[ No ordinary cop show, The Shield starred the LAPD’s corrupt
anti-gang unit, which itself functioned and behaved like a gang. The
show vividly captured the failures of American policing that would
animate the George Floyd protests 20 years later.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TWENTY YEARS AGO, THE SHIELD CAPTURED THE BROKENNESS OF AMERICAN
POLICING  
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Joe Mayall
December 11, 2023
Jacobin
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_ No ordinary cop show, The Shield starred the LAPD’s corrupt
anti-gang unit, which itself functioned and behaved like a gang. The
show vividly captured the failures of American policing that would
animate the George Floyd protests 20 years later. _

Still from The Shield. , (FX)

 

Americans love cop shows. In fact, about 20 percent
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all scripted network TV shows are about law enforcement. And while
most of these programs follow the same tired premise of honorable
characters doing their best to catch the bad guys while balancing the
stressors of family life, there is one cop show that stands out from
the rest.

Originally aired in 2002, FX’s _The Shield _turned the boilerplate
cop show on its head. Unlike the prestige television show _The
Wire, _a more pensive and high-brow offering that premiered the same
year on HBO, _The Shield _followed the format of shows like _Law &
Order_ and _NCIS_ — except instead of unquestioningly valorizing
police work, it centered on Detective Vic Mackey and his corrupt,
anti-gang “Strike Team” as they rampaged through the streets of
Los Angeles. What made _The Shield_ different from its
contemporaries was its explicit focus on the dark side of policing.
Throughout the show, Mackey breaks every law on the books, including
but not limited to drug dealing, torture, planting evidence, illegal
searches and seizures, and murder.

Though twenty years old, the Emmy-winning series shines a light on two
facets of modern America that still plague the country today: our
punitive and ineffective policing model, and the authoritarian
hysteria of the “war on terror.”

Problems With Policing

_The Shield_ was inspired by the illicit actions creator Shawn Ryan
saw while shadowing the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for his
much rosier cop show, _Nash Bridges._ “What I saw [during the
ride-alongs] was much darker,” Ryan told _Entertainment Weekly _in
2017.

Ryan’s pilot script was based on the Rampart scandal
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the _Los Angeles Times_ called “the worst corruption scandal in
L.A.P.D. history.” In September of 1999, Officer Rafael Pérez was
caught stealing a million dollars of cocaine from an evidence locker.
He agreed to a plea deal and began to reveal widespread corruption
throughout the department. When the dust settled, Pérez had fingered
close to seventy police officers in crimes such as bogus arrests,
false confessions, perjured testimony, the planting of evidence, and
more. According to Pérez, these practices were most frequent among
the city’s anti-gang units, the inspiration for Mackey’s Strike
Team.

 

Members of the Strike Team torture suspects, plant evidence, deal
drugs, are openly racist, have sex with suspects, and steal with
absolute impunity. _The Shield’s_ title card — the theme song
“Just Another Day” playing over an image of a fractured police
badge — leaves little room for interpretation. The show’s
perspective is that violent and often extralegal control of Los
Angeles’s minority and poor neighborhoods is routine for the
officers of the LAPD. The show’s second episode, titled “Our
Gang,” poses a side-by-side comparison of the funerals of a gang
member and a police officer, drawing explicit parallels between the
lawbreaking groups.

In addition to portraying flagrant disregard for civil liberties and
procedural justice, _The Shield_ illustrates the inherent inability
of American policing to solve the problems it claims to — indeed,
how the cops often make things worse. In one of the most memorable
scenes of the show, the new police captain gives a speech to her
officers, stating: “We can’t solve poverty, we can’t solve
addiction. But we can distinguish between the criminals and the
citizens.” Such words echo the viewpoint of activists critical of
policing, who have long claimed that armed police are unable to solve
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actual underlying problems that cause crime.

Not long after this speech, _The Shield_ shows officers seizing cars
and houses from suspected (but unconvicted) criminals to fund the
hiring of more cops and the purchase of military-grade weaponry for
Mackey’s Strike Team. When a black officer protests that taking a
single mother’s house will put her and her children onto the street
where they are destined for a life of crime in order to survive, the
captain dismisses him, saying, “I don’t care what skin color you
are. But you’re either blue or you’re out.”

The War on Terror

_The Shield _also captures the widespread fear of the post-9/11
years, and demonstrated how it was weaponized by the state both at
home and abroad. Though it is exclusively set in Los Angeles,
there’s no shortage of references to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. In a later season, the Strike Team gains a member
nicknamed “Army,” who teaches the others abusive tactics he
learned “going door to door in Baghdad.”

The pilot episode shows Mackey torturing a suspect in an interrogation
room under the watch of his captain. It only escalates from there, as
he burns, beats, and threatens to send suspects to prisons where they
will be raped and killed by other inmates. He even has a secret remote
torture site where victims are suspended from chains, an image
strikingly similar to those seen in the American torture camps at Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

On this point, however, _The Shield_ errs. The portrayal is
stomach-turning, but the problem is that in the world of the show —
unlike in real life, where confessions extracted under torture are
often false — it actually works. Like many other American films and
series of the time, it seems to suggest to America that torture, while
perhaps immoral, is at least a viable method for “getting the bad
guys,” whether they’re low-level drug dealers or high-level
al-Qaeda operatives.

Nevertheless, _The Shield _captures the hysteria of the war on
terror period, showing how rational thinking and proportionate
responses were dismissed in favor of groupthink and maximal force. In
one episode, a minor gang member claims affiliation with al-Qaeda,
bringing the Department of Homeland Security on to the case,
demonstrating the broad reach of the post-9/11 anti-terror apparatus.

Again, however, the show reveals its limitations. In the final
seasons, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) makes an
appearance as the cutting-edge face of federal law enforcement,
offering an alternative to the brutal tactics of the LAPD. One wonders
whether the writers would have shaped that storyline the same way
today, after mass protests against ICE have convinced many that it’s
not a necessary agency, but is instead a heavy-handed expression of
American xenophobia and anti-immigrant paranoia.

It’s not clear that Ryan himself really understands the implications
of _The Shield. _In an interview with _Entertainment Weekly_, Ryan
claimed that “98 percent of the time Mackey is doing the right
thing.” This will come as a surprise to anyone who watches the show,
as 98 percent of every episode consists of Mackey’s Strike Team
breaking the law. In other interviews, it seems that Ryan was setting
out to dramatize the warts on an otherwise noble project to “protect
and serve.”

But whatever its creator’s own intentions, _The Shield_ vividly
captured the depravity and brokenness of American policing. In the
aftermath of the George Floyd protests of 2020, it looks less like a
case for tossing bad apples than a condemnation of the entire
enterprise.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Joe Mayall is a writer from Denver, Colorado. His work can be found at
JoeWrote.com.

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