Didn’t Your Mother Ever
Tell You Not To Talk To The Cops-Visions From The Acre Neighborhood-With The
Hollywood Version Of “The Mod Squad” (1999) -Social Commentary Disguised As A
Film Review
DVD Review
By Seth Garth
The Mod Squad, Claire Danes,
Giovanni Ribisi, Omar Epps, 1999
[Those who have read my
film reviews in various incarnations of American
Left History and its associated publications or way back
in the early 1970s as a
free-lance stringer at American Film
Gazette know that at times I have gone off on a tangent when I have
something which I think is socially relevant or political to say. Have a few
times used the review as a vehicle to get something off my chest. This however is
the first time, thanks to site manager Greg Green that I have telegraphed my
intentions up front, have stated that this is social commentary fronted by a
review of the movie version of the successful and fairly long-running television
series The Mod Squad.
My problem as confessed
to Greg was that I really wanted to take a swipe at the idea of young “hippie”
type felons recruited by the public cops to get into places where a young
straight crew-cut cop wearing a plaid shirt and chinos would not dare to go. To
essentially for no jail time become civilian snitches. That strange arrangement
is so contrary to both my own and a number of older writers here experiences
with the cops in our own “hippie” period and more decisively going back to the
old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where both cops hassling us and us
having a code of corner boy honor (which extended to other corner boy groupings
as well, even hostile cohorts) to have no truck with them really has my blood
pressure up even forty or fifty years later. So be forewarned that this is a
screed and that film is just an occasion to vent. S.G]
******
Hollywood is nothing if
not ingenious, or opportunist as the case may be grabbing onto an idea that got
its first workout on television which is kind of ass backwards since most of
the time it is the other way around. Back in the 1970s after the dust of the
1960s had started to clear somebody got the bright idea that a cop show had to
take a different twist if you were going to retain or grab the youth audience.
A tough problem when so many kids had been busted for dope, been teargassed and
billy-clubbed for speaking out on a
range of issues (then beaten again for mumbling out some answer when they were
in the bastinado getting third degree grilling). Got hassled for hitchhiking
(hell for jaywalking when they wanted to pull the hammer down) , and a ton of
other things that among older more respectable folk would not have gotten them
off their duffs at the local donut shop cadging their coffee and cakes and
harassing the cute young waitresses who weren’t sure exactly how to respond to
such unsolicited crap before #MeToo was not even a dreamed up idea. I will
speak more personally on that issue and the growing up absurd ways that we
dealt with the police back in the old Acre neighborhood.
For now though some
wizard figured out that maybe if you took a clot of young troubled people,
three, a manageable number to corral, two white, one black, two men, one women
who were in legal distress and you offered them the lifeline of playing copper
rather than jail maybe that battered youth nation might be brought back into
the fold. I am not sure what the numbers were, the demographics either but the
television show was on for a while. Solving crimes real coppers would not get
off their duffs at the local donut shop for all while looking very civilian.
Then they took their wares to Hollywood or glitter town took their idea and ran
with it.
Bullshit. No
self-respecting hippie, boy or girl, would be caught dead acting for the
coppers, would rather do hard time among honest thieves, black-jack artists,
armed robbers, mother murders and worse than be a snitch, which is what these Mod
Squad pillars of society were really doing making the cops’ jobs easier for
them. I won’t even deal with all the crap the FBI under one J. Edgar Hoover did
on the national and local political fronts framing every militant, black or
white but especially black when the Panthers raised the stakes and attempted to
organize community youth with a very different perspective. Won’t even deal
with the massive arrests, sweeps really grabbing everyone in their paths from
New York 1966 to bloody Chicago 1968 to May Day in 1971 and beyond. That was
the stuff of headlines, of archives. That was the coordination of national,
state and local police working up a lather.
What I will mention is about
the time the recently passed on Jimmy Higgins was sitting on the side of the
road in Todos el Mundo out south of Big Sur in California, just sitting there
backpack, rucksack really, in front of him when some Highway Patrol copper
stopped and asked him why he was hitchhiking. After some argument, that was
Jimmy’s way and not a bad one this time, the copper yanks him in the cruiser
and takes him to the police barracks for transport to the clink. Jimmy had no
dough, had nobody he knew out there although about a month before a half dozen
of the old gang from the Acre neighborhood had been out there checking out the
suburbs of the Summer of Love, 1967. I won’t even count the number of times we
were hassled or busted by the notorious quota-driven Connecticut staties who
would jack us up in full view of passing cars filled with respectables on the
side of whatever highway they grabbed us on. Chickenshit drug busts for a simple
joint would fill a book, thirty days here, fifteen there. This was life for a
not insignificant number of young people, hippies if you will, just trying to
break out for a while anyway from the nine to five number that society had
hatched for us and would snare a lot of us later when the ebb tide of the times
came crashing down around our heads.
