Title: Behind the Badge: A Cop's Take on Must-Watch Cop Movies

Original Publication Date: 12/20/2023

Transcript URL: https://share.descript.com/view/LDqmp2b3zG7

Description: Former Spokane Police Captain Frank Scalise takes us on a cinematic journey in our latest episode, sharing his top picks for cop movies. Tune in as he delves into these thrilling tales and discusses the impact these films have had on law enforcement. From classics to modern gems, get ready for an inside look at the silver screen's portrayal of policing. #CopMovies #PodcastEpisode #LawEnforcementCinema

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Begin Transcript:

I'd like to welcome back Frank, now officially a made member of the Organized Crime and Punishment crew. I'd also like to spend out special thanks in this episode to another member of our crew, Joe Pascone of the Turning Tides. History podcast for providing the voiceover for the new Organized Crime and Punish promotional audio.

You'll be hearing more from Joe in the future. To find out more about Joe, Frank, and our crew, look for links in the show notes. Uh, Frank, maybe, I don't know if we've gotten into this too much, but maybe you could, uh, this might be a good time to drop if there's any plugs you want to do, uh, now that you're a made man on to some of your other projects.

The action I got going on on the side there, is that you mean I don't know if I want to tell you that I'll have to kick up a little more. Um, well, I mean, I, I think the reason that, that, that you invited me to come on the show [00:01:00] occasionally is my law enforcement background, which we talked about before, uh, 20 years of, of, of being a police officer, about half of it on the street and about half of it in leadership roles.

And then, uh, about 4 years teaching leadership in the U. S., all over the U. S. and Canada after that. And, and so that gave me a pretty wide perspective that, that I think at times can be valuable. Other times I don't know anything. But, um, in addition to that, I also write crime fiction. I write greedy crime fiction from both sides of the badge, as Frank Zaffiro.

And so, uh, I've written about 40 books, some are police procedurals, some are hard boiled, some are private detective novels. Uh, pretty much unless it's a cozy, if you like mystery, I've got it for you. Um, and people can check out frank safiro. com and learn more if they're interested. Awesome. Frank mustache.

Chris and I are today are going to tap into and lean into Frank's cop background with a show today of our [00:02:00] favorite police movies, cop movies. And these movies we really get, we get crime, we get punishment, we get drama and really everything else you want from entertainment out of these great movies. And I think we will eventually discuss the corollary of the Cop movie, the corollary to the cop movie genre, the cop television procedural, that's a different episode for a different day.

Before we dive into it, I'll share a little, uh, anecdote I had about police movies. I was sitting in a, I was at a party with a friend of mine, and he had all of his cop buddies there. And I just asked, I was like, what do you think about cop movies? And they all kind of, like, groaned, because. They didn't, they did cop stuff all day.

They didn't really want to go and watch it as entertainment. And I wonder, what did you, what do you feel about that? When you watch them, are you able to watch them and kind of separate the professional side of you and just enjoy them? Yeah, I always was. I [00:03:00] mean, I used to joke that. You know, when you're trying to get on the job and then your 1st year on the job, you would watch the TV show cops all the time when you were off duty.

And then by the time you've been on the job for about a year, you never watch it again in your life. Unless it's a training video at the academy or something that they use because it's a busman's holiday. But it's not, the same is not true with, uh, with good television shows and definitely not with good movies.

I always enjoyed a good police related movie. I mean, I got to be particular about mistakes at times, although, you know, you can overlook that if the story's good and all that. Um, but just like any profession, you pick out the things that aren't, aren't real. Uh, but I, yeah, it wasn't ruined for me at all. I, I still enjoyed good police movies.

I think I hated bad movies. That were police related more after I came on the job than I did before, but I still loved good cop movies. So we're going to start right with [00:04:00] you, Frank. What are your top cop movies? Well, I only picked two for the purposes of this discussion, just to, to keep things. From going on for six hours, uh, because we all love this topic so much.

And, and so just picking two is, I mean, picking 20 would be easier. Um, but I decided to go with, uh, the two coasts of corruption. I went with Copland, which is set in, uh, New York and New Jersey. And I went with training day, which is set in Los Angeles. So completely over on the other side of the country. So why don't you start off with which I could talk about Copland all day and eventually we'll have an even an episode that Chris and I did on Copland.

Let it rip with which one you want to go with. Well, I mean, before I get into either one, I think pointing out that both of them have some similar themes. Um. Is, is interesting to me. I mean, both of them feature corruption, both at [00:05:00] the individual and the systemic level, you know, level, um, you know, all of these cops are, are working within a broken system.

Um, and then at the same time, they also have cops within the system who are trying to play within the rules and, or bring down the bad guys. I mean, in, in Copland, you've got. Obviously, Freddy, the character played by Stallone, he's trying to do the right thing, and he idolizes all those other cops, you know, and he's trying to, to be a good cop.

And then, uh, in Training Day, you've got, uh, uh, Officer Hoyt, played by Ethan Hawke, who is trying like hell to impress. This, you know, narcotics sergeant, so he can make the team and, and take the next step in his career. Uh, but when he figures out what's actually going on, he, he rejects it and he tries to do the right thing.

So even though they explore corruption and, and as a police officer, uh, and, and having been around cops, like I said, I mean, all over the U S and Canada, it was always the same [00:06:00] thing. They hated to hear about, you know, corruption and they didn't like to see it in movies and stuff. Um, but you know, When you have some balance in it, you know, I think it makes for a much better film.

I mean we did a podcast on copland right and uh to be honest when we did record that podcast I hadn't watched in a really long time and so long to be honest with you was uh I just knew it's like oh this was like the stallone doing the serious movie type thing or doing like the role that he typically doesn't do and then When we watched it for the podcast, I watched it several times and um Yeah.

Like I was blown away by just how well done it was. And in particular his acting and then training day I find is it's weird because at the beginning of the movie, you kind of, kind of liked Denzel Washington's character to a degree. Kind of, come on. You fell in love with him. You wanted to have his children at the beginning of the movie.

And then you see [00:07:00] though, like you kind of see. Slowly, like, it's like a peeling of an onion, right? Like, which is kind of how corruption itself actually works, right? Like, it's like the surface level of it, and it's, oh, you don't, you don't think much of it. It's like, oh, it's something you can just kind of overlook, right?

Like, oh, you know, like, um, my girlfriend doesn't like folding the laundry or something like that. You know, it's not, it's not a big deal, right? But then you peel another piece and it's like, oh, okay, this is making me question a little bit, right? And then you peel another piece. And then by the time you get to it, you see, okay, Or at the end of it, just how disgustingly corrupt Denzel Washington is.

And even within like a community that pretty much functions on criminality, they're like, we just, we can't even deal with this guy anymore. That's how corrupt he was. And in a lot of ways it shows, shows like how corruption affects A, the individual, but it also affects the entire community, um, um, that it's being perpetrated on.

And then [00:08:00] Copland, I mean with Copland, I think that the, one of the themes that keeps Coming through with me is, Freddy always felt like he won the, the, not even the second place prize, he thought he won the third place prize, that he was in the minor leagues, that he could only define himself as if he was a New York City cop, because a All those other people in the, in all the other New York City cops, I mean, he was like, he didn't even exist because he wasn't on on the force.

And that, that whole thing that he could be who he was in his role. I mean, it's almost a, uh, For a police procedural movie. I don't know. It's on. You can almost can't leave that movie without a tear in your eye. Oh, for sure. For sure. For, for several characters. And the interesting thing about the character of Freddie that Stallone plays, I think you hit it right on the head.

He sees the major league as being a New York. An NYPD officer, [00:09:00] and because he did the right thing, he saved a woman's life, you know, at jumping into the water and rescuing her and had his, his eardrum busted permanently as a result. And now he can't be an NYPD police officer. Uh, you know, he sees that. You know, as the pinnacle and he's been, yeah, he's in the minors.

He's a double a player at best in his mind. And they prey on that. These, these, these few officers who are corrupt. I mean, I'm not going to tell you, oh, it's just NYPD. Hell no. Of course it's not. But these officers are corrupt in this movie. And, and, you know, uh, Harvey Keitel and, you know, and all of them, he's kind of the ring later.

They prey on his, Psychosis, they prey on the psychology that he's going through and give him what he wants, even though it's, you know, only a shadow of what he wants. And I think that that kind of, uh, manipulative behavior. I mean, that's very mob like, isn't it guys? I mean, isn't that what you see [00:10:00] in that?

Setting as well, I think that things exactly what they were going for that movie. It was pretty it was a mob like a mafia of cops, right within their own version of America where nobody talked. And if you were going to talk to, you know, they were going to kill you, which is what happened to Ray Liotta's.

Partner, it's not made, I don't, I can't remember if it was made explicit in the movie, but it was hinted at that that's what Harvey Keitel's character did is, you know, took care of him before he talked, right? The interesting thing about Copland 2, and you mentioned Freddy's character, is, yeah, he's a small town cop, like, in a sheriff, in a small town, but In terms of fighting corruption, it really does start at that level.

It starts with just your regular everyday Joe saying, like, we're not doing this anymore. And people say, like, oh, like, you know, what's that going to do? It's just like one person, but like, one person kind of setting an example inspires other. People who do things too. And then before you know it, it, it's not just a couple of people doing [00:11:00] it.

It's a bunch of people doing it. And once it's a bunch of people talking about it, then something has to be done about it. You know, are you going to solve police corruption by doing that? No, you're not going to solve it, but you can stop. You can stop it with it. Maybe in that circumstance and. It's a never ending battle.

It sounds cliche, but you know, you know, liberty is not free. Like, it's constantly, you have to constantly fight for it. And in terms of, uh, fighting corruption in the police force or in our government agencies, you can't just, you have to constantly fight against it because otherwise you have what happens in, um, Cop land where you have this little cadre of mafia cops is basically what I would call them.

Um, running the show and doing just horrible things to like fellow cops and the community around them. Ironically, that sort of participation and vigilance and shining some light on on behavior. Uh, it's the exact same formula formula for trying to stop crime, uh, you [00:12:00] know, community involvement and people willing to testify and shining a light on it and so forth.

And it's also a never ending battle. I mean, you're never going to as a police officer. You're never going to show up at work and see the chief lock in the front door and say, what's going on? Uh, we're done. Crime's done. We're finished. Go find a new job. You know, I mean, that's never going to happen. Right?

So it's interesting that. Right. To hear you describe that and that that's what's going through my mind is yeah, that's exactly the same formula for for fighting crime. It's a persistence and and an ethical awareness and people being willing to to make a difference. Quickly, though, let's not dump and I know we neither of you were intending to, but let's not dump on small town cops at all.

I mean, the reality is, is the majority of police are on a medium to small size police department, um, in the U. S. Anyway, the majority of cops serve on a department that's medium sized or less. I don't remember what number defines that, but we're not talking about hundreds of people. [00:13:00] In that size of an agency, and there is a different form of policing that takes place.

That might be a different discussion for a different day. But when you're a county detective with backup 30 minutes out, it's a little bit different style of policing than what we saw in Copland, where when the guy's fighting on the roof, there's 12 guys coming in squad cars. You know, a minute and a half away, so just something to think about out there and the folks, it's a different sort of world, depending on where and how you end up policing to bounce off of that.

I think that that's what Copland set the dichotomy so well of that. The city is always in the background. And as far as I know, there's no place in New Jersey. That's a small Right. Right. Village essentially right across the street or right across the river from the city, but they got that so well that the small town versus the big city, even if it doesn't actually [00:14:00] exist in reality to, to draw that really stark dichotomy.

It, you know, it wouldn't have been the same if they lived three hours away in Pennsylvania, where it would really have been that way to show. This is their town. That's all that's right on the river. And you can see the city in the backdrop. I think that was one of the most clever things of the movie is it always kept it in your mind.

Yeah, it did. And he always knew that dichotomy was very starkly drawn and, and constantly reinforced. And I thought they did a pretty tremendous job of that. Um, it, it does, uh, well, I'll talk about this more when we get to, to, to training day, but it does bring up the issue of, um, how like those cops from, from New York, in addition to how Freddie saw them, they kind of saw themselves.

As elite and for being part of NYPD and a certain amount of, of entitlement came with that. And, [00:15:00] and, uh, I think some of that was bred from the corruption that they were enjoying, uh, and also, of course, like I said, for being part of the a team, essentially, um, and, and of course that's, you know, that's not a good trait, right?

That's not something that we admire. But these same guys are dealing with stuff in the city every day, uh, you know, that is horrible, right? They're in the, in the trenches up to their knees, battling through the muck and the mire of, of that job. And it's not like that every day. It's not like that all day long every day, but it's like that most days, some of the day, if that makes sense.

And, and when you experience that day after day, after day, after day. Even if you work in a decent city, it's still you're dealing with the under world of that city. Essentially, the under parts of it, people at their worst or the worst people depending. So, what do you end up wanting as as an [00:16:00] individual?

You want your family to not experience that. And 1 way that you don't experience that. Is if you don't live in the same place, and so a lot of cops live out in the suburbs, they live somewhere else. Like these cops, they lived in Garrison, New Jersey, which I assume is a made up town, or at least the was depicted fictionally, um, you know, a nice town where people can, you know, not lock their doors and all that.

And, you know, and all that kind of stuff. Um, and that's great. Everybody wants something better. Their family for their families, and I'm all for it, but it has an interesting side effect. And. Yeah. And I don't know if this really came out so much in Copland, but, but the, the danger of it was, was right there.

And that is when you don't live where you police and where you live is dramatically different than where you police, then there is a loss of. Connectivity with your community that you're policing. There's a lot loss of of understanding. There's a [00:17:00] detachment that takes place and and and that can lead to more distance.

And anytime there's distance between the police and the community that they serve. Um, it's never good. It's not necessarily, it doesn't cause corruption necessarily, but it, it does make policing more difficult. Uh, if you disconnect from the community, the community disconnects from you. And suddenly people aren't calling when things happen.

They're not testifying. They're not getting, you know, willing to, to go as far in terms of being a witness. Um, You know, programs that you might try to start to make things better, get lukewarm reception and maybe not the greatest level of involvement. Um, you know, I mean, everybody's been in a relationship where the other person checked out and you can figure out that we're not going to be friends anymore.

We're not going to date anymore pretty soon because they're already gone. Right? I mean, there's even an eagle song about it. So I would, I would hum it here, but you'd get struck on a copyright violation. So I [00:18:00] won't do it, but. Okay. You know, the community can sense that from an agency too. And so when you see these guys set up over in garrison and you see what kind of, you know, junk they have to deal with in the city, you can kind of understand their desire to do that, to have a better life.

And I get that. I totally get that. And I'm not saying they shouldn't have done that. Um, but I think it does bring a whole new set of problems with it that can be bad. It can be bad for our community. So, um, that's just one of the things I noticed that I didn't really think about. When I watched it the first 12 or 13 times when I watched it recently, uh, uh, I did it occurred to me, uh, because I was in a different place experientially.

And so those are some of the thoughts that go through my head. Um, so I don't know, does this, does this concept make sense or Sparking up a death tree, Steve. Here we are, a member of the Parthenon Podcast Network, featuring great shows like James [00:19:00] Earley's, key Battles of American History Podcast, and many other great shows.

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Uh, to me, you basically described about like, uh, communities not feeling like in a connection to the police force or the state authorities. You basically set up the scenario in which the mafia can thrive. That's exactly how it happened in New York, in places like Brownsville, where, I mean, a lot of the times we just finished, uh, we're finishing, well, releasing, finishing our series on Murder, Inc.

And a lot of the time was They didn't trust the cops, you know, they grew up in poverty. They didn't trust the government either, right? Because they lived in some of the worst conditions and, you know, the modern world at the time. In the world, you could argue too, uh, because of how cramped the spaces were and.

