Aquarius, Episode 4: Spoiler Alerts

Episode 4 of Aquarius is an exposition of hypocrisies–in domestic law enforcement, in foreign policy, and in personal life.

At the forefront of the episode are two murders: the one Sam Hodiak is investigating, an intra-racial crime within the black community, and the one no one is investigating, the murder of a black teenager named Michael Younger in the hands of a white cop (“chokehold” is said to be referred to as “cop hold”.) When Hodiak comes to investigate the former, the message from the Black Panthers, on behalf of the neighborhood, is that they will not collaborate, nor will they hand him the suspect, until the other murder is solved and the culprit, a police officer well known to them, brought to justice. Among the Black Panthers is the man Hodiak falsely arrested in Episode 1, who tells him:

Bunchy: You pushed out the contradictions and gave birth to me as a black panther. It’s the dialectic.
Sam: I don’t understand what you’re saying, and moreover, you don’t understand a word you’re saying.
Bunchy: The dialectic. A conflict of opposites. As the man said, you may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.
Sam: I think it’s way too early in the morning to quote Trotsky. Oh, look, it reads!

By “it”, does Sam refer to Bunchy or to himself? Bunchy accuses him of being “a racist cop in the most racist police force in the nation.” Perhaps moved only by the will to secure cooperation on his own investigation, or perhaps realizing a bit of the broader structural problem, Hodiak investigates Younger’s murder. He and Shafe crack it and prepare to go to internal investigations. But Cutler, promoted to lieutenant now, stops them. “You think that, after Watts,” asks Cutler, “this department going to admit a white cop killed a black teenager?” Shafe’s incredulity about the department’s decision to bury the murder, and his awakening to the bitter news about the status quo, will undoubtedly echo in many sympathetic post-Ferguson viewers’ thoughts, made more bitter because of the passage of time.


What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends;
I learned that justice never ends;
I learned that murderers die for their crimes,
even though we make a mistake sometimes;
that’s what I learned in school today,
that’s what I learned in school.

But Hodiak has his own awakening to go through, too. His son, Walt, has gone AWOL. Having served in covert ops in Cambodia, he has realized that the plan is “saturated bombing, killing children, arming crazies, destroying that civilization.” Hodiak is not blind to the atrocities of war or to the president’s deceit about the Cambodia front, but his moral compass is elsewhere: “if you want to win a war, you got to fight ugly sometimes.” But Walt is undeterred and plans to leak what he knows to the press.

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie;
I learned that soldiers seldom die;
I learned that everybody’s free,
that’s what the teacher said to me;
that’s what I learned in school today,
that’s what I learned in school.

I learned our government must be strong; 
It’s always right and never wrong;
Our leaders are the finest men,
And we elect them again and again;
that’s what I learned in school today,
that’s what I learned in school.

Finally, the Manson girls’ care and concern for each other (if only as fellow disciples) is contrasted, again, to the hypocritical sham marriages of, well, pretty much everyone else, such as the Hodiak and Karn families.

Aquarius, Episode 3: Spoiler Alerts

Two major themes emerge in Episode 3 of Aquarius: the two main characters as embodiments of the two criminal justice models and the fragmented and complicated image of Manson painted by the show.

The first half of the episode, and some scenes in the second half, see Hodiak helping Shafe solve the murder of Art Gladner, for which Shafe’s informant was falsely arrested. The investigation takes Hodiak into the noir-like environment of a strip club (“burlesque theater”, the owner corrects him). There, he uncovers a drug connection, which leads him to the culprit. It turns out that Hodiak himself contributed to the chain of events that led to the murder: by writing “snitch” on Gladner’s forehead, he marked him for execution; and, by breaking the new suspect’s arm, he advertised to the other players in the drug business that the suspect was under police control and surveillance. Hodiak does not seem to harbor any guilt or discomfort about his complicity, and his confrontation with Shafe floats this to the surface:

Shafe: He was a person.
Hodiak: Who sold drugs.
Shafe: You’re unbelievable. Whatever you want, you do it.”
Hodiak: It’s true. I can be a tad brusque”.

This dialogue, again building on the buddy-cops trope, highlights for 21-century viewers the transformative moment in American policing. Two important developments clash in the years immediately preceding this scene: the emergence of Mapp, Miranda, and Gideon, part of the Warren Court’s criminal procedure constitutional revolution, and the arrival of Richard Nixon to the Presidential seat, and with it efforts at bolstering and funding local police stations to counter the revolution.

