by: Dr. Clarence Spigner | Back to Blog index...

African Americans are 13% of the U.S. population but make-up 28% of the arrest made and are 40% of the inmate populations in U.S. prisons and jails.  Whites comprise 67% of the US population and are 70% of arrests made yet are only 40% of the inmate population.  Hollywood propaganda is disguised as popular entertainment and operates to floods the collective psyche with images of incorrigible African Americans and Latinos.  Policemen are more often seen as being forced to trample over Constitutional rights in order to protect the greater public from the hoards bent solely on perpetuating total anarchy.

On March 3, 1991, police-thugs beat up Rodney King on camera and in February, 1999, paranoid plainclothes detectives shot an innocent Amado Diallo 41 times.  It both instances, the men in blue were acquitted by predominantly white juries.  These were Los Angeles and New York cops, respectively, who may have been products of Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis about people who “think without thinking?”  I contend that such racist police brutality and murder, as well as the public’s toleration of their behavior, are largely responsible for such disproportionate representation of blacks and Latinos in the U.S. criminal justice system.  These racial disparities which would embarrass a third-rate dictator in a developing country, have been aided and abetted by a  law and order mentality reflected in many Hollywood films. 

The most notable ambassador of such fascist cinema has been Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan.  The neoconservative image of this bully with a badge went on to foster Eastwood’s lucrative Dirty Harry (1971) franchise.  Released in the same year was the equally racist and more gleeful cop, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) in the elevated train chase thriller, The French Connection.  West coast Harry and east coast Doyle sat the tone for other law-and-order imitators featuring middle-age cops as role-models for real-life cops such as Mark Fuhrman.  Such cinematic great white defenders of a racial status-quo also created obscene versions of equal-opportunity as manifested with gangster cops-of-color. For example, the black psycho-cop Alonzo (Denzel Washington) in Training Day (2001) and Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) turned-up in Lakeview Terrace (2008) decades later.  Alonzo and Abel were bigots in black-face or slaves imitating the slave-master. 

Popeye Doyle was based on the real-life New York policeman Eddie Egan.  Doyle/Egan’s free used racist epithets while pursuing drug dealers gave legitimacy to real-life cops and their own use of the N-word.  This has long been a point novelist James Ellroy has made, and it is what helped to bury detective Mark Fuhrman during the O.J. Simpson trial.   Hollywood so loved the nasty-mouth Doyle that he was featured again, this time brutalizing Puerto Ricans in the thankfully rarely seen Badge 373 (1973).  Such was the post- Naked City (1948) image and mentality of the big city policemen gallantly fighting to protect and serve. Racial bigotry, unearthed as so obscene and illegitimate during the black-led Civil Rights Movement, was reconstructed as needed to control an increasingly dark and lawless society.  This reactionary cinema was perpetrated by a Hollywood Power Elite in direct response to the rising empowerment of people-of-color. In almost Orwellian fashion, an entire precinct of name-calling cops were broadcasted into society’s living-rooms in the over-rated TV cop-drama, Hill Street Blues, from 1981 to 1987. 

The early 1970s introduced the wise-cracking San Francisco Detective Harry Callahan based on Eastwood’s earlier Walt Coogan from Coogan’s Bluff (1968). Coogan was depicted as a good-old boy lawman from Arizona (John McCain’s country) bringing his down-home values to the corrupt big city of New York.  Eastwood, producer, writer and director, found gold in this salt-of-the-earth protagonist. His far less talented but equally conservative colleague, Sylvester Stallone would do the same with his own Rocky Balboa alter-ego in the Rocky saga.  Eastwood skillfully pushed into the public psyche  Callahan’s fascist politics in such films as Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer, (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).  The personality of the over-rated protagonist was directly opposite to another San Francisco detective, Frank Bullit (Steve McQueen) in the excellent chase film, Bullit (1968) released a mere three years earlier.   Eastwood’s attempt at redemption in subsequent films such as Unforgiven (1992) and Gran Torino (2008) strikes me as too little too late.   

What followed in the wake were more of the same which pushed the buttons of rising conservatism during the Reagan era.  Most irresponsible was the 1974 release of Death Wish which went on to repeat itself in 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1994. Death Wish featured the diminutive and fading actor Charles Bronson, impressive in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), but now reduced to the depraved Paul Kersey, a white everyman driven to take revenge against street scum when his family is wiped-out.  Playing to such paranoia, which continues to be manipulated by the National Rifle Association, made a raving gun-nut out of the actor Charleston Heston. Over-rated as an actor, Heston never hesitated to mention the Los Angeles Watts Riots of 1965 as chief among his reasons for owning a gun.  As a major spokesman for NRA, he used his so-called actor status to openly encourage anyone who would listen to go arm themselves. The 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King only bolstered the actor’s appeal.  A 13-year lapse after the last Death Wish sequel unearthed  another diminutive and diminishing actress, the 45 year-old Jodie Foster who stepped forth as yet another gun-toting urban vigilante in The Brave One (2007).  Foster, who rose to fame portraying a pre-teen prostitute in Taxi Driver (1976), hit the screen and streets as Erica Bain, an updated female version of Bronson/Kersey. 

Disturbing was it that in both Death Wish (1974) and The Brave One, policemen were featured as having a relationship with the status-quo killers. In Death Wish it was detective Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia).  In The Brave One it was detective Mercer, rather conveniently portrayed by African American actor Terrance Howard.  The latter was clearly an unsuccessful effort to diminish the racist overtones.  Both Ochoa and Mercer were established detectives, making each the exact opposites of Dirty Harry and nasty Popeye Doyle.  It was as if Hollywood wanted to lend legitimacy to the outlaw citizens by having them identity with more competent and respectable lawmen. 

As noted earlier, African Americans have also appeared as cop-bigots and vigilantes.  Notable has been Denzel Washington’s depiction of the mad Alonzo in Training Day and the more magnificent Creasy in Man on Fire (2004).  The cold-blooded Creasy, similar to Lee Marvin’s cool, systematic and revenge-seeking Walker in Point Blank (1967), was equally methodical and not random in his killings as compared to the cowardly ambushes perpetrated by Kersey and Bain. Creasy, similar to Michael Jai White’s Al Simmons in Spawn (1997), learned the lethal trade in the service of the United States government as hired assassins.  Both were dark guardian angels (Simmons is from hell and Creasy is on his way there).  Each was a product of American society and not its victims as were Kersey and Bain.  It is telling that Creasy killed several policemen.

Films such as Serpico (1973), Narc (2002) and Dark Blue (2002) are among the few that reveal the underside of law enforcement which nurture societal and institutional racism.  Conservative movie critics have referred to these films as “cop-bashing.”  Yet they pale in comparison to the proliferation of films that justify the police-bigot as needed.  The racial disparities in the U.S. prison system stem in part from the practices of implicit associations by too many policemen.  The seeming complacency of the public could be a consequence of having been conditioned to accept such racial bias presented in much of popular cinema.

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