The lack of sanitation, they just looked at all authorities and be like, we're doing, we don't trust [00:20:00] any of them. So like, even if a cop wanted to go in there and like, try to make a difference, good luck. This is not going to happen. And then who comes in and replaces that, uh, the authority that the state and the.

the police force is supposed to have it becomes the gangs really it's like oh you don't want your shop burned down well you got to pay this tax for us right otherwise this is going to happen to your shop or this is what's going to happen to your brother oh you need a loan to get something oh come to me you know Here's the problem though.

It's like, we're going to charge you a 40%, you know, interest. And if you don't pay, if you don't even cover the, the VIG payments, uh, yeah, we're going to break your fingers and, uh, beat your wife up. But doesn't that, doesn't that come later though, Chris? I mean, doesn't it start with, Oh, that guy, Steve is messing with you.

I'll take care of it. Like that's what it starts with. And then it's like, then it, then it gets to the, probably you should just give me some money to take care of it on an ongoing basis for you. And then, you know, but it [00:21:00] almost like we, we, we talked about noble cause corruption on a different episode about how cops start doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

Basically to put bad guys in jail, the guys they know are very bad in jails. Yeah. So they don't get off on a technicality that might be the first transgression that happens, but then it progresses because it can be a slippery slope. I think the same thing's true in the mob, isn't it? I mean, I mean, even if you go back to Italy, it basically they brought order and they brought resolution to problems.

They brought safety to people initially. Um, and then, of course, yeah. It became corrupt and it became, you know, extortion and it became, you know, all the other bad things that that the mob does. So, uh, it's interesting. Basically, human nature is human nature. I think is what it comes down to. I think so much of what you said to about the sense of community.

Where if you are living in the community, like I've seen it in a slightly different way of teaching in the [00:22:00] neighborhood school where my kids went to that school, their friends went to school, and it could, even in that situation, there was some really awesome things about it. And really did it, it broke down some of those barriers of the authority and this.

And, you know, you became friends with the parents, they were your neighbors, they were your shopkeepers, your, you know, the person who did your breaks, all that, you know, everybody was leveled out the playing field in a lot of ways. But then there, it did also cause some awkwardness where you could see where some of that noble, uh, corruption could sneak in.

Oh, I can, can I really give, uh, so and so's kid a bad grade when they're, you know, my, uh, a good friend or, I mean, uh, getting Uh, cornered. Oh, can you talk about this or that? And I think with police, it would get amped up even more because it do you really want to live in a neighborhood where you could be potentially, you know, especially in maybe a higher crime neighborhood where you might have [00:23:00] to be locking up a lot of people.

I think there could be a lot of really good benefits to that. And there could be a lot of really, uh, negative outcomes. And I could see where some people want to keep a separation there. But the thing is that, you know, it's easy to think of a person as a stereotype. Oh, he's an Italian. Um, oh, he's, uh, uh, whatever an Irishman though.

She's, she's French or whatever. He's a teacher. She's a cop. Uh, you know, he, he works at a recycling plant, you know, I mean, you can, you can just decide that's a, that's the stereotype and you can, you know, really easily decide how you want to feel about that person. And, and, you know, but. When you know the person is an individual, it's a lot harder to sell yourself on anything that isn't true.

That's not, you know, that's not accurate. And so one of the things that's great about community policing or whatever iteration that they're calling it at this stage now, I've been out of the game for [00:24:00] a decade, you know, neighborhood policing, you know, whatever you want to call it, is that now people know Steve, not officer Guerra, right?

They know. Chris, not Officer Daniels, they know Frank, not Sergeant Scalise. I put myself in charge 'cause I have more experience, . Um, so it's, it, problem solving is different when, when you know somebody, even, even a little bit, even if you have the tiniest bit of commonality and, and so that's the benefit of being within the community.

So when you don't have that, you have to, as a police officer, you have to try ho hopefully you do anyway. You have to try to. Discover that commonality, uh, you know, I mean, if they've got a picture, if they've got, you know, Native American picture up on the wall, you know, and you are also, you know, maybe that's your history area, then you can, you know, broach that topic.

I mean, I'm not talking about the middle of a drag out fight, but you're there on a [00:25:00] call, right? Anything to create commonality, because then. The problem solving becomes easier. And I think, and I think in Freddie's case, that would have been all of the policing that he did. He knew everybody in that town.

Everybody knew him, but in New York, I mean, these guys live in care. So they, they're only there when they're working. They're in cars. They're not walking a beat. I don't know that. That it necessarily is quite as effective. It may. You know, I may be a little pie in the sky. We're never going to go back to officer Joe on the beat.

But boy, if we could find a way to bridge the gap between where we are and that, I think we'd be in a better place when it comes to policing and everything that surrounds it, the effectiveness of the police, police corruption or scandals when they do happen people's. Quality of life. I mean, it would just, it would be more like Garrison, New Jersey, where these guys want to live than it would be in some of the rougher places in New York.

Let's, uh, shift gears to training day. And, uh, how does [00:26:00] that fit in? It's a lot the same, I think. And that's kind of why I picked it. The biggest difference though, is so the corruption that's taking place in Copland is a reaction to the policing life and a desire for a better life. And then it, of course, it becomes about self aggrandizement and, you know, self enrichment as well, but that's where it starts.

And that's mostly what it's about, um, in training day. You know, Alonzo Harris does what he does to put bad guys in jail. That's his creed, right? That's what he does. And when Ethan Hawke calls him on it, he gets offended and he lists out judges of, you know, put, you know, have, have given out. This ungodly number of years of prison sentences on cases that he's worked and, and everything he's doing is about either putting bad guys into jail or bettering the life of the community that he's policing.

Um, even if sometimes that community is, as Chris [00:27:00] very rightfully pointed out, just beset with criminality. I mean, he's, he's crooked, but I don't know that he's a completely bad guy. I mean, 1 thing that people. Need to remember when they watch that movie is the actions. He takes during that day is actually a response to the fact that he went to Vegas and popped off his mouth and lost some money and made the Russians mad and they put out a hit on him and he was trying to buy off the hit.

And so he does a lot of corrupt things, a lot of very corrupt things. But essentially it's to save his own life is how he sees it. I'd be curious to see a different training day where maybe before he went to Las Vegas, how similar it would be. It would be very similar up to a point because his habits and his behaviors were, were, were what he did all the time.

It was clear, but his attitude was. You got to be a wolf to catch a wolf, you know, and, and that's not an uncommon attitude among a lot of [00:28:00] police. And I don't know that it's a wrong attitude entirely. One of my favorite television seasons, probably the best season of television of all time is a true detective season one, my humble.

And there's a line in there where, or one character is feeling bad about some decisions that he's made. And he, he asks the other character, the. He asks, uh, Matthew McConaughey, a character arrest goal. Do you ever think you're a bad man? And Russ tells him the people need bad men. Marty, we keep the other bad men from the door.

I mean, that's almost word for word, beat for beat. You gotta be a wolf to catch a wolf from training day. And so this corruption is. Is more based on what they're trying to accomplish. And I want to touch on that a little more deeply, but I don't want to go too far, too fast. How many times have me and you argued about the receiver?

There's a part of me that's just like, you know what? Like you go into places like Baltimore and Detroit, and it's just [00:29:00] like, you know what, you're not going to fix this problem. Like, can you, you need a sledgehammer to actually fix this problem. And it, at the end of the day, like sometimes people, it gets almost.

Well, some people willingly take the burden, but in a lot of ways it can be a burden. It's like, I have to be the sledgehammer, because who else is, who else is going to be the sledgehammer in the face of this, this There's absolutely debauchery and criminality that's going on in this community. Like I have to at least if I could stop it here, or at least it's not at least I can keep it from spreading in other places.

And Steve, you're you're you have more so like a libertarian Ben. So you're. Always terrified of, you know, the state having too much power, uh, organizations having too much power. And I mean, I get it like to a degree where I'm like, I, I see, I see the problems with that, right? I've, my opinion's always been like, well, if they start having a problem, then the people can just get rid of the people that are causing the problem.

But you, it was, I don't know, I go [00:30:00] back and forth with it all the time, where it's just like, there's a, in some ways I understand Denzel's character. It's just like, yeah, like if you're gonna fight a bunch of wolves, like you have to be the biggest, baddest wolf to be able to tame all these wolves, right?

And I think some people, I think they don't get it fully. Like I, I, you know, like, like I grew up in Toronto, so I didn't grow up in a place like Detroit or anything like that, right? But I grew up like. You know, like a lot of my friends end up becoming criminals and stuff like that, and then you're dealing with, you're around these people and you're dealing with this, and I, there's a lot of eye in the pie type solutions to these problems I find where people are like, well, if you just do this and you do this, and if the cops did this, and I'm like, like, sometimes it just, it literally takes a billy bat across the face and like arresting people, you know, like just literally removing the problem.

For the community to even have a chance, but I mean, that's probably a really controversial opinion, but that's how I feel sometimes, but I understand the, the concern of, [00:31:00] you know, police using excessive force or the state using excessive force, because in a lot of ways they, you know, it's cliche, but it's the truth, right?

In a lot of ways, they're the most powerful mafia, you know, they can print their own money. You know, they have their own army, but people, it's funny because if, if, like, if, if somebody goes zoom in down your block and then a police car goes zoom in after him and stops and writes him a ticket, you're cheering, right?

Write that mother a ticket, you know, write that Humpty Humper a ticket, right? You're all, you know, um, and that extends to some guys being a total jack wagon and a. Or something and takes a poke at somebody and shows up and mounts off to the cops and takes a swing at the cops and gets pig piled, you know, as we used to call it and, you know, ends up on the ground with, you know, about 6 knees holding him down and gets cuffed up and thrown in a car and taken to jail.

People probably cheer the. Cars, it drives away. I mean, people's sense of justice is pretty, is pretty well. I mean, unless you start [00:32:00] having philosophical discussions with them, but the, in the moment sense of justice is pretty well developed. It's pretty keen. And, and so the question that comes to me with this, with this movie training day is, is.

You know, he's engaged in corrupt behavior. That's one side of the coin. But the other side of the coin is how much of society is willing to accept that behavior in order to get the result. Like when we talked about noble cause corruption, a lot of times it goes when it, when it goes off the rails and goes really far, you've got absently T absentee leadership.

That's really not paying attention to anything except the results, you know, drugs and money on the table stats, you know. Uh, arrests community and happy about whatever. Um, the community is kind of the same way. I think about some things that the cops are getting it done. They almost don't care, you know, what, you know, it's just a bunch of criminals.

I mean, if somebody happened to get smacked upside the head. You know, when they didn't [00:33:00] deserve it, I can live with that sort of attitude. I think, I mean, and so in this movie, it just makes me think about the question. What does society want? They want justice at what cost, you know, what, and everybody's answer is different, of course, right?

Everybody's, if we pulled the three of us, we'd have three different answers. If there were 300 people on this broadcast there. Be 300 different answers where that line is at and training day does a really good job of, I think, drawing you in, you, you talked about liking Alonzo and I teach you about loving him.

I loved him. Like he's the coolest dude ever for like, it's a two hour movie and for like, um, 90 minutes. He's a God. You know, he's funny. He's charming. I mean, Denzel's a handsome man. Obviously, he's good looking guy. So very charismatic, very cinematic. Uh, and what he's doing makes sense to your basic sense of justice, doesn't it?

I mean, did he do anything that you thought was over the top? Until when, when did he do [00:34:00] something that you felt was too far? You know, probably when he faked the search warrant to steal the money from that, that woman who had the kid did the fake raid. Do you remember that part there? That was probably where most people go.

Oh, I think I'm out. I think he's a bad guy now. But prior to that. Most people were probably like, yeah, well, you know, that guy, he tried to rape that girl in the alley. So he got whacked in the grind by, you know, by, by the butt of a gun. He's lucky that he didn't go to jail or get 1 of those, you know, get, get it shot off or something.

Right? Um, and so where, where's that line and they do a really good job. I think of. Taking you down the road and seeing how far down that road. You'll go with them before you look for an exit. Yeah, you, you mentioned about like, how far would we be willing to go? Like, if somebody told me, and this is just all theoretical, right?

It's like, Hey, and your neighborhood, we can get rid of all the fentanyl. We can get rid of all the crack, get rid of all the math, right? We [00:35:00] just going to have to be allowed to do this, this and this and this. If they provided the results, I'd be like, It's not a bad deal. It's a part of me that goes like, that's not a bad deal, but what's this, this, and this, like, what, what would you have that kind of that's there's there and lies to me.

It's like, if you got the results, like, there's no fentanyl on the streets anymore. There's no. Okay. So I'm going to, uh. I'm gonna assassinate every drug dealer until all of them leave the neighborhood. Are you okay with that? That's a long, that's a long pause, Chris. I just dunno what I should say because I know, I know what my answer is, but I, I mean,

Steve here again with a quick word from our sponsors. I started at the wrong end of the spectrum, Steve. It should. I should have started with, I'm gonna go and t verbally her, all the drug dealers to me. I'd be like, yeah, it's perfectly fine. Shoot the drug dealers. But what if you dial it back a notch [00:36:00] and you just, the team is around the table and they say that it's, the people who are doing this are predominantly teenagers from the age of 17 to 23 and they're of a certain race, is it okay to roust every single person of that, that fits that profile?

Is that, you know, would that be acceptable? And shake them down no matter what, you know, like basically essentially profiling. I mean, in our democratic country with civil rights and I mean, we have the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. No, but in a place like Singapore, they don't care and they don't have drugs on the streets like we do, you know, it's just employees think they profile behavior more than anything.

So, you know, if, if those individuals with whatever age group or whatever, uh, demographic racially or, or whatever, if they're on a known drug [00:37:00] corner, making frequent contacts with, Okay. People coming and going, that's the focus, right? Not necessarily the other factors. But, but I think your point, Steve is, is.

A wonderful one, because it really clearly defines what we're talking about here. You're giving up some freedoms and not your own, by the way, somebody else's in order for everybody to have safety. And how much of that are you willing to do? And in the movie, yeah, I think that that's kind of what we have to ask ourselves.

They're trying to get drugs off the street. Well, what are you willing to do to do that? Are you, are you willing to allow a guy like Scott Glenn's character to basically operate unimpeded for years because he gives you information and he doesn't sell to kids? And he, you know, he has this code that you're okay with.

Is that acceptable? Cause you're never going to get drugs off the street, right? So why not try to control it a little bit? Yeah. Um, now I'm being rhetorical here. I'm not actually saying that's what we should do, but some people would be like, yeah, that's a necessary evil. [00:38:00] That was a smart play on their part.

Um, is that okay? I mean, there's a lot of questions that it brings up. And I just, I think it's a fantastic movie from that perspective too. And it's a never ending discussion, honestly, like I go back and forth with it all the time, like, uh, but. I, I'm not going to lie, like I kind of lean towards stuff, especially with like drug related and, um, stuff like murder and obviously murder and stuff like that.

Like really serious crimes. I mean, do what's necessary to get the stuff off the streets. You know, people, I don't know, people talk about like, uh, terms of drug use. And like a lot of times, like people, I think there's certain people that just kind of gravitate towards it, but there's also people that are just like, they're at a party and they try something and.

Yeah. They're hanging out with a couple people and they try it a couple more times and then all of a sudden they're hooked, you know, and that's if that just wasn't, and if that was difficult to get, which is unlike what goes on society now. [00:39:00] If that was actually somewhat difficult to get for the average person, a lot of those scenarios just wouldn't happen.

I think what you describe is that, for the most part, drug use, more than the physical effects of addiction, Is it's habitual and a lot of the research shows that is when people get into drugs, it's, it, it's a habit and it's their lifestyle. And it's a lot of the, the best programs that get people off of drugs.

I interviewed another author, Sam Quinones, who, uh, was really a big fan of a program in, I want to say was somewhere in Appalachia or Appalachia, uh, where he said that. They put people in prison and they had guards and psychologists who just trained people on how to operate in a society where they're not on drugs.