Going back even further No
self-respecting corner boy would haul anything but bile for them, for the
blood-stained coppers. What a lame excuse for a movie who’s only redeeming
quality was that its plot involved getting the best of a bunch of crooked cops
who had their hands in the till come drug trafficking time. The Acre reality
was that you avoided the cops like black death, even though it seemed that
every family that had three or more sons had a cop in one position (the other
two, oneot the of course was the
gangster and the other was the boy with the “calling,” going into the priesthood,
throw in a sister and you had a nun, or a whore maybe). The idea that you would
say word one to a cop, to say hello, was beyond comprehension. Even though
everybody knew that some outlier was singing his song to get out from under
some serious jailtime (even that was not the same as being recruited to do the
coppers’ dirty work for them as against the code as it was and as life-threatening
as such a rash decision was if anything happened to anybody due to the ratting
out)
The classic case for how
the code of honor worked, Omerta I heard it called in some neighborhoods although
not ours even though it was the same thing when Red Riley, the king of the hill
of the toughest corner boy crowd over at Harry’s Variety, just because he
suspected some guy from some rival corner was “trespassing” on his turf chain-whipped the guy into a
bloody pool and just walked away. When the ambulance and coppers came nobody
who had witnessed the scene including me said word one to the coppers. Not even
the guy who got chain-whipped. A serious object lesson. (By the way Harry’s was
just a front for a protected book-making operation with Red and friends as the protection.
The cops? Well they just came in from their police cruisers to make their bets
and grab some quick coffee and cakes.) There are a million stories but hey all
run to a type. Later when we sort of outgrew the code of honor etched in the old
neighborhood we would have rather lost a limp that given anything to the
coppers but guff. Making this tale of three kids of no known origin frankly
weird.
Frankly I don’t understand
why Freddie Murphy, an Acre product and a guy who had one brother doing time in
the state pen and the other doing Hail Marys at Blessed Sacrament Church, about
par for the course, who I knew for many years before he turned copper in LA
wanted some young kids to see what was happening to the drug evidence boxes
that were going out the door at the station house in Hollywood. Hell, even a rookie
cop, a cop who had not gotten into the donut shop coffee and crullers groove,
knew it was an inside job including protection going pretty far up the ladder,
the chain of command. The older guys in the locker room come wash up time were
laughing about the poor suckers who were going to have to do twenty and out if
some perp didn’t waste them and they would have to not cash their checks. While
they bathed on easy street with a couple of big scores, a couple of knock-offs.
Frank was a funny guy,
quirky, until he turned copper, until he broke the pledge, the old corner boy
pledge never to say boo to a copper much less be one. But he had this idea,
obviously he didn’t hang around the locker room, that it was guys who were
running a high end nightclub who were getting a rogue cop to come up with the
dope to keep their hipster young and wild crowd high as kites. So the kids’ idea to get in and see what they
could see. But before they could do their work, Frank made the cardinal error
of trying to set a trap assuming it was just one bad apple copper-and got
wasted out in some LA drainage ditch for his efforts. The boys in the know in
the locker room had a big laugh as they put on their ceremonial blues to give Frank
his big sent-off.
Here is the funny thing
though these kids, and forgive me if I don’t remember their names but like I
said one was a holy goof white-bread, a surly black guy with a chip on his
shoulder and a young white woman with tracks up her arms and the look of
somebody who had worked the streets to support her habit who was trying to
break a jones and not having much success decided to find out who killed
their mentor, who wanted Freddie six feet
under over this drug stuff. And they did a pretty good job at least as far as
they went. They went up a million wrong alleys before they realized that they
were looking outside when they should have been looking inside. Looking more closely
at that hostile, to them, locker room since they were outside the loop, weren’t
anything but rent-a-cops really.
The key was when the
young woman who was having an rekindled affair with an old boyfriend found out
he was cheating on her, was a junkie with connections to the mob and to the
coppers, wired. From there it was ABC to drag the deadbeat coppers out of their
lair once they knew that they had to act fast to grab dope and go down easy
street-one way. In the end though why did the kids do it, why did they give up
their dignity just to find out what they already knew, knew what their mothers
told them when they had to do the “talk,” the old Acre neighborhood talk that
every mother even with cop sons had to do. The coppers are not your friends.