If you will, the two officers are personal embodiments of Herbert Packer’s Two Models of the Criminal Process. Hodiak embodies Nixon’s commitment to the crime control model, where the police and prosecution are imbued with immense power and discretion and anything goes as long as crimes are solved and criminals brought to trial quickly and efficiently. By contrast, Shafe embodies the Warren Court’s commitment to the due process model, both in terms of adherence to constitutional requirements like the Miranda warnings and in the commitment to equality, illustrated also by his personal life (in this episode, an unknown neighbor paints the words “nigger lover” on his garage, intimidating his wife and child.) For Shafe, the worst thing that can happen is a procedural mistake leading to a wrongful arrest. For Hodiak, it’s delay in solving a crime.

These political perspectives are generational, too. Hodiak is a WW2 veteran, with a clear idea of right and wrong, leading him–three years before Daniel Ellsberg would leak the Pentagon papers–to assume that the war in Vietnam is justified and that his son, gone AWOL, is a war criminal. Shafe seems to be a Vietnam or Korea veteran, capable of seeing more shades of gray.

These aspects of the show, at this point, strike me as more interesting and convincing than the Manson family scenes. It seems that the show has a difficult point pinpointing Manson’s image: is he a religious leader? a common pimp? how much of his eventual terrifying violence is already in evidence through his malevolence? We see Manson enchanting girls with two-bit New Age speeches that might have been more effective in the Sixties; we also see him controlling and domineering them, treating them as property. But we also see him performing great violence, often with his signature knife. At the same time, some of the lines given to Manson have him effectively expose the destructive hypocrisy of the 1960s; his words to Ken, who comes to him at the bottom of his spiral of shame and self-hatred, are apt. After a particularly heartbreaking and distressing search for furtive sex in a park bathroom (a good reminder of how far we’ve come), Ken accuses Manson of making him a homosexual:

Ken: You did this to me.
Charlie: I freed you.
Ken: You broke me.
Charlie: You were already broken, Ken. I just pulled you out of your shell.

Manson’s perspective, of course, is far more in tune with our modern perspectives on homosexuality. One has to conclude that even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day.

Aquarius, Episode 2: Spoiler Alerts

The second episode of Aquarius features quite a bit of gender critique, ranging from internalized, closeted homophobia, through sexual hypocrisy and workplace discrimination, to domestic violence.

In is search for his daughter, Ken finds his former client and lover, Charlie, who subjects him to his spiritual and sexual ministrations once again. One almost feels sorry for Ken; his internalized homophobia and self-hatred make him an ideal victim for Manson’s exploitation. Meanwhile, affairs abound: Ken’s wife and Hodiak, a former couple, succumb to their passions, while Hodiak’s wife sleeps with Cut, his former partner. Not a single marriage in the series is portrayed as happy and fulfilling. The show makes it almost refreshing to listen to Sadie (Atkins), Katie (Krenwinkel) and Emma discuss the need to end jealousy; it would be idyllic, if not for the fact that Manson employs the control tactics of a common pimp and essentially sells out the girls to his sound engineer and to others. In this episode we see him, for the first time, battering the girls themselves into submission.

To infiltrate a cult in which sex is a common currency, the undercover police officer, Charmain, has to sacrifice, more than Shafe, who works with her, is comfortable allowing her; but as second wave feminism is only just beginning, and Charmain is in a hierarchical organization, she is willing to go undercover among predatory and dangerous bikers, and sometimes has to respond quite sharply to male officers who miss no opportunity to humiliate and objectify her.

This episode has piqued my curiosity about undercover police practices in the 1960s, and the extent to which these were employed to infiltrate cults. These are, after all, the early days of the Nixon administration, and police professionalism and proactive policing would be encouraged. Perhaps there are many unsung heroes and villains still among us, who saw people their own age as the enemy and can tell many tales of duplicity and domestic espionage.

Aquarius, Episode 1: Spoiler Alerts

“Charlie has a vision; one day he’s gonna be more famous than the Beatles, and we’re gonna help him get there.”

The first episode of Aquarius feels a bit like a Sixties Smorgasbord. Everything is there: revolution, Vietnam, Nation of Islam, homophobia and closeted homosexuality… and also, Manson, his nascent cult, and some ideas on old and new policing.