Well, I don't want to, uh, [00:40:00] to, uh, spend all the time on just these two movies. So, uh, before we move on, I do want to ask everybody, uh, favorite quotes from each movie, favorite lines, um, Copland, Steve. Without a doubt, it would have to be, well, uh, there's so many of them that I use, uh, in for a penny and for a pound Ray, but, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the diagonal rule following, you can follow somebody from, uh, ahead of them as much as you can from tailing them.

And then, um, and I, I'm probably, I might be stealing somebody else's is being right. Isn't a bulletproof vest. Oh, my goodness. I tell you Yoda. Does he not own that line? Oh my, you know, that's, I don't think that's the best line in Copland. That's the, that is the best line. That's a, a motto you should live by lip being right is not a bulletproof vest.

And he delivers it with such like. So emphatically and with [00:41:00] frustration too, it's like, he's trying to get somebody to understand, you know, being, you know, being right. Isn't a bulletproof vest, Freddie, you know, and he comes at him hard with it, you know, and, and that is, that is my favorite line. Um, but. I will take another one then.

Um, because Robert De Niro has a very understated but extremely important role in this movie. And, you know, I went, go to lunch, you know, and he freaks out at everything . And, and when, when Stallone comes back and tries to, uh, give him the information now, and he, he's got the sandwich and he's like, not.

Worried about it anymore. And he goes, you know, we came to you and he goes, you know, you had a chance to do something and you blew it. And just the way that De Niro delivers that line and he's waving the sandwich. It's like, it's just, it's a great, it's great. I, I really enjoyed that line. You have a favorite line for the movie, Chris.

Not so much a line, I'd say more so a scene. I think it's when, uh, Ray Liotta's character comes over to Frank's place and he's [00:42:00] laying low for a bit, and Frank realizes like, like, Ray Liotta's character's doing blow in the bathroom, like his own bathroom, and it's just kind of like a realization where Frank has such a good, like, Freddy.

It's Freddy. Sorry, yeah, sorry, yeah, sorry. Freddy has such a good moral, uh, Compass in the sense like this is wrong, but he I think it's like a revelation to him to do a degree where it's like sometimes you know what I have to work with people that might not might not necessarily be as good as me or have the same moral compass as me to achieve.

Uh, a better good, and just because somebody might be bad in this scenario, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're entirely bad, which is, you know, kind of what we find out during the movie, right? And that's pretty much real life, too, in a lot of ways. I get, I have a very strong sense of right and wrong, a moral compass.

Now, I might not be right about that all the time, but I And to me, it's, it's pretty strong. Like, I don't, uh, it doesn't fluctuate all that much, but [00:43:00] sometimes I have to catch myself where I'm judging somebody because they're doing something wrong and think to myself, I'm like, well, I gotta be able to be a little bit flexible here sometimes, you know?

And, um, I just think that seems like a perfect place. Well, Freddy has to be too, doesn't he? He, he washes it off the, the mirror. He doesn't confront him. He doesn't. Arrest him. Um, he shows that he's able to, I mean, that's corrupt. That's a little corrupt. I mean, he shows that he's not a perfect individual.

And, and I love that about. The movie, because it shows that it's not a light switch. You know, there are degrees of somebody being corrupt and in whatever profession that they're in. And Freddy is at the very light end of the spectrum, but that's still a corrupting. He also knew figs. He. Blew up his own house.

I mean, he might not have been able to prove it, but he knew it and he didn't say anything. So, you know, he, he had a little bit of corruption too, just not enough to allow somebody to get killed. You know, he wasn't going to let a murder [00:44:00] Superboy. Right. So, uh, I think that's a great scene. That's a good. I think just a part of it too is where unlike say like the other characters or they they see the corruption and it doesn't like they know that they're being corrupt and it's not affecting them where you can see that it's literally eating freddie away inside that he is participating in this yeah yeah he's conflicted with and I have no choice right and.

Um, I think that's like, that was the biggest difference to me, like, and that that scene kind of perfectly represents it. And to me, that's what separated him the most from all the other characters were like, a lot of the corruption. It wasn't eating away at it. At the other guys were Friday was, you can literally see it on his body.

I think that's why I still don't gain weight for the role. And, you know, he didn't look as jacked as he usually did because it was, I think he was physically showing. That this, that, that the corruption was literally eating away at him. And if he didn't do something about it, I mean, eventually he probably, maybe he would have killed himself.

I don't know. Well, that is a very [00:45:00] insightful view of that character in that scene. I think, I don't think a lot of people would have picked that scene as being as pivotal as, as you've pointed it out to be, but I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. I do. Before we move on to training day quotes, I did want to point out Ray Liotta's character Figgs.

He has a little bit of a redemption arc too. So you've got the cops who are outright corrupt. And you've got Freddie, who's outright not just a maybe slightly tiny bit flawed and then you got fixed. It was 1 of them, but now he's trying to get out and he's got to decide if he's going to do what's best for him, or if he's going to do the right thing.

And ultimately he backs Freddie up and he does the right thing. Um, and so that's to me, that's a redemption arc. And I think that's a, I think that sends a pretty powerful message too, but. Training day favorite favorite quote from training day. Chris, do you want to start since you had to go through it last time?

Uh, the King Kong quote. I mean, that's, that's like, that's the best line in the entire movie, right? [00:46:00] Like it's, uh, I mean, it's just so, I don't know. It's just so bad ass, you know, but it's, it's not that as the same time. Cause it's, I don't know. It's this guy's like making one last stand. And in some ways it's pretty pathetic too.

Right. Where he's just like, I run this neighborhood, I'm King Kong. And it's just like, yeah. No, you're not, you know, like your guy, you pointed out your guy, you know, made some bad bets and ran his mouth off and you've been trying to save your life this entire time. You know, you're not really, you're not King Kong, you know, King Kong doesn't have to worry about this type of stuff, you know, like this really kind of encapsulates just how delusional, uh, Denzel Washington is about The character, like, it's just about himself, really.

But it, the way he delivers it is perfect. I mean, it's like one of the best scenes in, I don't know, cop, I don't know, cops behaving badly type movie. That's my opinion. I was glad you asked me because that was, I know one of you guys were probably going to pick that scene too. So I, I snagged that [00:47:00] one. Frank, what do you think?

Um, I, I, I like the, to, you know, to protect the sheep. You got to catch the wolf and it takes a wolf to catch a wolf. I think that that's a good one. I love it when he tells the, the stupid suburban kid, you know, I will slap the taste out of your mouth. You know what I mean? I think that's really cool. But I think that, uh, my favorite is when he says.

Um, well, I love the King Kong quote too, by the way, Chris, but I didn't want to steal yours. I think when he says it's not what, you know, it's what you can prove. And that's the creed that he, you know, he says several times and it's an interesting piece of this character because it. It works on the positive side, you know, you might know a guy is guilty.

It doesn't matter. You have to be able to prove it on the flip side. They might know you're corrupt, but they have to be able to prove it. So we've got some room to tell a different story here. So the quote. Uh, you know, is ambidextrous, right? It doesn't, it applies to both, you know, the [00:48:00] law and the corruption.

So, but there's so many of them. He's got so many good lines in there. I mean, the scene at the diner is fantastic. The scene where he makes him smoke dope. And it's just, it's, it's, it's well done. The craziest thing about Training Day, I find, too, sorry, is just like, it's literally a one man show in a lot of ways.

Like, Ethan, uh, like, uh, Ethan Hawke's character is there, but it's like literally Denzel Washington is just, his character runs that entire movie. It's, I mean, the only comparison I can kind of think of is like Al Pacino and Scarface. We're like, like everybody else is just there, you know, you're just watching, you're watching out for Chico doing Tony Montana.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a noticeable difference in the tone of the movie. Once the focus shifts. Strictly on to Jake, I mean, it's like 60, 40, 65, 35 on Alonzo and then Jake, you know, cause you're seeing Alonzo through Jake's eyes, but then it shifts after that. We, after he tries to have [00:49:00] him whacked by the, by the Mexican and, uh, or Hispanic gang.

And so, yeah. Yeah. So Steve, yours. I mean, I think you guys really encapsulated the best ones out of the whole movie. We kind of bogarted them, didn't we? So, transitioning to mine, I had probably, like Frank, I had about 20, and I'm sure Chris too, about 20 movies I wanted to pick. But I, as I was sifting through them, I found that there was three movies that, um, one almost made the cut, but at the last second I cut it.

But I wanted to focus in on crime in L. A. because I think that some of the best crime movies come out of L. A. like, uh, Training Day did. But so the one, uh, the three that I picked was the New Centurions, and that was from 1972, Colors from 1988, and then Ramparts, which was from 2011, and one thing that I really liked about them is that they, uh, one from the [00:50:00] 70s that was set in the 70s and made in the 70s, one in the late 80s that was set in the late 80s and then filmed in the late 80s, and then one that was in, uh, it was set in 2000, Or it was actually set in 20, around 1999, but it was filmed a little bit later than that.

But I think each one of those movies got the zeitgeist of what was going on. And the other cool thing about each of those three movies is they all took place in more or less the same neighborhood of LA. And you could see the translate, the transition of how the neighborhood was and how crime. It rose, it fell, it rose, it fell, and I, I think that that arc of those three movies is what really attracted me to put those three together.

You know, they almost form like a, uh, you know, a three movie series. Oh, no, I just say you continue to do because like I some of these ones I haven't watched in a long time. I don't know why. So I'm probably [00:51:00] not saying as much as this time. And then 1 other thing that I think that tied them all together is the, especially the new centurions and colors.

Well, each and then a couple of them had some different connections, but the new centurion colors had the, the, Uh, The rookie element and the veteran and the veteran who could who took things very lightly, they took their job seriously, but they also took it lightly. And then another development that we're almost seeing the playing out of it now is, uh, gang units in LA.

So kind of the thing that Chris is talking about, they, they put the, an experiment into place where they put these gang units that were very much targeting the people who sold the drugs and, and in some cases went into assassinations, but that's a, that's not really talked about in these movies, but the, these crash units that the LAPD had.

And it really, I think that they, it shows how [00:52:00] those things developed. Well, the Rampart scandal was, uh, involving crash officers, uh, when it happened. So, uh, it's interesting that two of the movies are related in that way as well. You know, I have not seen the new centurions, uh, film. I read the book way back about the time I was at the five year mark.

And so. I remember thinking how, how incredibly well Joseph Wambaugh captured those first five years. It was a little different in LA. Obviously every, every jurisdiction has its own little, you know, differences and, and, and it's not exactly the same, but the human behavior is the same and the, and the resulting emotions are the same.

So I'd be curious to hear from, uh, essentially a civilian, although I would argue your teaching experience actually gives you. A pretty strong insight on these phenomena, Steve, but, uh, what is it that drew you to that [00:53:00] movie? You know, I loved the, I, I mean, I'm a, I'm kind of a sucker for that old timey. It's this, you know, like the seventies and the, but I loved the, um, the Kilvinsky character, his arc in there.

I mean, it's, this is one of those movies that they made in the early seventies that it has. On the veneer, it's cheesy, but it's, it's so much better than it even has a right to be. That the, the Kilvinsky character, he, he's a great cop. He has some of that corruption. He looks another way, but I, I think he's always doing it for the right reason.

But the thing that I loved the most is that it explored. The person Kilvinsky for his 20 or 25 years that he was on the job, he was a hundred percent cop. And then when he retired, he had nothing like it, it, it evaporated his whole purpose. And I don't think he even realized that would happen. And I wonder [00:54:00] from your perspective, I mean, it's, it's pretty clear you filled your retirement up, but you must have seen, uh, Officers who Once they retired it, they were rudderless, um, not as often as you might think, but that's because, you know, we've known about things like this current Kilvinsky scenario for, you know, a long time.

And so you get warned early on, like, don't make your. Life all about the job when you're 1st on, it's super exciting and it's all a consuming and all encompassing. And all you want to do is work. I mean, there's a constant or a frequent joke that gets told that there really isn't a joke. When you 1st come on the job, you run around like crazy.

And all you can think of is, I can't believe they pay me to do this and you're just so excited. And then, you know. After about five years or more, at some point you reach a point where you say, [00:55:00] God, they do not pay me enough to do this. You know, that's, that's how, that's the arc of the career, you know? And a lot of people figure out early on, Hey, I need to, you know, I, I need to be involved in other stuff.

So I, I have friends who are, uh, let me know my best friend from the Academy. He he's into cosplay. He makes cosplay outfits, like really high end ones. I know another guy who plays a couple of guys who play in different bands. Um, you know, people, they figure that out, but not everybody does like you, like you point out.

And, and it sometimes even happens while you're still on the job. I knew a guy who was one of those people who his entire identity was wrapped up in being a police officer and being successful at it. And he really wanted to achieve a particular position and things didn't break, right. Um, and, and it really was through no fault of his own.

He deserved the position and he deserved to succeed. He was a good guy and he worked hard and he had morals, but, uh, the [00:56:00] fate conspired against him and a lousy chief came in and kind of screwed him over and he struggled for a couple of years. With with how much that shattered his sense of self, because he didn't have a lot of other stuff going on.

It was all about who he was as a police officer. And when that got rocked, uh, it really shook him. And I think that happens to some people when they retire for sure. But I'm happy to report that. I don't think it happens as often as it used to because of, uh, you know, in, in some cases you can probably say that, uh, Wambaugh is at least a tiny bit to, to, uh, blame for it not happening as much or give him credit.

I guess I should say, uh, because fiction, you know, what is fiction, but, you know, a lie. Told to reveal the truth and by showing this guy Kilvinsky and how he's so into it and it's all he is and then he's just nothing when he's gone. There's a lot of cops that read Joseph Wambaugh. A lot of cops read the new centurions.

A lot of cops [00:57:00] read the choir boys. Um, there's, you know, there's a lesson learned there just, just from that. So, uh, but you, you make a valid point. It's the same with teaching though, right? It's the same with any career, I think. Yeah, I think a career where you're super invested, you've worked hard to get to that career.

It's not, it's not something that you generally people fall into. They, it's a, usually a life pursuit. They get it. And like you said, they go through those arcs in their career and. A lot of people, if they don't, if they're not careful, like you say, they can become consumed by it and then once they retire, it's dropped off the cliff.

I have seen that in teaching as well. Uh, one other thing that I think that they really touched upon, and I think it's, you know, maybe again, this is one that's not as. As much as it was back then, was it the alcoholism and, uh, Stacey Keech's character, Failure, [00:58:00] he, his alcoholism, he just kind of slid into it.

He got home, he was working the, uh, the night shift and he got home and you have a little bit of scotch to get to sleep and then you're, you still don't really sleep very well. You go to work, you get amped all day during work. You can't, you know, then you can't get home. You can't calm down again. So you have a little more scotch because you need a little bit more.

And I can see that that must be a very easy thing to slide into with either alcohol or prescription drugs could potentially be one to, you know, just give me one of these sleeping pills so that I can not be a zombie tomorrow at work. I would love to address that, but I want to hear what Chris is. Chris has been wanting to say something for him.

A minute here. No, I like, I can't say personally, like the police work and like, I'm not a police officer. Right. But you were talking about alcoholism and kind of just slipping into it. I mean, I can speak from, uh, [00:59:00] I mean, we talked a little bit about it on the leaving Las Vegas podcast, but again, speak from personal experience, uh, working in restaurants for a big chunk of my life.

And, uh, anyone who's ever worked in restaurants for any length of time knows that just drinking goes in and, and, you know, like, especially you're getting off late at night, everything's closed. What is there to do? Oh, let's all go hang out at the bar and have a drink. And it starts like that. And then some people, they just, you know, restaurant work is just something that they do for a little bit.

