What Cop Land can tell us about the police

First off, I had to include this screen shot from the landing page (Cop Landing page?) on our streaming service Stan, rather than a poster for Cop Land, because of how funny I thought it was. For one, I don't think it's an actual still from the movie, or if it is, I don't remember it. It seems more like the actors laughing after a flubbed line. But whether it is or isn't, it gives the impression of a nice, harmonious movie about badge-wearing chums, when in fact, all three of these guys are set up in opposition to each other at one point or another during the narrative, and corruption runs deep. In other words, the mood of Cop Land is not captured in the slightest by this picture.

Secondly I want to tell you that I did not decide to cue up James Mangold's 1997 film on a random Thursday night on holiday to grapple with its portrayal of police, to help me better understand what's going on in the world in 2020. In fact, it had more to do with someone recently using a scene from Cop Land, punctuated by Robert De Niro telling Sylvester Stallone "You blew it!," to comment on a typically befuddling piece of news on Facebook. (I think it was related to John Bolton not doing anything sooner to counteract Trump, but at this point I can't remember -- there's just so many people reacting to so many befuddling actions taken by Trump.)

Thirdly, spoilers for Cop Land to follow.

As I started watching, I realized that Cop Land may have been ahead of its time in one sense, while being very behind it in others:

It posits that all cops are basically bad.

That's not actually how I feel about the police, but it's how a lot of people feel, and justifiably so. The "few bad apples" metaphor is no longer placating people. They've realized that most of them are bad, if not by their own actions then by covering up the misdeeds of others. And even if I feel that "most" is a strong word, I support this perspective because I'd like to see the whole system torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. (And just being the police reporter for a weekly newspaper in Rhode Island nearly 25 years ago is probably not reason enough for me to run to the defense of the good officers I knew back then.)

It was certainly interesting to watch Cop Land in 2020, as it starts out with our actual hero committing multiple crimes. That's the sheriff of the small (fictional) town of Garrison, New Jersey, which looks right over the Hudson at New York. He's played by Sylvester Stallone, and we first meet him extremely drunk at the local cop bar. "Cop bar" is probably redundant, since most of the residents of this town seem to be New York City police officers, who depend on Sheriff Freddy Heflin to look the other way when they speed, drive drunk and commit a hundred other minor or major felonies in town. But who is Freddy to talk? We first meet him opening the parking meter outside the bar so he can get more quarters to play the video game inside. He's then packed into his car by a couple of these corrupt NYC cops, even though he's had about five too many drinks to be driving. Predictably, he swerves to miss a deer and crashes into a tree.

As I said before, this is our protagonist, the guy whose behavior we are supposed to see as a model. After this unfortunate introduction, he does steadily turn into that guy.

But the rest of the police portrayals in this movie are problematic at the very least. Let's start out with the least problematic of these police.

We meet the two other cops in Garrison, the veteran (played by Noah Emmerich) and the newcomer (played by Janeane Garofalo). They are both basically good cops, and she is 100% good, doing everything by the book. But Deputy Cindy Betts up and quits when things get too hot in Garrison, returning to her old job in upstate New York. It's not cowardice that causes her to quit, but rather, a desire to return to police work that is not compromised by giving corrupt cops a break on all their infractions. It should be said, though, that she only comes to this decision when it actually starts seeming dangerous to do this job, which is not a good look for one of only two female officers we meet. (The other is played by Edie Falco, who works for the NYC bomb squad, and gives Ray Liotta's character the supplies he needs to torch his house for the insurance money.)

Emmerich's character is basically just a bit ineffectual. In fact, he chickens out when Freddy sticks his nose too far into affairs that he is repeatedly told don't concern him, and leaves Freddy's side when he starts fearing for his own safety. (He's got a pregnant wife, so we can allow him some latitude.)

Then we've got the IA officers, played by Robert De Niro and Malik Yoba. Yoba is the only vaguely sympathetic black character in the whole movie, but I'll return to that topic later on. As they work for internal affairs, their hands are clean, though I don't suppose that goes without saying. In fact, one character later on (I believe it was Harvey Keitel) explains that the only reason people join IA in the first place is because they get caught on the take, so they are given the choice of joining IA or going to jail. So we are given reason to suspect these two as well -- though of course, anything Keitel's Ray Donlan says should be taken with a grain of salt.

Then we get to the actual corrupt cops, and their degrees of corruption.

Sort of in the middle you have Liotta's Gary Figgis and Michael Rapaport's Murray Babitch. (This is truly an all-star cast, if you haven't figure that out yet.) Liotta only gets to be "in the middle" -- remember, he torched his house for the insurance money, and his girlfriend was unexpectedly caught inside -- because he lost his partner and kind of sidled into corruption that way. He does choose to do the right thing at a certain part of the narrative, but we can't forget his many crimes against humanity. Then there's Murray, who kind of wants to do the right thing and turn himself in after he shoots two young black men after they bump his car and threaten to shoot at him (even though they're only holding a "club," one of those devices we once used to lock our steering wheels). He shoots wildly rather out the window while he's driving, not execution style, so the shootings appear genuinely to be an "accident" (he could argue he was trying to stop the car rather than kill its occupants, I suppose). But his willingness to draw his gun makes him very problematic, as he had already drawn it previously that evening, outside the NYC bar where Robert Patrick's corrupt cop is seen vomiting. He probably thought it was some black guy instead, who could really hurt him. This guy had been ready to shoot someone all night. Even if it wouldn't have been his idea to have his death faked by Keitel pretending he jumped off the George Washington Bridge (which, strangely, had no cars on it other than these two), he's certainly grateful enough for it if it means he won't go to jail.

