather, who then (in the terminology of Hollywood mobsters) ‘sleeps with the fishes’. Nevertheless, not even at this point does Banks take action against them.

Finally, the Internal Affairs detectives recommend that proceedings be started against our hero and that his gun and badge be taken away. Needless to say, were this to happen there would be no doubt that our hero would be gunned down and that the neighbourhood would once more become the happy hunting ground of narcotic-pushing criminals.

So how should our movie script end?

Do we have Police Commissioner Banks bowing to the wishes of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants’? Do we have other cops putting pressure on him to let up on our hero? I really don’t know.

Perhaps we should ask Ban ki-Moon. He might have an opinion.