But then if it's something that you pursue for any length of time, all of a sudden it's like, oh, that's something that you're doing three, four days out of the week, 10 years. And you start associating with things where like, Oh, like, what are we going to do? Hey, like, are we going to go hang out? Oh, that means that we're going to go drinking.

And that's how it starts. And it slowly creeps up on you. And then before you even realize it, you're a full blown alcoholic. Like, um. That's usually how [01:00:00] alcoholism works. Nobody, I don't think anybody wakes up in the morning and goes, I want to be an alcoholic. You know, it starts off as, you know, it starts off as a thing here.

And then it just slowly gets worse and worse and worse. And then before you know it, you can't go to social events without thinking about drinking. You can't, you can't really think about doing anything else really, except for, you know, like, when are we going to go drink? And um, That's, there's like Nicolas Cage leaving Las Vegas style alcoholism, and then there's that type of alcoholism, which is much more prevalent, where people literally, they can't think about doing anything else than, you know, like getting home to get a drink.

Like, if you start thinking like that. You're an alcoholic. You know, you might be only having a couple of drinks, but still, if that's what you're thinking about during the day, it's like, oh, I can't, this is so stressful. I just, I can't wait to get home to have a drink. You're an alcoholic. And for cops, I mean, it's understandable.

It's like, oh, I just, I saw a crackhead, you know, throw his [01:01:00] baby in the microwave, you know, that's a, I guess we could have talked about heat, but like Al Pacino's character says that in the movie, Heats, and what do you do when you get home? Like, yeah, you're gonna get a drink, you know, you just saw that, you know, and then.

You know, it just becomes a habit that you brought it up, Steve, in the in the previously were a lot of addiction. It just becomes something that you do. And then before you realize that it's just something that you do, uh, it's a massive problem and you really hit on it. Steve, the two. The 2 of the big reasons that cops drink 1 is to calm down after a shift.

Not every shift is all jacked up, but a lot of them are depending on where you work and what shift you work and and so forth. So there's that. Um, and then, uh, you know, some of it is to cope. Some of it's self medication. Some of the stuff you see sucks and maybe it's. A single event, like the one that Chris described that Al Pacino talks about in heat.

Maybe it's cumulative. Maybe it's just like the whole [01:02:00] last week. Everybody lied. Nobody told me the truth about anything. They wouldn't tell me the sky was blue on a clear day and I'm just fed up with it. I need a drink. I need to calm down. And then there's the 3rd piece and that is, you know, celebrating party.

And, you know, I mean, uh, cops are people too. They want to party, you know, and, and just because there's not. Yeah. In my experience, there's not drugs involved and I didn't know anybody that did drugs. It was, it was a very where I came up. Anyway, it was a very verboten thing. It wasn't treated lightly at all.

Um, but drinking is legal drinking was legal and drinking to excess. Well, there's no speed limit on how much you can drink. So you can drink as much as you want. Right? And so. I, you know, I've been to a lot of parties, you know, and we've drank a lot and I was probably one of the more mellow guys on that spectrum.

But there was a time in my life when I was in command roles that, you know, I was, I was having a drink in the [01:03:00] evening and I was drinking every weekend. And that was, was, you know, my wife and our friends with another couple and they were kind of drinkers. And so we kind of became drinkers to a degree for a good year.

I mean, you know, I mean, I haven't had a. Uh, uh, as many drinks in, in the last year that I would've had in a week in that timeframe. Uh, in fact, that that friend of mine, he, he, when we were talking about getting, uh, uh, the difference between a sergeant and a lieutenant, and we were talking seriously about it, you know, we're having a serious conversation.

And then later he comes up to me and hands me a slip of paper. And, uh, I open it up like we're in a meeting when he did it. He slides me a piece of paper, like passing a note in class or something, and I pop it open and he's got a list sergeant on the left and lieutenant on the right. And then he's got brands of liquor and under sergeant, he'd have like, Jose Cuervo.

And then under lieutenant, it would be Patron and then, you know, it'd be some cheap, you know, whiskey and then. You know, I don't know what's good. Whiskey Hennessy or something. I don't know. Stoli would be under the Lieutenant [01:04:00] and, you know, something cheap. And the point was, yeah, the reason they pay you more as a Lieutenant is because you're dealing with more headaches.

And so you're going to drink. So you might as well drink a finer brand of alcohol. And it was a pretty funny joke, especially when I'm sitting there in the middle of command staff and the chief's wondering why I'm looking at this note. Uh, but, uh, that that's the thing about alcohol is for a lot of society, it's free or it's legal rather, and it's, it's free of stigma, uh, for, for most people.

And so cops leaned hard into that and, and there were, there was a lot of. Of that release going on and I don't, I don't judge him for it. I did it too. And I understand, I understand why. Um, but it, it's not a new thing. Like you point out, it's in the movie. Uh, and, and I think it's shown at least if it's anything like it is in the book, it's rather insidious in the way that it's eventually portrayed.

Yeah. And people know too, that he's [01:05:00] drinking on the job and they, that's another thing that I think they explore too, is how much do you cover from, for somebody and how much do you have to expose them? Because they're putting not only your life on the line, they could potentially be putting the people, you know, Obviously somebody who was as drunk as Fahler was getting towards the end there, he was putting everybody at a lot, in a lot of danger with that.

And you want to obviously help someone in that condition, but you also need to call them out. And I think they explore it more in the book, the issues around that, but I think you can, the, the movie invites you to explore that. Yeah, I don't, no way would anybody that I ever worked with. Uh, put up with that sort of behavior because officer safety was always the primary consideration.

You, you get home, you get your partner home, you protect the innocent people that you're [01:06:00] serving. And it even extended to doing your best to protect the suspect in every situation. But that was the, he was the bottom of the list. Right? Um, so if somebody was drinking on the job and was intoxicated, that was handled, um, Okay.

Very quickly and very harshly a lot of the things that you see historically in policing from the 50 60 70s that were, you know, kind of looked the other way or covered up or just flat out accepted by the time I came on in the early 90s was just wasn't tolerated. It just flat out wasn't tolerated. You wouldn't keep your job.

And part of the reason is, uh, Uh, you know, policing was paying better by the time I came on, it was a, it was a career that you could make a good wage at and own a house and take care of a family. And, and, you know, and 1 spouse stay home if you wanted to, um, certainly you do pretty well. If you had to do income.

And when a lot of police corruption [01:07:00] started, it started because of a lack of pay for police. That was 1 consideration back in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Um, And so, you know, things became normalized and then we started looking around going, why, why are we still doing this? There's no reason for it. We're not putting up with this anymore.

Um, and, and we're professionals now. It was a big thing when I was on the job, you know, be a professional, be a professional. And there's arguments about whether policing is a true profession or not by whose definition. And, and certainly you, you can't win that argument with someone if they don't believe so, but there's being a professional and there's.

Behaving like a professional and you can always do the ladder, no matter what job you're in. Right? And so it was, it was a huge emphasis. So, like, failure, he would have, he would have been out of the job so fast. Um, and, and maybe even charged for, for some of the stuff he did. Um. But definitely out of out of a job.

So when you talked about it going from time [01:08:00] period to time period and illustrating the differences within the L. A. and within the community and society, I think that's a difference between the police. I think by certainly by the the 1990 film, the one set 99, he'd be out. No, it's just interesting. Like, I just thought of this right now and you picked L.

1. kind of as a theme for all your movies. It's interesting to think because L. A. You could argue is probably the youngest big city in the United States. I mean, it really didn't become a big city until when, like the 60s, 50s, really? Because other than that, like, I wonder, it's just a, it was just an interesting thought I had, like, in comparison, like, all of the cities in the United States are young in comparison to, say, the cities that are in Europe, but, uh, I don't know, I just thought, I just thought of it now in terms of, um, the type of, uh, I don't know, like, the type of criminality and stuff that goes on in, in some of the movies that you're talking about.

I wonder if that has any factor into the fact that L. A. is such a young [01:09:00] city and it expanded so quickly. I've done a little reading into Los Angeles and their policing, and one thing that it seems as they grew up with a very different mindset, I think maybe because they did, they exploded so rapidly that they didn't have the ability A lot of the entrenched interests that a place like New York and Boston, and I think Frank brought this up and the previous episode where there's a lot of institutional baggage that accumulated L.

1. At least on paper, they tried to create. A very certain type of department that was highly professionalized, I think even down to the uniforms, like they have pretty cool uniforms that are really clean. And I think that they went for an image of, you know, like super professionalism and a small department to that was.

Kind of in the background, but it would go to the [01:10:00] forefront when it needed to. And I think that's worked really in their advantage in some ways. And then we've seen a lot of really high profile times where that's blown up on them. Well, you know, scandals aside, you know, you can take those and set them aside.

Rodney King, Rampart, the other, you know, however many other ones you want to talk about and, and to what level you want to consider them a scandal that all aside. Los Angeles is considered a premier police department and a department to model oneself after now. I think a lot of departments in saying that would model themselves after the ideal Los Angeles, right?

And, and try to avoid some of the same mistakes. But I mean, in Spokane, we were the same uniform. Uh, you know, I mean, a lot of the department structures are structured very similarly. Um, a lot of people's understanding of police work that's not East Coast police work comes from TV [01:11:00] shows, all of which are set and filmed in Los Angeles.

Um, I think you make a wonderful point, Steve, and I think it, uh, it is interesting that that maybe they are. In good ways and bad a, uh, a result of their rapid expansion, I think they were one of the first departments to to go away from revolvers that they, they, they, I'm pretty sure they were one of the first departments to do SWAT.

SWAT was invented by, um, one of their chiefs. I can't remember. I can picture his face to, uh, the fact that I know the name of a Darryl Gates chief Yeah, that's right, you're thinking of. Yeah. Yeah. And so many cutting edge things have come out of that department. I mean, crash, really, if you think that was a very cutting edge program.

And I think any program that can go really well, it can go really bad, depending on what happens in it, where it is, and it's evolution. Crash and these [01:12:00] programs worked pretty well when they were first instituted. If you're not managed properly, anything can, uh, go down the drain. Yeah. I mean, they had to do something in the, in the eighties that with the crack explosion in, in, in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, uh, I mean, I guess through all of greater Southern California and any heavily populated area, something had to be done.

And so. They innovated and they created a unit and it was very effective. And unfortunately, over time, it wasn't as you very well point out. It was not, uh, they didn't, they didn't, uh, pay close attention and they, they'd had a lot of mission drift, let's say, as evidenced by, by the rampart scandal, but, uh, I know you want to talk about colors, but before we move to that, did you have a favorite quote from the movie?

Because I, I don't really have one. I haven't seen the movie. I don't remember 1 from the book. I don't know if Chris does, but. I'm sure you do. No, I don't have one on top of my head. I was, when I was [01:13:00] watching it, I think one of the things that stood out is Kilvinsky, who was played by George C. Scott. He had his Kilvinsky's Laws and he was one of those guys who would always, you know, Oh, this is, but he'd have all of his sayings and his one saying was, um, I can't say this one on the air.

Well, I mean, I'll, I'll, uh, fill you in. I think people can fill in the blanks. Take a look at the streets. They'll always be another, uh, I think our code for our code for that was, uh, Adam Henry, it'll teach. It was teaching failure that you can't be an avenging angel. You're not going to solve every crime.

You're not going to make the world safe on your shift. You're going to punch out and you're going to punch back in tomorrow. And it's going to be the, uh, we had a saying and on the one job, S. S. D. D. Same stuff, different day. Yeah, there's a lot of [01:14:00] variations of that in police work to, um, that, that saying that you just quoted, it actually kind of mirrors the lesson that Robert Duvall, the central lesson that Robert Duvall tries to teach Sean Penn and colors.

Right. With his bowl story. Um, and, and, but it, it, it is a veteran guy trying to teach a young guy that, uh, You're not going to change the world. You're certainly not going to change it all today, and you're not going to catch every bad guy. Every, you know, every, every game is not a Stanley Cup final. You know, you sometimes, it's just, you punch the clock, like, like, uh, uh, Kovinsky said.

Steve here. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast Network featuring great podcasts like Mark Vinette's History of North America podcast. Go over to ParthenonPodcast. com to learn more. And now a quick word from our sponsors. Now I'll move on to colors. Colors. I really loved it. I think it captured [01:15:00] something of the age, even though it was a little cartoonish in some ways.

And it, it was very, uh, it painted the gangs, I think, a little cartoonishly. It didn't have the crisp ves. And then. Uh, they even, they insert a fake gang in there and that becomes the ultimate antagonist. Uh, the Crips and the Bloods kind of melt away and it's this gang, the 21 Street Gang, who's, as far as I know, it wasn't a real gang.

And I think. Just maybe to not get the Crypts of the Bloods angry, they made up this fake gang. But I think that one of the things is that it never had a clear antagonist. There was the one guy high top and then he flips and the, uh, then it switches over to Rocket. And you think that he's going to be sort of the, uh, Bond villain, but he doesn't turn into that.

And then the, uh, the ultimate, uh, Enemy or the [01:16:00] antagonist in the film is this gang that nominally was friendly with the, with, um, Robert Duvall and Sean Penn's character, the whole movie, and you could, in one way, look at it was a clunky storytelling, but I think in a way it really shows that how complicated the streets were for the nobody was really your friend.

Nobody was your enemy either, and a lot of relationships are very contextual. I, you know, I, I ran into people that I had fought with and arrested in different settings, not off duty. I didn't have that happen very often, but, you know, while working, you know, go to a party call or something and he's just chilling there and he's.

Not being a jerk and he's not under arrest and he doesn't have a warrant and we actually have a cordial conversation. That's quasi friendly, but we both know if I get behind his car and he's got a felony warrant or he's hold and he's holding drugs [01:17:00] or or a gun or something. That it's on. Right. And we know he's going to run, you know, he knows I'm going to chase him.

He knows if he gets out and points his gun at me, I'm going to shoot. If he runs from the car, I'm going to chase him. If he throws a fist, I'm going to throw one too. And, and like, we both know that. And, and, and it's interesting, some of these criminals that I came into contact Um, like there's kind of a code and it's like, you know, Hey, I, I got slammed on the ground.

I chased a guy down an alley one time and, and, uh, I was all by myself. I was undercover, well, it wasn't undercover exactly. We're playing close detail and I jumped out of the car to chase one guy and my partner jumped out to chase the other guy. And I go down this, this alley and it's in a residential neighborhood.

And, uh, I have my radio with me, but like a dumb ass, I didn't flip the power on because it was my handheld radio. Cause we were in, we weren't in a police car. We were in a undercover car. So I'm running down the alley telling my police radio and anybody with an ear shot [01:18:00] that I'm running down an alley.

But. But dispatch doesn't know. And my partner doesn't know cause he's running down a different alley. So the guy turns down and ends up being a blind alley. There's a fence at the other end and the guy gets to the fence and I'm pretty close to him. He grabs on the fence, tries to go over and Chris, you would have been proud of me, man.

I threw the best body check I'd ever thrown in my life. I just nailed it hard into the boards, man. That fence shook like it was. At the Spokane arena or whatever. And, and the guy falls to the ground, you know, I bounced back. I, you know, I got up first and got up on top of him before he could get up and he, he struggled a bit, but I had the advantage and I got, I got a good grip on him.

And he just, he realized it was like, it's either go all the way or, or give up at this point. Cause he's at a disadvantage. He gave up. I probably don't know if I was justified and slamming him into the fence like that. You know, looking back, I mean, if they had, if he had complained, I might, they might've argued I did.

You know, that was excessive for us. He should have grabbed him or something. Guy never said a peep. Um, and as we're walking [01:19:00] down the alley, he's kind of like. You know, I don't remember how he phrased it, but it was essentially good hit, you know, kind of thing. I was like, Hey, I ran, you caught me. That's the way it goes.