Our exposition to Manson in this double episode introduces him already as a diabolical character. His charm toward girls, grandiosity, mystical talk, and hidden violence and “pull” with the Los Angeles upper crust, as well as his love of music, are all already there. Of course, the viewers already know the aftermath, and so, many features that would otherwise appear innocent–your typical musical aspirant hustler–take on a much darker meaning. On at least two occasions, Manson is already engaging in terrifying violence, against a shopkeeper and against his former lawyer and lover, Ken Karn. Karn attempts to regain his daughter, Emma, who lives with the Family, but ends up being pulled himself back into the clutches of Manson and his cult, in a storyline reminiscent of RuthAnn “Ouisch” Morehouse and her father, Deane. We are also introduced to Sadie (Susan Atkins) and Katie (Patricia Krenwinkel) and to a biker/bodyguard, as well as to Manson’s extensive criminal record. As the police officer in charge of the investigation, Hodiak, discusses his criminal history with Manson’s parole officer, we get a glimpse of what criminal justice was like before the sex offender panic: no time served for pimping, and seven years served on four grams of marijuana in a state park.

Using the classic tropes identified in Richard Spark’s TV Cops, we are introduced to this series’ version of the bond-between-two-different-police-officers: old-skool Hodiak and new-generation Shafe. The former, always in a suit, was a cop very long before the birth of Miranda (two years before the show is set); the idea of suspect rights is more natural to the latter, always in hippy clothes and, as a narc underground, “gone native” to an extent. Collaborating on a homicide, Hodiak arrests an unrelated, innocent man–a member of the Nation of Islam whom he knows from a previous case–radicalizing him in the process. Using this false arrest to obtain a confession that avoids compliance with Miranda, Hodiak creates a ruse that holds off and confounds the real suspect’s attorney (a maneuver later considered constitutionally kosher in Moran v. Burbine). Promising the suspect, a terminally-ill man, no jail time, Hodiak prevents him from meeting his attorney, arresting him after he obtains a confession. Only then he gives the suspect his warnings, which he reads out of a card.

The ruse itself does not upset Shafe; shortly before, they both collaborate on a similar Miranda ruse, and seem to already engage in the evasive waiver maneuvers that Richard Leo identifies in Police Interrogation and American Justice. What upsets Shafe is Hodiak’s false, strategic arrest of the innocent Black man, whom he believes would not have been arrested if he were white. The next scene exposes just how transgressive and “not subtle” Shafe’s personal life is (a mere year after the decision in Loving v. Virginia):


The scenes in minority neighborhoods, as well as the protest scenes, are particularly poignant to watch in the post-Ferguson era; I have a hard time figuring out if the language is anachronistic or if today’s movements simply regurgitate the identity politics and lexicon of the 1960s. It is clear, however, that the introduction of civil rights as a barrier to aggressive policing is relatively new and foreign, but that evasive interrogation tactics are already practiced and accepted; that the Nixonian law-and-order campaign resonates with police practices; and that the perception among African Americans is already that of the (white) police as an occupying force.

Stay tuned for a review of Aquarius: Episode 2, in the next post on the series.

Aquarius – New NBC Series, Loosely Based on Manson Family

NBC has released a new series, Aquarius, featuring David Duchovny as an LAPD officer in the late ’60s. The series also features a central storyline loosely based on Charles Manson and the “family.” But the Panthers and the explosive years of political rising and race consciousness also figure quite prominently. The series feels, so far, like a ’60s smorgasbord, but it is not devoid of interest.

I’m currently working on my second book, tentatively titled Yesterday’s Monsters, which examines parole hearings through the lens of the Manson family members’ parole hearing transcripts, and am therefore interested in the depiction of the period in this show. My reviews of Aquarius episodes will be posted on the CCC blog, with links to full episode viewing and spoiler alerts.

Enjoy your summer. Or not.

Will Executions in California Resume?

Apparently, a new effort to revive executions in California is under way. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The settlement of a lawsuit brought by crime victims’ families requires Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration to unveil a new method of lethal injection this year. That method, which Brown officials said would be a single-drug lethal injection, will be subject to public comment and court challenges.

If the plan survives the scrutiny and litigation, it still could be stymied by difficulty in obtaining drugs needed for executions. Manufacturers, pressed by death penalty opponents, are refusing to sell drugs for executions. Compounding pharmacies, another possible source of the drugs, also could have trouble procuring the necessary chemicals to make them.

Still, the settlement remains the first breakthrough in a years-long hiatus in executions in California. It is likely to reignite the debate over capital punishment in the state and test the resolve of the Brown administration. Brown personally opposes capital punishment but defended the death penalty when he was attorney general.

The text of the settlement can be found in full here.