The really bad cops are played by Patrick, Keitel, John Spencer, Peter Berg and Arthur Nascarella. They are guilty of anything everything: taking bribes, planting evidence, murdering people, drunk driving, speeding. Not necessarily in that order of magnitude. In a more hilarious moment, Patrick tries to plant a machine gun in the car of the two dead black motorists, when the first cops arriving on the scene have already fully investigated the car for the gun Rapaport reported them having. (They're on the up and up, but since we barely get to know them, they aren't really worth mentioning.) It's an absurdly obvious attempt, but then again, Patrick was just vomiting outside that bar a few minutes ago. While most of these guys are "only" guilty of these transgressions, Berg's character is also cheating on his very sweet wife (Annabella Sciorra) with the not-very-sweet wife of Ray Donlan (Cathy Moriarity). (See, I told you everyone was in this.) He's also a violent drunk.

I remember at the time I first saw this, I found it bold and brazen that the film cast such a suspicious eye at such a venerable institution as the police. Don't forget, even with the Rodney King beatings only a few years in the past, people generally supported police officers and the work they did when this movie was released 23 years ago. You were far more likely to get dozens of movies each year in which cops were the uncomplicated heroes, who didn't even open parking meters to steal their quarters. So Cop Land seemed, indeed, quite a risky proposition for a studio to fund.

While it may have been ahead of its time in this regard, it's fallen way behind the times in another, and that was just one of the things that caused me to kind of turn my nose up at it on this viewing.

Simply put, almost all of the black characters in this movie are bad, or at the very least, disagreeable.

Let's start with the two black motorists who bump Rapaport. They are very clearly at fault for this. They bump him either intentionally, because who knows why, or because they are too incapacitated to drive, though it certainly seems more like the former than the latter. When Rapaport catches up to them, they have these exaggerated looks of being criminal punks, with a lot of dreadlocks and a nearly sociopathic indifference to the fact that they are dealing with a guy who is flashing his badge at them. They laugh at him, and this is when they point the club at him to pretend it's a gun. The movie basically gives Murray Babidge every excuse for acting as he did as a response, as he was dealing with people with whom you cannot negotiate.

The next black characters we see are two black motorists who are pulled over in Garrison by Emmerich's character. Freddy Heflin's cruiser is also present. It's not entirely clear what the function of this scene is even supposed to be, though during it, Freddy has a flashback to when he saved Sciorra's character from drowning as a teenager, the heroic feat that made him deaf in one ear. Anyway, the black motorists are very angry at having been given a ticket and they yell at Freddy, breaking him out of his stupor. Their yelling definitely has a haranguing quality to it, like they are "uppity n-words" or something. How could you yell at nice and spacey Sheriff Heflin? the movie seems to ask. (It was also interesting to note the difference between then and now; black motorists would scarcely dare to yell at white police officers in 2020, for fear of being shot on the spot.)

Then you have the character played by Method Man, another criminal who relishes beating up two cops on an NYC rooftop. Like the bump-and-run motorists Rapaport shoots earlier, he is portrayed as Evil with a capital E -- not a scared guy who finds himself in a physical fight with two police officers, but someone who might have sought out that fight so he can taunt and torture them. The extent that he is Dangerous with a capital D is underscored by the fact that he's already subdued Berg's partner, and now is throwing around Berg like a ragdoll, with a big sadistic grin on his face. How can you face an enemy who does not fear for his own life? the movie seems to ask a second time. Although the way Berg's character dies is pinned on Keitel, for delaying his rescue in an attempt to get Berg's character out of the picture, it's Method Man who actually throws Berg over the side of a building, leaving him to hang on an antenna, and fall to his death a minute or so later.

Finally, you have a scene at the end where a random black police officer, no more than an extra, starts mixing it up with someone else for no reason whatsoever, in a scene that otherwise has nothing to do with that. It's like Mangold (who is also the film's writer) specifically chose to put this in just so we could once more be reminded that black people mouth off and are naturally aggressive.

Mangold has become quite a good director, responsible for hits like Logan and Ford v. Ferrari, but back in his second feature, he really had a lot to learn about subtlety. I won't ding him as much as I should for the representation issues, because the climate in that regard was unfortunately a lot different back then -- as evidenced by the fact that I did not even remember this as a racially problematic film. But yeah, this movie is pretty overwrought and simplistic.

However, what no longer seems simplistic -- sadly -- is the film's observations on what percentage of police officers are compromised. This year has taught us that it's not a few bad apples spoiling the bunch, but a bad bunch that came pre-spoiled.