TV REVIEW : Jack Newfield Goes ‘Behind the Badge’

Do not dismiss New York Post reporter Jack Newfield’s “Frontline” investigation on corruption and the poor public image plaguing the New York Police Department as a parochial Gotham story. “Behind the Badge” (at 9 tonight, KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15; 8 p.m., KVCR-TV Channel 24) is about the country’s love-hate relationship with cops, and why the scale seems to lean toward hate much more than toward love.

As his past “Frontline” reports--”Don King, Unauthorized” and “JFK, Hoffa and the Mob”--starkly demonstrate, Newfield loathes bad guys, and is deeply troubled by violations of trust. What he finds in his intimate study of working cops and two dramatic, headline-grabbing episodes is that as police culture fights evil, it can be infected by evil. Even worse, this culture’s insularity from the larger culture--perceived by cops as a strength--may very well be its Achilles’ heel.

Certainly, this is obvious in the corruption investigation surrounding policeman Michael Dowd and his NYPD circle of drug-dealing, drug-using buddies. As a unit of the department’s internal affairs, led by investigator Joseph F. Trimboli, inched closer and closer to nabbing Dowd’s group, Trimboli felt the whole weight of NYPD brass to stop before the case blew open. The fear, it unfolds, was not of a department betrayed by bad cops allying with the enemy; it was that the public’s worst image of police would only be reinforced by good cops exposing rotten ones.

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Of course, as Newfield rightly notes, the brass’ attempted cover-up of the corruption was the PR scandal, not Trimboli’s work. (He became a hero, in fact, lionized by some of the same officials who tried to muzzle him earlier.)

For truly bad PR, though, few cases could top NYPD cop Michael O’Keefe’s. Before he was found not guilty by a grand jury of murdering Kiko Garcia, O’Keefe was essentially tried and demonized by the media and a pent-up public that rioted in the Washington Heights streets in the wake of the Garcia shooting. Newfield’s lengthy look at the case is not so much to show how badly the press botched the story--though it did, to a fare-thee-well--as to indicate what deep divisions exist between police and everyone else, from press to politicians to the public.

O’Keefe clearly became the whipping boy of a pervasive anti-police attitude, a tendency that cops in O’Keefe’s 34th Precinct, and everywhere else, despair about.

Newfield’s prescriptions? More cops on the beat, more cops from the neighborhood, fewer headlines presuming that cops are guilty and even fewer self-serving public officials. The former are possible, the latter are pipe dreams, but Newfield’s recipe stems from nothing less than a concern to preserve civilization.