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]    

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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.