And the habitual criminals kind of understood that. And, you know, but, but it's a, it's a, it's a tenuous contextual relationship because if the tides had turned, I don't know that that guy wouldn't have grabbed my gun. You know, if, if he was looking at a long prison stretch, which he could have been, you know, um, and so what happened in the movie was actually brilliant in that regard, because it really punctuated the fact that, you know, the streets don't care.

They don't care about you and your relationships and the danger can come from anywhere. I mean, look at the wire, right? Who killed Omar little canard, you know, just as an eight year old kid or 10 year old kid, right? This is the big, bad assassin of the show. Um, You just never know where that's going to come from.

And so in a way, I think it was pretty brilliant that that [01:20:00] friendliest of antagonists ended up being the one that pulled the trigger on the fatal bullet. It's interesting. You bring up like that, um, like the relationship between like the habitual criminal and the cops. I mean, if you listen to a lot of these mafia guys, A lot of them don't necessarily hate the cops.

It's, you know, like I chose to be a criminal, and you chose to be a cop, and we're on two different sides. But, you know, I'm gonna do my thing, and you guys are gonna do your thing. All we ask is, be honest about it when you do get us, you know? Like, don't plant evidence on us. Don't, you know, make up charges.

Like, you're gonna, you're gonna catch me doing criminal act. I'm more than fine doing the time. But actually catch me doing criminal acting when I did, um, that's their opinions. A lot of the times when it's, you know, these guys talk about it is that's the way they view it. It's like, I'm on one side above the other side, just be honorable about it.

That's all we ask. Yeah. And that goes a long way and that was one of the [01:21:00] themes of the movie when you really got down to it was this and I think it was maybe a thing that was going in the zeitgeist at the time is that there was a change in attitude that there was maybe an honor amongst thieves and amongst cops and amongst everybody that was going away at that time and the young characters the Sean Penn that Cop, you know, he was, at least initially in the movie, he was going to bust everybody and he didn't grant any sort of mercy or have any thoughts.

He was just gonna get every collar he could, and he didn't really care if he made relationships or soured or anything. And then, The, the gang members, the older ones were the ones who wanted to work with the, you know, the cops and if they got busted, you got, but I mean, they even had that scene where the, um, the leader of the 21 gang was in the precinct helping out the police and then one of the cops walked by and he was like, Oh, hey, you have a warrant.

And he's like, all right, you know, [01:22:00] cuff me and take me to jail. And it was, there was an honor there. And then you see, as the movie develops, the young. Uh, gangsters are absolutely blood thirsty too, that they're not, they have no honor. And I think that that was a thing that a theme that I think they were trying to play out is that there's no, you know, that nostalgia of the old day where we'll all work together.

Hey, you, you got me, you got me and you know, that, or if, uh, you know, I will get you on something that's. That's chicken salad, right? I won't, I won't, I won't Trump anything up on you. I won't get you on something that's piddly. Uh, it'll be a legit thing. And if it's a legit thing, then you'll be a man about it.

That kind of thing. One of the things that you have in this show that is prevalent in all three is, uh, and you have it on your, on the outline to their Steve is. Partners riding together. And in, in every case, the examples seem to be the old veteran cop and the young brash rookie [01:23:00] or pretty new cop, um, in, in training day, he's, he's, but would be new as a detective, even though he's been on the job for a while and that that's a pretty common.

Theme that you see on pretty common trope that you see in these in these movies. Um, but I thought it was really well played in colors. I mean, Robert De Niro, he had a lot of patients, but he wasn't suffering fools when it came to to Sean Penn and he recognized that that character. I can't remember the character's name right now, but that pen was, you know, overly aggressive and he didn't understand that you're just arrested for stupid things that aren't going to go anywhere.

And the only result from that arrest. Besides padding your stats is an erosion of trust. Whereas if you were to play it a little bit differently, you might get some goodwill there that you can bank that somewhere down the line. Maybe somebody actually tells you who dropped the gun in a homicide or something along those lines.

And a young guy like that just doesn't think that way. He's [01:24:00] just all full of testosterone and, and, and, you know, lots of piss and vinegar and wants to just chase bad guys like a. Like, uh, you know, thoroughbred hound or something, you know, it's, it's, they're just so excited about it, but it's, it's really well done because he does impart wisdom, Robert Duvall, but he also kind of is like, Exasperated with him at times too, I think, and if I remember the movie, right, am I remembering right?

Yeah. Did you do to, um, officer cars when you were a cop? Because I would think that, um, I don't know. I'm not, uh, I think for somebody who's talkative, that would be the best thing in the universe. But I could also see that after about an hour, you've said everything that could possibly be said. And If you have somebody who won't shut up the whole time, that could be, that could be more annoying than, uh, actually going for criminals.

We had, uh, uh, one officer cars for the majority of my [01:25:00] career. Uh, so when you got to dump and ride with a partner, if, uh, if staffing allowed or special detail was going on or, or something like that, it was a, it was, it was a treat. Basically, it was a cool thing. Yeah. Absolutely. What you described is true.

If you were assigned to work with someone and you didn't get along, or they were annoying, or they like to talk and you preferred silence or the, you know, the radio or whatever that just go on a road trip with somebody you don't like. And imagine that 8 hours a day, 10 hours a day every week. All year long, but if you are partnered with somebody you chose to partner with and you work well together, it is, uh, it's, it's incredible.

It's a, it's a, it's like being on a, on a line with a hockey line with somebody that you just know where the other guy is and you hit him with the pass and he, you know, shoot past score, you know, that kind of a thing. Um, yeah. You, you're safer because, you know, where the [01:26:00] other guy is, you know, how he's going to play it.

You learn each other's sort of tells. And so you can communicate without directly speaking and so forth. And we used to work for tens. And so we had a sister platoon that worked our days off. There's, you know, not 8 days in a week. So there was 1 day a week where both teams worked and we call that the double update because we weren't very imaginative.

So, on double up nights. People would do 1 of 2 things. They would either use it as an opportunity to take a personal day or vacation day or whatever, start their, you know, start or extend their weekend or they, we double up. Where we could, as long as we had the middle number of cars out there, we could put out a couple of 2 officer cars and I went through the Academy with a guy named Steve and we used to double up almost every time that we were both working on a double up night.

And those were those were some of the most productive shifts. I ever had, I mean, we went to jail 7 times in 1 shift, [01:27:00] 1, 1, 1 day, and we had a couple of nights where he went 6. I mean, and these were not for chippy things. We weren't stopping people for littering and they're all warrants or felony arrests or whatever.

Got into some great. I would call it fun, but adventures, I guess, you know, pursuits and things like this. Um, it's great. It's wonderful. Um, but we got along and we both talked at about the same amount. Like we didn't mind writing around quiet for a little while too. So, um, but the biggest thing was knowing you got to know your partner.

I don't know how that relationship would have gone if we had worked together four nights a week instead of two nights a month, you know? Um, but boy, those two nights of the month were, you know, in the top 10 percent of my. You know, happiness level for, you know, patrol work. It was, uh, uh, pretty good. So I know there are some departments that have the staffing to put out to officer cars, but I think that that is uncommon these days.

So then my last movie that I picked to round up [01:28:00] this, uh, Three parter is the movie Rampart, and that takes place in 1999. And it's a, uh, corporal played by Woody Harrelson. And it's really, it doesn't, it's the story really focuses on the end of his career where he's. Burned out. He's a Vietnam vet and he's, you can tell he's burned out from that.

And he's had, he's gone through most of his career with the cloud that he, he killed somebody. And it's your normal noble cause corruption where he killed somebody because the person was a serial rapist. And so he. They don't really get into the exact circumstances of it, but he kills the guy and then it just sort of spiral.

I think it's that escalator or spiral that you've talked about, Frank, that a little bit of corruption leads into a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And the next, next thing you know, you're not [01:29:00] making. These these choices for the betterment of society, you're making them fairly much for the betterment of yourself.

And I think this movie is maybe the most dramatic of the three. If, uh, really, when you look at New Centurions, it's the more realistic of the three. This one's the more dramatic of the three, but I think it uses that drama and a purpose to see a person whose life just goes it. It's that's. Going on, like truly going over the cliff.

It's just the inches up, inches up. And then when he goes down that, uh, that slide to the end, he's going full steam all the way down. Have you seen this one, Chris? I, I think I have has been quite some time. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, for me too. I, I do remember watching it when it came out. Um, I remember how visceral it was.

I mean, Woody Harrelson's character was so unlikable, but charismatic. I [01:30:00] mean, he wasn't like, this wasn't, uh, uh, you know, training day in patrol. You know what I mean? It was, it was a completely different kind of movie. And he, he was. Like, like I said, very charismatic, very visceral in his behaviors, just the stuff he was doing in terms of his living situation.

And, and the biggest thing, I guess, was how unrepentant he was. Like, he did what he did and said what he said, and he believed in both and he wasn't apologizing for it. And. You know, I, I think that was already becoming problematic back in 2000, whatever it was when this was made. I'd, I'd, I'd love to see somebody in public service have that attitude today.

He wouldn't, he wouldn't last 5 minutes. Right? So it'd be a breath of fresh air though, if they did and be like, you know what, I did this at the time and by standby, I look at the results or something, you know, like something like it would be as opposed to the site and I'm constantly apologizing for something.

Thing that you did [01:31:00] before in your life at a different time, like it gets, I don't know for you guys, but for me, it's infuriating just constantly having to hear the, like the, the, the carousel of like, apologies about literally everything. It's just, I don't know. It's very, um, Sorry. I just don't like it. I could use a different word, but I, I don't like it.

I think though that in this, that, that was one of the things that they did in this movie that I thought was kind of interesting is Sigourney Weaver played. I don't know what her role was exactly. If she was somebody from internal affairs or if she was somebody from the DA's office, but she, uh, you know, he always thought that he was this, uh, you know, White knight who had, you know, rid the world of this serial rapist, but then she said, well, when you murdered him his and it all like came out to his wife and she killed herself and then the kids went into foster care and they were abused like there's no decision that just isn't that [01:32:00] has no consequences to it.

And I think when you, if you get into that avenging angel mode, Yeah. You don't look at the consequences of things, and that's maybe why we have a system that you arrest somebody. And maybe everything would have gone all bad for the family as it is. But to have that whole situation, I think that that's maybe why we don't have country justice.

So I will quote a very nerdy quote that is not a cop movie quote at all. It's actually from Lord of the Rings. It's J. R. R. Tolkien. And there's a point in which Frodo laments that Bilbo didn't stab and kill Gollum when he had the chance for those who know the stories or seen the movies, you get the contact, but Gollum is creating a whole lot of trouble at this point in time when he says this and Gandalf said.

You know, you're right. He did deserve death, but it was, it was, it was pity that stayed his [01:33:00] hand. It was pity and mercy. And he may have deserved death, but you know, some people who die deserve life. And can you give that to them? Uh, no, you can't. And so then he says, that's a paraphrase, but the exact quote is something along the lines of, you know, don't, don't be so quick to deal death.

Uh, even the wise cannot see all ends. And I always thought that last line was really great because you go out and, and, and try to be the guy meeting out street justice, deciding people's fates that are in an extra legal fashion in a way outside of the system that's in place. And you may get away with it a few times with a positive result.

You may make a difference exactly in the way that you intend, but there's gonna be a ripple effect. In some of these cases that you might end up with a worse situation than you started with. And it's not beyond the fact that it's just not your place to be doing that. But is it even wise to, I mean, at least habitually, the odds say you're going to screw it up [01:34:00] at some point, even if you get it right a few times.

And so, uh, it's, that's just an interesting piece to it. I think it's interesting though, with like street justice, because like, I'm sure if you asked. You know, pull people aside and you ask them like deep down inside. It's like, don't you want Charles Bronson just to go in there and clean up the streets that you want the punisher to just, you know, go outside the law and just kind of take care of the problems?

Because he does. He's not tied down by any of this stuff. If you honestly ask people will be like, well, yeah, there's going to be problems, but Okay. If he actually, you know, did take care of the problem, be like, oh yeah. You know, like he was, you know, he, he might be a vigilante, but look at what he did.

Honestly, if you do ask people, I mean, we touched on this with the, you know, like Robocop, um, we did the Robocop series too. This idea of like, yeah, he was working for the police force in a lot of ways. He was kind of like a vigilante to a degree. Um. I do think, like, if you honestly ask [01:35:00] people, it's like, they do want, they want Batman, they want Charles Bronson, they want a Punisher character to come in and just clean up all the junk outside of the entire system.

I mean, I know I do. Unless Batman shows up. Unless Batman shows up and kicks your butt and you're the one on the receiving end of Batman, then, you know, and, and I'm more to the point unless Batman makes a mistake, right? And that, that could happen with a human being. I hear what you're saying, Chris. I just, I, I, people absolutely have an appetite for it.

I mean, one of, one of my more popular books amongst. People who I know that are police officers is a book I wrote called the last horseman and, and the, the premise is that there are four X cops who are essentially vigilantes who are fed files from the system of those people who slipped through the system, who are with, you know, they're vetted.

They're 100%, no doubt guilty. And when, when the file comes, they, they slipped through the cracks [01:36:00] somehow, technicality or whatever, and they go and exact justice and. Man, every cop says how much they love it because it, I mean, it was born of a cop fantasy mine. Right? I mean, uh, that, that book came into being because I was walking out.

From from the end of shift 1 night, and I saw 1 of my sergeants who was looking depressed and staring at the screen. And I was like, Hey, Steve, what's going on different Steve? And he just relates to me how he was in court and they had a solid case against this job. And he got off because somebody didn't follow certain paperwork within a certain window.

And. He's like, how is that justice? That's, that's, that's a procedural, no harm error. And he just was so upset about it. And I just, you know, let him vent and try to be all Lieutenant Lee about it, you know, and offer some leadership in this situation. And finally he says to me, you know what? You know, it'd be great.

We'll be great as we get like you and me and [01:37:00] Brent and a couple of other guys. And we just, when these cases come out, we just go find this guy and just beat the snot out of him. So at least get some justice, man, that, that would be awesome. But I could never do that. And I said, yeah. Yeah, neither could I.

And then I went home and made some notes about this book because it was such a great idea that he came up with. And you're because you're right. People do want it, or at least they do think they want it because they have that sense of justice that I talked about, uh, in the previous, uh, uh, episode about how it's very refined.

And in the moment, they're very, it's very clear, but it's a slippery slope. It is a slippery slope. And, and I don't think you can rely on, I mean, it eventually leads to, to what despotism, right? Because somebody is going to get in charge that isn't noble. And then it's all going to change. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think like the Woody Harrelson's character and ramparts, it really is. Yeah. It ate at his soul. I don't see how that couldn't. I think that that's how you really do go down that [01:38:00] slippery slope is, you know, you're not doing your, your, you know, it's in the theoretical, you say there, maybe there is that group of cops out there.

Um, like that. And I, what was that dirty Harry Magnum force was kind of that, uh, yeah, that's the same kind of thing. And nobody is that virtuous that they can just do it out of pure virtue because it's, and I think all, a lot of these movies that we've talked about, the person starts off that that's what they're doing it out of the best intentions.

They did it to the, the child molester, and then it turns into the drug dealer, and then it turns down to shaking down the guy who's been doing 35 and a 30, you know, like, uh, the. You can go down that road really, it just, it opens yourself up to making these moral decisions that I don't think there's really any human who can be completely virtuous once they start going down that road.[01:39:00]

Every cop is going to realize at some point in his or her career that I cannot fix this problem in its totality. I am not going to change the world. I might change some people's experience in this world and I can make an impact, but I'm not going to change it. Big picture. Crime is going to exist. Drugs are going to exist.

All these things are still going to exist. And it's a sobering moment and it's a depressing moment. And I think. If you're already engaged in corrupt behavior, but for a noble reason, so that you could put bad guys that you know are bad guys in jail, when you reach that crisis point where you realize that even if you do that a hundred thousand times over the course of your career, you're not going to stop the next wave of the ocean coming onto the shore.

