TV REVIEW : PBS’ ‘Police Chiefs’ Offers an Enlightening Look at Top Cops

One of the reassuring messages of “Police Chiefs,” filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond’s contribution to the PBS documentary series “P.O.V.” (at 10 tonight on Channels 28 and 15), is that not all of the country’s top cops are like the Los Angeles Police Department’s Daryl Gates.

By placing Gates in a larger American context, in which he shares the spotlight with two other chiefs with very different crime-enforcement philosophies--Anthony Bouza of Minneapolis and Lee Brown of Houston--the Raymonds show that Gates’ P.O.V. (short for point of view) might just be kooky period, even among cops.

Perhaps less reassuring is the fact that Bouza and Brown have left their posts since the film was shot--Brown assuming the top post in New York City, and the eloquent Bouza resigning from public life, which he terms, “a slippery rock upon which one ought not rest too long.” Gates, the bulldog of the three, remains at Parker Center.

So, tough guys finish first? Not necessarily.

As the Raymonds track Gates and his department’s impressive array of paramilitary hardware, ranging from see-in-the dark helicopters to the notorious battering ram, they portray a department fighting mightily and failing miserably at the drug war. With a comparatively tiny force for a city the size of Los Angeles, Gates’ department feels it must use an aggressive, high-tech strategy, of which the star is the SWAT team.

The Houston and Minneapolis departments can be just as forceful, as we see with Houston’s anti-drug unit. But at least Brown and Bouza are men with a sense of social justice--a justice, they both stress, that begins at home: Both chiefs were responsible during their tenures for dramatically reversing departmental corruption.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, the Raymonds record Gates denying any causal relationship between poverty and crime, and proposing some solutions to prison overcrowding that are straight out of science fiction. Gates almost smirks as he says this, as if he doesn’t really believe it himself.