Interrogating The Shield

Introduction

1 Introduction Trees Falling Nicholas Ray I In episode 4.1 of The Shield (FX, 2002–2008), “The Cure,” Officer Danny Sofer indulges in a bit of cod philosophy. After senior colleagues fail to materialize at the scene of a drive-by shooting, she addresses a rhetorical question to her partner, Julien Lowe: “If a guy gets shot in the ghetto, but the detectives don’t show up, did the crime really happen?” Flippant as it may be, Sofer’s reworking of the old philosophical question about a tree falling in an uninhabited forest gets to the heart of an essential concern of the entire series. The conundrum of the falling tree, popularly misattributed to the idealist philosopher George Berkeley, opens onto questions that are nonetheless congruent with Berkeley’s thought: Does reality exist independently of perception? Is the existence of an object distinct from its being known? Sofer’s remark, however, shifts the focus of the conundrum from the actuality of a natural event unperceived by human beings to the actuality of an event—a crime—that is itself humanly instigated and humanly known. In doing so, it makes a significant departure from the hackneyed philosophical question it parodies. Her concern is not, obviously enough, with the matter of whether reality exists outside of perception . It is with the ways in which different modalities of perception may constitute and fail to constitute what passes for reality. The centrality of this concern to the very conception of The Shield is made manifest within the first few minutes of the first episode of season 1 (“Pilot”). Here, the “cold open” cuts between a press conference at the 2 | Nicholas Ray Barn—the station house for the police precinct in the Farmington District of Los Angeles—hosted by Captain David Aceveda and the Strike Team’s pursuit of Booty, an African American drug dealer, through a poor shopping area in Farmington. At the press conference, Aceveda lauds the virtues of Farmington policing under his leadership. He makes claims about a fall in violent crime, an increased feeling of safety experienced by local citizens, and the newly sympathetic mode of policing evinced by his “neighborhood outreach programs.” Meanwhile, the Strike Team’s pursuit of Booty gives a very different sense of the police presence in South Central LA. Once Vic Mackey and his men corner the dealer at the back of a Best Buy supermarket, they beat, strip, and aggressively disburden him of his “third ‘nad”—a drug pouch attached to his scrotum. What is most significant about the juxtaposition of Aceveda’s soothing claims for a new era in policing and the brutality of the Strike Team’s metaphorical emasculation of Booty is that both scenes—however much they otherwise contrast—feature internal audiences. Aceveda, naturally enough, is speaking before an invited group of press reporters, whom the captain’s personal assistant thanks for their attendance. However, although the pursuit of Booty has taken him and the Strike Team from the main drag to the rear of the supermarket, the brutality inflicted on the suspect is undertaken in the open. No sooner have we heard Aceveda’s claim to the press about the increased safety enjoyed by “local families” than we cut to a Hispanic family looking down on Booty’s humiliation from their balcony. The Strike Team members are unperturbed by the family’s presence—so much so that in a gesture that rhymes ironically with the assistant’s expression of gratitude to the reporters, Mackey’s final act in the sequence is to address to his informal audience a sarcastic “Buenos días!” The contrast established in The Shield’s first cold open is not, then, as one might initially expect, between the public face and the private face of Farmington policing—between the division’s overt and regulated presentation to the community and its covert tactics behind closed doors. Rather than the predictable opposition between public and private, the fundamental contrast established here is between public and public. The Strike Team’s treatment of Booty—antithetical to the model of policing peddled to the media by Aceveda—does not take place beyond the Introduction | 3 community’s gaze. It is perceived, it is known, it is witnessed. But what the cold open stresses is the differential authority that inheres respectively in Aceveda’s audience and Mackey’s. The brute reality of the Strike Team’s tactics goes...