When you make that realization, if you're already corrupt, the next question that probably comes to mind is, well, If I'm not going to be able to change anything, then maybe at least I can make my own life better [01:40:00] somehow. And then you turn the corner and it's more about that self enrichment that happens.

I don't know for a fact that that happens. I'm not telling you that happened to anybody I know, but from just a basic psychological standpoint. It seems to make sense. The 1st part I know for a fact, every cop makes that realization. At some point, they don't necessarily give up. They don't necessarily become destitute or depressed to the point of not functioning.

They just realize that if I'm going to make a difference, it's going to be in more concentrated ways. I'm not going to change the entire game. I'm going to change this play. I'm going to change this 1 thing. Um, and so. You know, I do think that that realization can affect how corruption occurs. And in this case with Woody Harrelson character, he kind of defends himself by saying that he's like, I'm an equal opportunity hater.

You know, he hates criminals, but he gets into some stuff beyond that. That isn't about taking bad guys to jail. I think he's, he's reached that point of [01:41:00] disillusionment. Before that, um, at least that's what I remember. It's been a, it has, I probably saw it when it came out. So it's been a good 23 years. Uh, so if I'm blowing smoke, just, just, uh, feel free to point it out.

No, it's, uh, it's interesting. You brought, like, cops having a kind of inclusion. They can only make, uh, say, changes in concentrated ways. I can, not as a cop, but from personal experience, like, just from growing up, I used to get, uh, really, really upset and it used to really bother me when I would see injustice.

He brought up the example of, like, somebody misfiling paperwork and, uh, just injustice in society, you know, like government corruption, um, Um, you know, criminals on the streets and, you know, the list goes on. And I found as I, as getting older, as I'm getting older, being the youngest person on this podcast right now, but I am getting older, I have found that I am getting less upset about that type of stuff.

I still do get upset about it. Um. But I'm [01:42:00] finding that the difference I, I can make is in personal relationships where I can strengthen, you know, friendships with the people that I work with, um, and in particular younger people, or I find I can, I'm trying to at least make a difference in terms of giving advice.

To younger people, Hey, I'm older, you know, I've seen a lot of things I've gone through a lot of things in my life and I see what you're doing here. And, uh, this is not a good idea. And let me explain to you why. And sometimes it makes a difference. Sometimes it doesn't make a difference, but it's a lot, it's a lot more effective than getting upset about, Hey, did you hear what was going on in Congress today?

There's nothing I can do about that. Or in my case, parliament, there's nothing I can do about that. They're going to do their thing. I can at least maybe somewhat make a difference in this person's life. Yeah. You're not going to serve. You're not going to solve world hunger, but you can open a food bank locally.

And I think that from a [01:43:00] cost perspective, I'm not going to stop people from doing crime. I'm not going to stop people from speeding, but I can have a conversation with this person and maybe they'll slow down at least in a school zone. You know, I mean, you, you, you, you change your perspective and you change your focus and your emphasis.

And, you know, people don't always listen. Sometimes you talk about giving people advice. Sometimes the advice isn't heated the first time it takes making the mistake and getting pounded. And then Chris's advice comes back. Uh, after that, and, oh, man, he warned me about this. And then it really takes hold because now they have their own experience to anchor to the advice that you gave them.

And they know you're not just, you know, uh, you know, talking out your rear end or whatever. They, they see the value of it. Um, that happens on the job to people, people, cops get told things all the time by older cops. And we don't listen when we're young. And then we screw up or we, Mhm. Go through the fire.

And then we're like, Oh, wow, that old grinder, that old, that old call Kilvinsky guy, you [01:44:00] know, he looked a lot like George Patton did and he knew what he was talking about, you know? Yeah, that the, really the Robert Duvall character, the Kilvinsky character, they, they, they knew where they could make a difference and they knew where it just wasn't worth it.

There's a story I had with a student. He just. fought everything. Everything was, would turn into World War Three. And I sat him down and I said, there's two ways you can leave this room. You can use your head and bash down the wall right there and walk through the wall, or you can go out the door. Which ones get, the one is, is going to be a shorter distance.

But it's a lot more work or you can just take the door and I think eventually everybody's going to learn that there's, you can get a lot done doing it in an easier way and a more of one that easier isn't even always the way, but more [01:45:00] productively. And I think that that's what those old timers were trying to instill into the, the younger ones in colors and in the new centurions.

Walk down that hill, son. Walk down that hill. Don't run down that hill. The best is when Sean Penn tries to tell that story. He's completely screws it up. Like he's not quite there to mentorship. Yeah, that's a really, I think of all of those ones. That's the one I would go out for that. I would recommend people go out and watch.

It's such a fun movie and it puts you into that, that time, that place. They get the music just right. They get that, that whole thing with the crack and with the gangs and everything. And the world's changed a ton since then. Like, I mean, honestly, Robert Duvall's character might not have even died. And nowadays, yeah, Because he would have been wearing a bulletproof vest and that might have saved his life.

Like, I think there would have been so many [01:46:00] different things that would have been different now, but I think you really get to see a really specific time and place and good storytelling too. Yeah, it was a great movie. Not, not a huge quote generator was no tombstone or. Or a top gun in that respect, but, uh, uh, I love the Robert Duvall character.

And of course, Sean Penn is really good at playing a brash young kid, whatever role that might be. So I think it was a good choice. Uh, did, did you have a quote from it that you wanted to throw out there? I didn't have a quote, but I think one thing that I noticed with some of the older movies that it's something, maybe it's um, my old man coming out, they had a main character die in those movies.

I, I think that that, so many of the older movies, they, maybe they did it to the point of cliche where the main character dramatically dies at the end, but I think it, that brings you through such an emotional roller. [01:47:00] Uh, coaster where I think nowadays they're afraid to do that, maybe because they want to make the, make number 12 exactly.

You can't make a sequel unless he's going to be a ghost then. Right? So, so now we're going to dive into Chris's top cop movies and Chris's as mustache. Chris's want to do is taking things in a little slightly different direction. So let's hear what you got. Yeah, I, I picked The Pledge for one of my movies, and I mean, I think it's a, people would think, well, that's an odd choice for the theme of like, cops behaving badly, or the relationship between cops and criminals that we've been following so far with all the movies that we picked, but I picked this one because it is, it is kind of an odd choice, and basically the general rundown of the movie is, uh, it stars Jack Nicholson, actually directed by Sean Penn, and Jack Nicholson plays a Uh, character, uh, Jerry Black.

And, [01:48:00] um, at the beginning of the movie, we see, like, he's retiring, right? So, he's quite literally, uh, going to, uh, his retirement, uh, party. And, uh, he gets stopped, uh, the, the retirement party gets stopped. And he, because there was a murder of, uh, a little girl, uh, I guess within his district, uh, so he goes out and investigates it and, you know, they find the girl and then they go and inform the, the, uh, parents and he promises the parents that, you know, the last thing I do that I'm, I'm going to find who murdered your little daughter, um, they Get this Native American guy who has, uh, who's, who's special needs.

I believe he's, uh, it's not Down syndrome. He has, but he's, he's special needs. He's slow. It's the, I don't know what the right term is, but that's how I would describe it. And his partner kind of corroses like, uh, like, um, a confession out of them, but Jerry [01:49:00] Black, he just, he doesn't believe that that he doesn't believe this confession.

And, uh, yeah. The, uh, the Native American guy, he, Native American guy ends up killing himself. Uh, but, you know, the, the department and, uh, his partner and, you know, anybody, uh, important things, like, oh, it's open, shut case. He's the guy that did it. It's done. Uh, Jerry ends up getting, and Jerry ends up, uh, retiring and, um, He asks unofficially, can I, you know, investigate this case that I still think is unsolved and the chief of police said, you know what?

Okay, we'll allow you to do that. And, uh, he ends up buying, uh. Like a gas station nearby where the little girl was actually murdered and he starts doing his own investigation. But what we see clearly that's going on here is he is becoming obsessed with the case. Much of his career we've, he, we get the impression that he's just obsessed with his job.

He's [01:50:00] not married, doesn't have any kids. And through his obsession and trying to solve this case, he puts innocent people in danger. He befriends like a local girl. She's like a waitress and, uh, it takes a liking to her daughter and invites them to live with him after there was a domestic dispute. And he ends up actually using.

her daughter as bait to get this child murderer that he's convinced that there's like a serial child murderer going around and everyone that thinks he's nuts but they respect him because he was a really good detective for the most of his career and he's older so a lot of them kind of look at him like as a father figure and he sets up this whole scenario where he's going to trap this, uh, Child killer that he's convinced that he's convinced is going to come here, um, based on the, um, the evidence that he was able to gather because like the, [01:51:00] uh, this killer or whatever gave them like these little paper birds.

Um, I believe the, the, uh. At the original crime scene, they actually did find this, uh, paper bird there too, and that's what, how he makes the connection. And he gets all his cop friends to come and, you know, get ready, we're gonna bust the, uh, this actual, uh, child murderer. And What ends up happening is Jerry's actually right that there was a serial child murderer, but on the way to going to, uh, get the girl or go to the trap, he dies in a car crash and.

All we see is like a shot of his burning body in the, in the car crash, and obviously no one shows up to his trap, everyone's, you're, everyone's, yeah, you're insane, um, what's the matter with you? I mean, Frank, uh, I mean, sorry, uh, Jerry is, uh, during the movie you see that he is kind of slowly losing his mind, I believe it could be something like Alzheimer's, [01:52:00] um, And we pan away, and we see Jerry by himself, uh, talking to himself about, you know, how he was right, and he was right there, and it's a really depressing thought to have, because yes, Jerry was obsessed with doing the right thing to a degree, but he didn't care enough about the people around him, because he put the people around him in danger.

But at the end of the day, he, he was right. There was this child murderer and it was just a freak accident, road, uh, car crash that he's going to die with everyone thinking that. He's lost his mind and there wasn't this child killer about there actually was and if things maybe if buddy had just had finished drinking his coffee in the morning, he would have shown up there and Jerry would have been right and they would have actually been able to catch the killer of, uh, many of these girls that they had been founding, uh, finding and that just doesn't [01:53:00] happen.

It's interesting to think that it's. Like maybe a cop is right about something like is deadly right about something, but it he's not able to separate it. So he becomes so obsessed with it that, uh, it ends up destroying his life. I'm sure there's many scenarios where this happened where he's convinced that there's something going on and he's unable to directly prove it.

And, um, his partners and chief of police and. What have you, uh, ends up thinking maybe he's going crazy or ends up having to leave the police force. And what if that person ended up actually being right the entire time? I think you bring up a couple of really awesome points with this movie. And I'll be honest with you.

I don't remember this movie and I'm sure I saw it. I would have had to have seen it because it's Jack Nicholson at the time when I was watching movies all the time and. What a supporting cast. Holy cow. If you read the names of the other people in this movie that you chose, it's [01:54:00] just such an incredible array of actors.

And Sean Penn is an excellent director too. Um, but, but there are 2 things that jumped out at me as you were talking about this, Chris, the smaller of them was just that the randomness of the world is on display, much like when we were talking about colors and, and, and Steve talked about who actually shot it.

Robert Duvall's character and how it was kind of random, like, in my comment, then was the streets don't care. You know, they don't care about you and your relationships and fate is what fate is or randomness or chaos or however you want to put it. And that's what happens here, right? Just some random chaotic event, and you can't account for that.

But the larger piece that that I heard, as you were describing this film, it ties into a movie I talked about before, and that is training day where in training day, you have. Denzel Washington's Alonzo Harris say, you know, you want to catch the wolf. You got to be a wolf [01:55:00] basically. Right? And, and there are people in society who would say, yeah, you do.

I want my cops to be wolves so they can catch the wolves. It's necessary. Well, in this movie, you've got, you've got a cop who's obsessive about his cases and. If you went and ask somebody, you know, what, how do you want your detective to be a lot of them would be very okay with that. Most of them probably because he's going to find the bad guy.

He's going to hunt him down. He's never going to quit. I'll tell you right now, common sense, tenacity, and an ability to. Notice things in an open minded way or three traits that detectives need to have in spades and that they need to be able to draw upon if they're going to solve cases over long periods of time.

I mean, that's an addition to all of the basic foundational skill sets that that you have to have. This obsessive nature is just a, like the dark side of tenacity, isn't it? And As a society, we would applaud that because he's going to get his man, he's going to get this guy and if he [01:56:00] hadn't gotten that car wreck, as you point out, Chris, he would have got him.

But look at the toll that that takes on the individual. Look at the price that's paid. So is where Alonzo Harris or even in Copland, their failure, their, their negative way of doing something that society wants in, in, in training day, it affects it. The, the society, it affects the, the, the citizenry, the community, right in this, it it's turned inward.

It affects the individual flex, the cop himself, rather than the cop affecting the community, but it's just as dark. It's just as dark as when Alonzo was doing, it's just who's being affected by it. And in both cases, I think you would have a segment of society who, to at least a certain point before they got off the exit of the freeway would drive right along with it.

And they would say this guy, Jerry, this detective that Nicholson played, that's who I want looking for my kid. If my kid went missing. So I'm really [01:57:00] fascinated that you chose this film. But the part that always really gets to me in this movie is I could be say, I happen to go by that gas station. I'm talking to Jerry and he starts talking to me.

I had this guy, like I was right there and you know, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking to myself. This guy's insane. And yet, he's not, though. Like, he, he's telling the truth. The guy was right there, and I'm sitting there as an individual, myself, you know, justifiably thinking, this guy's lost his mind. But he really hasn't lost his mind.

It's, everybody else is just blind to the actual truth. He almost had this guy, and And how many times in society do we think that they'll were we think somebody is insane and then we come to maybe realize later that, you know, actually, they weren't and they weren't that insane. Or maybe people just never realized that.

And it's a slippery slope of like. How hard it is to how easily you can lose the truth and it could be just something as simple as like you pointed [01:58:00] out a freak accident. And then all of a sudden the truth is it's just gone. I always go back to Frank's movie. Cop land being right. Isn't a bulletproof vest and he was right.

But I'm You don't win every time, and I think that that's one of the things that he suffered, and he was right, but that didn't mean that he was going to, at the end of the day, get a medal from, for cracking the case, and I think different people handle that differently, and some people, it really does break them, that too.

They'd, because what I mean, maybe it isn't for notoriety, but maybe he just wants people to know the truth, but, um, to quote another Jack, uh, Nicholson movie, you can't handle the truth. Oh, yeah. And it's like just the movie itself. Like, I honestly, I suggest everyone want to watch it. It's one of those movies that, um, I don't know.

I [01:59:00] just, it's, I guess it's been forgotten over time. Um, but it's. It's a, it's a really emotional movie, and I mean, if you're a thinking person, uh, you'll get what I'm saying about just the slippery nature of the truth, and you'll go on this journey with this cop, where at one moment, like, at one moment, you're like, you're totally with this guy, like, he's obsessed, he's, he's gonna, he's, he's gonna catch this guy, and then you start realizing the, some of the stuff he's doing, like, he's putting another little kid in danger, he's sacrificing a potentially healthy relationship, I With, uh, this girl and her daughter, um, because he's so up so obsessed to, uh, to crack this case.

He basically, you know, he gave his life to the police force and trying to protect innocent people. But in the process, he ends up putting innocent people in danger and ends up destroying his own life. It's. It I mean, it's not an easy watch. It's a very depressing movie. And Mickey Rourke has, uh, has a [02:00:00] quick cameo appearance in it.

And, uh, Mickey Rourke is when he's on. Honestly, he's probably 1 of the best actors in Hollywood. And then this little 5 minute scene that he has in there where he's talking about because 1 of his daughters is 1 of the. One of the ones that were killed. Um, it's, it's, it's heartbreaking to watch and I find a lot of with a lot of these cop movies and, um, just crime shows in general.

It's all, it's all about like the CSI type stuff where it's just like, Oh, how are we going to solve this case? And like, uh, with criminal minds. And it's like, Oh, like this guy was doing this. And I found that the, the pledge really brings home just the, uh, personal trauma that comes with. The crimes of this nature, but just crime in general, like the toll it takes on people who are directly involved in it and the people around it and the people trying to, uh, solve the problem.

It's I find, uh, [02:01:00] with a lot in this genre, they try to make it seem it's like, oh, it's like a cat and mouse game. And, and, and. There's aspects of that in this movie, but it's really, it's not the focus. It's about the, the toll that, uh, criminality takes on everyone really well. And you quoted, uh, the other Jack Nicholson line of, you know, You can't handle the truth there a minute ago.

Was it you, Steve, that said that? Yeah. Yeah. But there's another line from that same speech that applies to this movie too, right? Where he says, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. And that. Applies to this character, the detective that he plays in the pledge. It sounds like to me, I mean, that obsessive compulsive, you know, tenacious sort of personality is exactly who you want.

I mean, if that's who you're, if your kid was stolen, but again, there's a price, there's always a price. And, uh, it sounds like they depicted that really well in this movie. [02:02:00] Now, yeah. I did not see it recently, so I don't have a quote from it. So I am going to do a fun fact instead. Chris, did you know this was actually filmed largely in BC?

I didn't know that, but if you told me that I would have been, yeah, I'm not shocked by just like, it looked like it was filmed in the Pacific Northwest, like around that area. Yeah, it was in the, it was around, uh, it was all in the interior of BC, except for the exterior shots that they filmed in Reno to, to, to set it, but they, they shot it in a bunch of small towns.

I've never heard of. And I, I actually know BC fairly well from traveling up there for hockey and stuff. So yeah, it's a fun, fun fact instead of a quote. Yeah. BC is interesting people. They, when they think of British Columbia, if they, I don't know how many Americans actually do think about British Columbia when they do, they can go like Vancouver.

And so people don't realize just how like, what do you like the wilderness in BC? Like they don't get it, right? Like it's [02:03:00] really like, it's really like there we have our hillbillies in Canada too. And then they live in BC. Um, and those are, I'm telling you that, like, I personally haven't been there, but I've heard stories and, uh, Yeah, it can get, like, really, uh, Hillbilly esque in certain parts of British Columbia.

I don't have a quote either, but, uh, another, Mickey Rourke, where he made a really short but impactful cameo was in this movie called Man of God, and it, it was a Greek movie, in English, about a Greek, uh, religious person, and And the last literally two minutes, Mickey Rourke is in it and he absolutely made the movie in just two minutes and he makes a lot of stinkers too, which is pretty amazing.

So yeah, he's a, he's up and down. But boy, like Chris said, when he's up, you know, when you get your angel heart and you're, and you're the [02:04:00] wrestler and movies like this, I mean, that's, uh, that's, that's some pretty powerful acting. Did you have a favorite quote from the movie, Chris? I mean, did he, were there any like favorite quote per se?

I mean, I would say. My favorite scene, even though, like, favorites, like, I guess is a weird word to use, is just that shot of Jerry muttering to himself and, like, shaking his hand, and the camera's panning out, and you see, oh, this is how it ends. It's, no one's actually going to know the truth, and Jerry's going to sit here and slowly go insane for the rest of his life.

Sounds devastating. You know, it is a very, uh, I guess that I suggest everyone watch it. Like it's, uh, it's one of those movies that I just think has slowly been forgotten about. And, um, yeah, go out and watch it when you, uh, guys listen to this podcast.

Steve here again with a quick word from our sponsors. [02:05:00] Now, your second one is a really interesting movie, and it, it, it's on theme, but it also, it has an, it's a little different, too, and that's The Departed, another Jack Nicholson movie. How does that make your list? I didn't even realize I picked two Jack Nicholson movies that didn't, just don't tell me right now.

Maybe I should have picked a third one where he plays something with cops. Uh, should have picked, I'm trying to think of what am I at Chinatown? It's not a cop. Chinatown. Yeah, . He's not, he's a detective per se. But, um, I know I picked, picked the theme for, for Steve too with the LA setting. Yeah, um, I, I just, I picked it to party because I, I enjoyed this movie and I thought, honestly, there's a lot of people who really enjoy this movie and Steve doesn't really enjoy it all that much or thinks it's somewhat overrated.

Um. To be honest with you, I do prefer Black Mass just because it's more, but we'll talk about that I guess in a little bit. But, uh, [02:06:00] yeah, I picked The Departed because it just touches on a lot of themes, uh, and it's somewhat loosely based on a true story. Like, um, I'm assuming most people have seen The Departed, so, um, because it was such a big movie when it did come out.

Uh, The Departed is somewhat loosely based on Whitey Bulger, uh, that, The character played by Jack Nicholson is supposed to be Whitey Bulger, and people aren't familiar with Whitey Bulger. Whitey Bulger was a famous, uh, organized crime figure in South Boston, which is where The Departed takes place. And what makes Whitey Bulger interesting, there's a lot of organized crime figures in the history of Boston, especially South Boston, but Whitey Bulger was actually an FBI informant for most of his criminal career, and it somewhat works.

The way that it's somewhat worked out the way that it's depicted in the movie The Departed, um, where Matt Damon's character grew up in South Boston, idolized, uh, [02:07:00] Jack Nicholson's character and became a police officer. Well, more than a police officer, ended up working for the, the, the FBI. And, uh, Made, uh, Jack Nicholson and, you know, I gotta, I gotta correct you, I gotta correct you there.

That he went to work for the Massachusetts State Police. Oh, that worked for, yeah, he did. He didn't work for the F fbi, FBI story mixed up. Yeah. , the character, the real story, he went, went to work for the F fbi. I, but it was Leonardo DiCaprio's character went to be, he became a Stai, I think. Is that how it Bo Bo Both of them were STAs, yeah.

Oh, okay. Uh, and, yeah, so he ends up, uh, tipping them off, uh, on information, uh, I'm sorry, Matt Damon's character, because he, he idolized him, and there's a whole history about that with how South Boston's almost like a country on and of itself, or a big chunk of its history, um. Yeah, and then with Leonardo DiCaprio's [02:08:00] character, we kind of get a glimpse into the problems, potential problems of undercover police work, because as you're watching the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio's committing various crimes, and I get it, because he's an undercover cop, and he has to, you know, fit in to be able to get to Jack Nicholson's character, um, and But in the process of doing that, he is committing crimes.

He's setting buildings on fire. He's beating people up. He's doing extortion. Uh, pretty much everything short of like actual murder. Um, but he's, he's part of that too, though. Remember him and him and French go into that one place and French kills that guy. Yeah. Uh, he wasn't like, I mean, he didn't participate in per se, right?

But there is that famous scene where he's, he's talking to his handlers and he's, he's saying like, I literally, we literally have this guy on murder. Like, what are you guys doing? And that's always like, I've said this to me, even when I watched the movie and I didn't know it was kind of based on Whitey [02:09:00] Bulger.

I said, Yeah, that would have been the moment where I go, yeah, I'm out. If you're not bringing them in at this point, there's something else going on here. You literally have them on murder. What else do you need? Um, but it's, it raises a lot of those, uh, themes. And then the nature of informants, because I guess, spoiler alert, by the end of it, we find out that, uh, Uh, Jack Nicholson's character has been an informant for the FBI this entire time, which is what happened with Whitey Bulger before they actually decided to start going after him, and there was a huge manhunt.

They, they start realizing it's like Wait a minute, this guy's been, and, our, his handler's basically been protecting him this entire time, and he's been tipping them off about people ratting and telling stories, which have led to like multiple murders. It's like, oh, how did this happen? And It, it shows you like, uh, how quickly, like, the informant system can be abused.[02:10:00]

Um, I mean, J. Edgar Hoover himself was not a big fan of undercover work for obvious reasons. He goes, well, I mean, if you're going to do undercover work, like, you're going to have to commit the crimes to fit in for them to actually buy that you're who you say you are. And the nature of the, the, the problems, if you say using informants is.

They can easily lie, or they can easily not give you good information, or they can, by lying, covering up their own crimes. Yeah, look at Donnie Brasco. I mean, look at what he had to do to maintain his cover. And certainly, uh, Uh, Billy Costigan, the character that Leonardo DiCaprio plays, he, he's present for a murder and, and he, you know, he's doing all kinds of crimes, lower level crimes.

And you can see it's taken a toll on him. I mean, when he goes to see that, that, uh, psychologist, which obviously that's pretty contrived that they both talk to the same psychologist, blah, blah, blah. [02:11:00] But how busted up he is about it and how he's asking for, you know, something to help him sleep and to. Cope.

I think that's pretty realistic. I mean, he knows what he just did is wrong, but, and he's still, and he's being forced to continue to do it. And, uh, Quinn and, and, uh, what's Don, what's Donnie Wahlberg's character's name? Uh, the sergeant. Uh, there's a smart Alec through the whole movie, uh, you know, they don't, they don't pull them out on when, like you said, they had any number of charges on him.

So I would be going crazy if that were me undercover work. I've done undercover undercover work for. Like hours at a time. That's, that's all the experience I had. Um, and it's nerve wracking for, you know, three hours to pretend you're somebody else and to, you know, to delve into that world. Um, and it's a completely different experience and not necessarily a [02:12:00] pleasant one.

I can't imagine doing it for the period of time that this character had to. Well, and you're watching, like I'm saying, like, you're, you're a police officer. You signed up to like, you know, I don't want to not commit crimes. Really? Like the majority, you want to stop crimes and then you become an uncovered police officer and you're participating in the crimes.

You have no choice because I mean, your life's at risk too. Like, if you're not like. Helping with committing the crimes. They're going to be like, who's this guy? He's, uh, is he a cop? Is he a rat? What's going on here? And you could easily get, you know, the crap kicked out of you or killed in some circumstances.

Like if you're a witness to a murder and they're like, oh, this guy could be a cop, they're just going to kill you right there. I mean, I wouldn't even like besmirch them to a degree. I'm like, this is what they do. And this guy's a cop. And he just watched us do it. Like, We're all going to go to jail for life if this guy talks, right?

So, like, I get it to a degree. [02:13:00] I think I obviously think it's a, it's abhorrent, but I, I mean, is it fair to be putting police officers in those circumstances? You know, I really, I know, I think, I think you have to volunteer to do this type of work. Like, they don't, it's not assigned to you, but even somebody volunteers, I mean, somebody can volunteer to go home.

To Vietnam too. I mean, was it really fair to be sending them into those jungles and with like no real like plan in place or rhyme or reason of them? We're just going to bomb the crap out of something and then just like, Oh yeah, just go into the jungle. It's it's not, I don't. There's a part of me that feels like it's not fair, but there's also a part of me that's like, it's, it's necessary work to really kind of get to the information.

I mean, one of the biggest, I mean, successful, uh, you pointed out with Donnie Brasco, one of the most successful operations in terms of the mafia and just collecting information, not so much per se with arrests, but a fair amount of people were arrested too, was Donnie Brasco, right? Joe Pistone going undercover for many years on, [02:14:00] uh, and infiltrating the Bonanno family almost up until the point where.

You know, he was going to get made and he actually pushed against the FBI didn't want him to get made. And Joe was like, I'm right there. They're going to make me just, you know, let me do it. And they pulled him out at that point. Frank, in your experience, was that sort of deep cover type thing? Was that something that it wasn't?

It's more common for the feds and the state authorities to do that sort of thing. And, uh, local police department. I think it's more common for a larger agency because they have the resources to support it. And, and yes, it usually is, uh, you know, you're targeting something big most of the time. I mean, going undercover for a shift and buying drugs and pretending you're a drug user and doing street hand to hands.

I mean, that's undercover, but it's not deep undercover. It's not what you're talking about here. And so what you're talking about here is. It has a, an overarching goal, [02:15:00] uh, that's pretty ambitious. And so it requires the person to be undercover for a longer period of time. And it's more dangerous. You're working without a net most of the time.

I mean, one thing that you do in an undercover operation, that's a short term one is you can, you can control the situation a lot more and provide for a lot more safety for your undercover operative. Yeah. Uh, if, you know, if they were walking up to the corner to buy drugs, you can have the corner coverage.

You can have a ready response car. You can have a video camera rolling. You can, you know, you can, uh, have an ear pier, earpiece in to warn them if somebody's walking up behind them. I mean, there's things you can do. You put somebody undercover like Donnie Brasco. Well, Joe Pistone, but like, You know, in that scenario or in the fictional scenario of Billy Costigan here in the departed and you know, they are totally walking, working without a net.

They are on their own. And that has a stress level to it that I think has got to be off the charts. I mean, uh, [02:16:00] and again, it's kind of shown in how Costigan, you know, relates to the, uh, to the, to the psychologist. It's, but it's like you said, Chris, there are some Goals, there are some things that you might want to accomplish that can only be accomplished through undercover work.

And you accept the danger as the officer and as the organization and you accept that there may be some smaller transgressions that take place in order to achieve the greater good. But it's far more regimented and far more, um. There are a lot of rules in place and safety precautions and checks and balances in the real world than in a lot of the more ambitious films that want to, you know, hype up the drama.

And certainly the further back you go, you can play a little faster and loosen, be a little closer to reality. But to answer your question directly, Steve, I think it is a larger department, maybe a state or a federal department. Or a large department [02:17:00] that has a task that they see that is going to take a lot of work to take down and not uncoincidentally organized crime is one of those things which speaks directly to the core topic of your show and not being a lawyer or a cop or anything like that.

But I think that somebody like Donnie Brasco. He just he kind of like kept slipping deeper and deeper and deeper into it, but I would personally think that, you know, with my very limited knowledge that you start getting somebody to in deep and they start making those, you know, they start doing those little crimes that kind of.

Opens up the prosecution to problems of chain of evidence and all that sort of thing. When they get too deep into it. Well, Mr. Brass or, uh, you know, Agent Postone, where were you when that murder was committed? And, you know, I did. That sort of thing where I think that and that's what I think the [02:18:00] FBI was getting to when they didn't want him to be made.

Like you put somebody on the stand, you were made in the, in the mafia. Where exactly did you stand in this? Yeah. And how did you manage to, to do that? Yeah, in the departed situation, where not only was he undercover, he was also working for the, the Jack Nicholson Whitey Bulger character. So he was working on, you know, all three sides of the fence.

And it's interesting, too, because when Chris points out that this mirrors the Whitey Bulger scenario, and that Nicholson was absolutely modeled after him, um, it's actually also an adaptation from a Hong Kong film called Infernal Affairs that. Mirrors the storyline very closely. Um, there's some deviations and so forth.

And there's a couple of good videos on YouTube that highlight what those differences are. But when they said it in Boston, obviously they said, well, there's a lot of local Boston history that we need to work [02:19:00] into this. And the whole, all the whitey bulger stuff obviously was where it was, what they plugged in.

Crazy fact about this movie is that Whitey Bulger was on the run still from the FBI when this movie came out, so he could very well have watched this movie that was somewhat loosely, I mean, it's very loosely based on his life to a degree, and sit there and just Like, watch Jack Nicholson kind of play a fake version of him.

It's, it's, he was, he was still on the run at the time. You know, they only caught him when he was like an old man. And then he was like brutally murdered in prison. But I mean, we're gonna, I guess we'll save that for like a whole another series. That's gonna be like Voight E Paltry. It's gonna be a huge series.

But I, I want to catch it. Like, you worked with informants, right? Sure. I mean, how, like, how reliable it's, it could be such a slippery slope where, like, you think this guy's feeding you good information, but like, is he actually really feeding you useful information or not? Like, how do [02:20:00] you discern that? Well, the proof is in the pudding, right?

I mean, you always want to independently verify what you're told and in order to use a witness, um, or a CID in order to use, uh, a confidential informant. For as the basis for probable cause to get a search warrant or to arrest somebody, you have to prove that they have that knowledge and you have to be able to prove that they have a track record of being truthful and accurate, right?

That there, you can't just say, yeah, some guy named Chris told me that Steve was slinging dope. So I want to take the door. I have to be able to say, well, you know, Chris is a user he's bought From that house before Chris has provided me information on 3 separate occasions that I have confirmed to be accurate.

I mean, you have to go through this process of essentially qualifying the informant and if they're going to be an official CI, there's actually a CI contract that they, that people will have their [02:21:00] CI sign. There's a. You know, basically I call it what you want. It's basically a code of ethics, basically a do thou shalt not list, you know, that they have to abide by.

And, um, and, and so I'm not telling you that people don't have informal snitches. They certainly do, but to get to the point where they're actually a confidential informant, then it's a little bit more involved. And, and to, to know if they're telling the truth again, it's because they've told you the truth and you verified it.

So you're just open that, you know. This this 6th instance of them giving the information is also true because the 1st 5 or true, you know, best indicator of future performance is fast past performance, right? How does the instead of curiosity? How would a department figure out whether a cop is? Basically running protection for an informant in this movie in particular, like the cop, like Jack Nicholson's character, Whitey Bulger was an informant.

He was giving them information to a degree. [02:22:00] Um, but it wasn't a lot of the times. It wasn't very useful information, but he had an FBI handler that was running protection for him. And how does the department go about finding out whether this is happening with the police officer? He's running protection for informant may be the guy was high school friend, or maybe he's giving them a little bit of cash underneath the table, or maybe the cops got a drug problem or something.

You know, he's hooking them up. How do they find out whether the information that the cop is claiming is giving them is good information. Um, it's leading to, like, other arrests and it only all you'd have to do is the informant is just give enough to maybe. So it's just so maybe somebody's getting arrested, but in actuality, it's just all a front for something else.

I mean, how do they go about investigating that? Well, that's a multi layered question and probably too big for this, for this discussion here. But I, but, but the one, one piece that, that you kind [02:23:00] of went to there at the end, it only takes one time for an informant to give bad information and for the.

Officer to act on that information and get burned, particularly if other cops are present and see that, um, to to to sour that relationship. You might get away with 1 mishap like that. If you've got a really good excuse and a real good track record. Um, but. You burn me twice and we're done and I'll probably put you on my, you know, give no quarter list, uh, as well.

Um, so it, it, it really all comes down to Chris, the facts of it, right? You just see, you know, did this person give good information or not? And that answers the question in, in, in toward the idea of a cop covering for an informant or something. I mean, it's a real great scenario for fiction. I haven't encountered it really happening.

In my career, I'm not saying it hasn't happened, but my answer would be the same. I mean, I would expect that this sort of [02:24:00] thing would eventually become apparent. I mean, even in the movie, when Matt Damon is fiddling with his phone and texting. Jack Nicholson, and he gets a text and Billy Costigan sees him get a text and then immediately make his decision to do something when he goes and talks to Queen and, and I still can't remember the Wahlberg character's name, which is bugging me, but when he goes and talks to them for debrief on this incident, he's going to point that out that he got a text or something and he changed, you know, changed the plan and they did this.

If anybody. Was suspicious or saw Matt Damon's character doing something they're going to start to be suspicious. And once somebody's suspicious of something, they start looking at it. You know, most conspiracies don't hold up once people start actually, like, you know, open in the cupboards and peeking under under the rug and so forth.

So I think the truth went out in most agencies pretty quickly. If somebody was doing that. You know what I thought was, it was great about the movie, but it, and I think it made it exciting, but it also [02:25:00] was sort of the failure at the end is that Whitey Bulger at that point in 2006, that was one of the great mysteries of, uh, you know, you could rank that with like, where did Amelia Earhart go?

And where did, um, you know, is it, are, were they all Elvis and Jimi Hendrix and then living on an island somewhere? Like that's how, with DB Cooper flying the plane that way. was how gone he was in 2006. He was on unsolved mysteries, you know, that was one of the things. And then to me, that was sort of a fail at the end of the movie is because they didn't, Scorsese didn't seem to know how to end it.

And then, what was it, I think in 2012 did they catch him, something like that? And then so we know now what the rest of the story is. So I think that that was kind of the, that was what made the movie so exciting when it came out. But then the ending kind of fell flat because I don't think, I mean, I don't [02:26:00] feel like it was a satisfying ending to it.

It was kind of an action ending. Yeah, I get shot up and then they find out that he's an informant. I mean, I mean, I, I'm not going to disagree with that. The ending's a little anticlimactic, but, uh, like the, the rest of the movie, the pace of it's just great. It just kind of rolls along. And I know you said you're not a huge fan of it, but I like, I don't know.

I enjoy it. Like, uh, especially when like Leonardo DiCaprio's character dies. It was just such a good kick in the ending. Kicking the balls, sorry, but like, it's the truth, right? It's a good shock moment, right? Yeah, you know, it's like, whoa, but then it's not like just shocking for the sake of shocking. Like, it actually makes sense in terms of this movie.

It really does. Maybe I'll upset the audience here, but. I think one of the things that I didn't like about the Departed, or one of the things that like stuck in my craw is Matt Damon's, one of my poison pill actors. I guess I, I give a quite a bit of a list that Chris knows that Nicholas Cage is one of [02:27:00] them, but when some certain actors are in a movie, it's a, it, it sets a high bar for me to like it, and Matt Damon's one of them.

Really? That's interesting. I think he's a pretty good actor. I, I got a somewhat, I'm not as bad as Steve. I got to like, I'm not a huge, huge fan of his, but I'm a huge fan of Leonardo DiCaprio. So I love his acting. I think he's great. Right? Uh, you didn't like goodwill hunting, Steve. No, I, I, and I liked everything except for him.

I think there's something about Matt Damon that he's always Matt Damon. I never really believe him that he's even like in Elysium where he played, was he a cyborg or he was something he just seemed like Matt Damon. I don't. I don't know what it is science fiction. Matt Damon. Yeah, that's funny. Good. Well, hunting was out of a soft spot in my heart because there's that scene with, uh, Robin Williams character.

And he's [02:28:00] talking about how his wife passed away and. Like, he's just, that was like, his life was over at that point and, you know, not to get too personal, it's just like, after my mom passed away, what have you, and then I, I could see, even at a young age, I could see it on my dad's face, right? Like, that was, he was just, I just, life was just never going to be the same again.

And, and, I don't know, that scene just really changed. That scene just really, this is really touching. I enjoy the movie. I, I, I, I, I somewhat agree with Matt Damon's acting. You know, I find it's kind of like The Rock to a degree where I'm like, I, I don't know. Oh my God, no, no, no. Is it like The Rock? Come on.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying like, it's almost like I'm seeing it. Yeah, his, um, I just, it's almost like, no, we're, let me explain that before we, uh, are you saying his persona comes through no matter what? Is that kind of the same thing? I kind of again and again, like, I've seen Matt Damon act [02:29:00] and it's good, but it's, it's the same, right?

Like, I don't, I don't. See a range, like a range of acting where, like, compare Leonardo DiCaprio in this movie, and you watch Leo, and he's pretty, he's very different and pretty much every movie that he's in. And one reason, I mean, Steve might hate Nicolas Cage. And to me, like, the one of the reasons I do like Nicolas Cage is I never know what to expect when I watch one of his movies, you know, it's either it's going to be a train wreck, or it's going to be leaving Las Vegas, you know what I mean?

Like, it'd be one or the other, right? And, you know, I just find, like, with Matt Damon, it's just, it's very safe, his acting, right? And, and that's the reason I kind of brought up The Rock. Like, you watch The Rock's movies, and they're like, okay, they're entertaining, but they're very safe. Like, you're, no one's gonna remember.

No one's going to remember any of these rock movies that have come out, like the way they remember the predator or Terminator or Total Recall. They're just not going to remember them because [02:30:00] they're all so, they're so polished and they're so safe. They're very vanilla. They're very vanilla. Yeah, but I don't think the same is true of Matt Damon's movies.

I mean, The Talented Mr. Ripley. I mean, that's completely different than any of these other movies. I don't think I've seen that one. Yeah, because you don't like him. So it makes sense. And, and, and just going back to the departed, you have to admit he's pretty damn good in this movie. I mean, whether you like him or not, he, he plays.

The role really well now, I can see what you're saying. He kind of plays Matt Damon really well. If Matt Damon were a steady sergeant, I get what you're saying. And he does do that sometimes. I'm not going to deny it. But I do think he has more range than you're giving him credit for. Um. Is there a favorite line from this movie for either of you?

Do you have a favorite line? Since it's your movie, Chris, you want to go first? That scene with, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio, I can't remember the exact line, but he's, uh, he's talking to, uh, Martin Sheen and, uh, uh, [02:31:00] Marky Mark, and, uh, he's saying that you, we literally have him on tape committing murder. Why haven't you brought him in yet?

And it's like, and I'm watching that movie for the first time. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Murder. You have him on murder. Like, uh, what else could you possibly need? And, uh, they don't do anything about it. That would have been, I'm sitting there watching the movie. I'm like, that would have been the second. I'm like, I'm out because there's something else going on here.

There are a number of YouTube videos online. You can look up that talk about why the departed is not a good movie. And that is 1 of the things that they hammer on this is that that doesn't make any sense. How about you, Steve? I don't have a quote as such, but I think this is 1 of those. Scorsese movies that has take or leave Matt Damon, but otherwise like such a great cast and a young cast to a young Mark Wahlberg, young Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio was young, like all [02:32:00] of these guys were young and Jack Nicholson was still pretty young at that point.

And I think that the movie had a lot of energy to it. Yeah, that's the best part of the film is the, is the pacing. Like it's just, it's go, go, go, go, go. It's like the dropkick Murphy song that's famous in the movie. Uh, it's, it's just has a pace to it. Like almost like a punk rock song, you know, it's just, I get from one point one, even though the movie is like, I think it's almost three hours.

I think it's just, it doesn't feel like that though. It doesn't feel like that when you're watching it. The pacing is probably the best. Just from a technical standpoint is the best part of the film. In my opinion. I love how they rag on the fireman early on when they're playing rugby. It's pretty funny.

Rip on the fireman there. I also like where he says that, uh. The Irish are impervious to, uh, to, uh, psychoanalysis. It's that whole scene. It's pretty funny, but I got to tell you that, uh, Mark Wahlberg's character, it's [02:33:00] ding ding them. Sergeant ding them. He has some of the best lines and maybe the very best 1 is where somebody says, who are you?

And he says, uh. I'm the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy. Oh, yeah. He's Mark kills me. Mark Wahlberg is one of those type of actors to where he's like, I wouldn't say he's like a great actor, but like in a role like that, where he has to play the tough cop from Boston, he's phenomenal at it. I mean, his brother's made an entire career out of it.

Donnie, I think basically just playing Boston cop rates. Yeah, well, he was in Band of Brothers too, as Donnie Wahlberg was. He played Sergeant Lip, uh, Lip, Lipman, Lipman, something like that. And, uh, and he was briefly in, uh, Sixth Sense too. Yeah, he was really good at like, that was out way. I didn't even know it was him.

Yeah, this was a good film, though. I was gonna say, Don, he was also in the Saw movies, too. I think he was, like, in three of [02:34:00] them. I know that's not for everybody, but he's, uh Talk about range. He was, uh, he was a three. He plays a cop in that one, though. He plays, like, uh, like, kind of basically Mark Wahlberg's cop, kind of, in The Departure.

He's just, like, this hard nosed, like, detective. Well, these were interesting, interesting choices really Chris, because like the pledges when I had not remembered, and I think you hit on some really great themes in there and the departed could be, I mean, you can take it or leave it. You can like it or not.

It has some. Complex things woven inside of it and you could decide it's about X and X could be any of about five different things and you could definitively make a case that most academics would agree. Yeah, that's what it's about. And, and you'd have some good support for your arguments. And it is a fun movie.

I did watch it recently, um, within the last year. And I, I did find that it didn't hold up quite as well as previous watchings, but you know, yeah. That happens [02:35:00] sometimes it's funny. You brought up, like, people push to push back against the, the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio says, uh, like, you literally have them on murder.

And people said, like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Well, I mean, in the Whitey Bulger case, like, they knew what Whitey Bulger was like, they had pretty good idea that he was committing murders too. And they didn't do anything about that at the time either. So, I mean, it's not that far fetched. Great soundtrack too.

Mara, yes, Scorsese always has incredible soundtracks. I mean, that's one thing that no matter what he always has the perfect song for the perfect moment. That, that, uh, voiceover that Nicholson does while Gimme Shelter's playing at the beginning, that really, really gets the movie going. Uh, good choices, Chris.

Thumbs up on your choices here. Well, I want to thank everybody for listening. Uh, thanks to mustache, Chris and Frank for joining us. And I think we really, you know, we've looked at the, the movie qualities. We've [02:36:00] looked at the, the bigger story. I think there's a lot to get out of these episodes. And if there are people want more of movies, uh, I definitely like talking about movies.

And I think you can tell that Frank and mustache like to talk movies. Let's head out with just one more. What's your honorable mention that maybe one day we can do an honorable mention show? For me, it's a really weird one. Maybe it would, I think it would have fit well into Chris's list is the movie Dragged Across Concrete with Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn.

It was completely fictionalized and it was very weird and it was very crime noir, but it was a really fun movie. Yeah, I, I, I would love to talk about that one in terms of, uh, cops behaving badly because, uh, it's a great movie. Everything that director does has done. I'm trying to remember his name right now.

It's just been amazing. Like, he did Bonehawk Tomahawk, I [02:37:00] believe, or Bone Tomahawk. And he also did Cell Block, uh, was it 99? Right, Cell Block 99. And those three movies are just incredible. It's amazing. It's just, the themes of the films are just so anti what goes on in Hollywood right now. It's such a brush, brush hair, everything that this guy, the director's done, especially drag to cost concrete.

There's some scenes in that movie. I'm like, how did this movie get made? Like, this needs to get made, but how did this get made in this environment? I don't know how, but it's definitely worth watching, guys. So what's yours? Um, who wants to jump in? What's your honorable mention? Um, I'm trying to think of one, uh, trying to think.

Oh, I was going to say the French Connection. And I was going to do it initially, uh, for the three, but I ended up cutting it out. I think we're going to save it for something later. But, uh, yeah, French Connection is probably one of my top five favorite movies. Uh, William [02:38:00] Freakin is also one of my favorite directors, uh, you know, off air we were talking about how I just, I just like his approach to filmmaking and, you know, sometimes it's a huge hit like the Exorcist or the French Connection and sometimes it's, uh, it's not so good, but, uh, I appreciate the fact that he's willing to take risks, so.

I was buzzing through a bunch of them sitting here trying to decide which I'd name. I mean, I was thinking of To Live and Die in LA. Uh, man hunter one. I know Chris likes NARC. Um, but I think if we're doing a little more eclectic films that are police related films that are, are like you're saying, Chris, that need to be watched and watch with some intelligent intent.

I'm going to go with Lone Star. It's a movie directed by John sales. Has Chris Christopherson in it, Matthew McConaughey's in it, and I can't remember the actor's name right now. That's actually the main character. You've seen him before as a character actor. He has kind of a, uh, his [02:39:00] face is a little bit ready, you know, and, and, uh, he's, he's always a 2nd, you know, 2nd or 3rd billing.

But he's, he's the lead in this movie. It takes place in, in Texas. And I'll leave it at that. If we do end up talking about it, it's a really good piece of filmmaking and storytelling with some great acting. All right. Well, we're going to leave it at that. If you want to learn more about the show, you can check out for links in the show notes.

We'll have links to Frank and his projects in the show notes. And the best thing you can do to help us out is to tell a friend of yours about organized crime and punishment so that your friends can become friends of ours. Forget about it, guys. Forget about it.[02:40:00]