A few comments spring to mind. First, having read Austin Sarat’s Gruesome Spectacles, and knowing that most death penalty litigation for the last few years focuses on the potential for botched executions, I can’t imagine that a new chemical will not usher a new era of litigation. I doubt executions will pick up as a result, but that is, of course, a possibility. This might be why, at least as of last year, three-drug executions persisted.

Second, in the face of all this tinkering with the machinery of death, it’s astounding to see the Brown administration cling to the death penalty, rather than be hard at work to abolish it. Any new iteration of the death penalty brings in its wings nothing but problems, litigation, concerns, and costs. Let go of the death penalty and you let go of the problem.

And third, the legal settlement is in a lawsuit brought by victims’ families. But not all victims are the same, and many victims’ families oppose the death penalty. I don’t want to discount the feelings of vindication and closure that an execution may bring to the family members of a loved one. But it is unfair, and untrue, to assume that pushing for the death penalty is a monolithic pro-victim move.

Should California “Talk Its Walk” About Corrections?

Over the weekend, at the Law and Society Association meeting in Seattle, I learned from colleagues that California is largely responsible for the 6 percent decline in U.S. incarceration. Three large-scale reforms are responsible for this contribution: the Schwarzenegger-era SB xxx 18, which provided good-time credits and reformed parole; the Brown-era Criminal Justice Public Safety Realignment, which shifted groups of low-level felons from prisons to jails and allowed for mandatory supervision and split sentences; and, most recently, Prop 47, which shifted several low-level offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.

Given the overall effect of these reforms not only on California prisons, but on the U.S. prison population as a whole, you’d expect California to take pride in its role as decarceration pioneer. But that would only be if you were unfamiliar with California and its neopopulist, polarized political culture. Instead, these reforms were justified as responses to the budgetary crisis; politicians did not openly acknowledge their connection to the decision in Plata v. Schwarzenegger, later Brown v. Plata; and they were justified as small-scale reforms and jurisdictional shifts, with at least the architects of Realignment proclaiming “no early releases”. Contrast this to the proclamations from red states about prison closures and “returns on investment” that I review in Cheap on Crime, and ask yourselves–wouldn’t it be better if California boasted more about its contribution to decarceration?

I’m trying to think about the relationship between rhetoric and practices, and am wondering whether the fact that California is controlled by a Democrat legislature means that Republicans here don’t have to sound bipartisan as they do elsewhere (such as, for example, in the federal government). I’m also wondering why gubernatorial candidates–Jerry Brown, now in his fourth term–still espouse, at least in name, law-and-order politics and think this is a good idea. I find this modest rhetoric puzzling and am curious to hear your thoughts.

Risks and Ethics of Criminal Justice Ethnography: The Case of Alice Goffman’s On the Run

Alice Goffman’s Life on the Run, based on her  dissertation work, is an ethnography of gang life in Philadelphia. Here’s a chapter from the book. It has received plenty of praise, and some critique (though I found the critique fairly weak), but now it raises an interesting issue: If an ethnographer tags along her subjects, who are incensed by a friend’s death and on the move to avenge it, is she part of a conspiracy to murder? In her methodological appendix, Goffman presents a narrative that many of us ethnographers refer to as “going native”: 
During the period surrounding Chuck’s death, I started studying shootouts in earnest: how and when they happened and what the ongoing conflicts looked like over time. But I don’t believe that I got into the car with Mike because I wanted to learn firsthand about violence, or even because I wanted to prove myself loyal or brave. I got into the car because, like Mike and Reggie, I wanted Chuck’s killer to die.
Goffman was criticized for, essentially, collaborating on a criminal enterprise, and her later explanation, in response to the critique, differs somewhat from that provided in the book:
One night, when Mike could not find anybody else to go with him, I agreed to drive. I felt ambivalent, but I went because I knew these drives were about expressing anger and about grieving, not about doing actual violence. I had talked Mike down from violence in the past, as did many other women in his and his friends’ lives.

I have just read Eugene Volokh’s interesting commentary on Volokh’s commentary includes views from several folks about this, among them Jack Katz:

As a citizen, as well as in my career as a sociologist, I’m concerned about interventions in this discussion that might embrace the flexibility of “conspiracy” and aiding and abetting laws to shut down descriptions of social life that many readers will take as resources for criticizing the government. Personally, I realize that it has not been since the Chicago 8 (then Chicago 7) that the use of conspiracy laws to shut down dissent or critical expression was something I had to think about in this country. (But maybe I have been asleep for 40 or so years.) I realize as well that labeling yourself a sociologist, like labeling yourself a journalist, gets you no privileges, but when conspiracy laws alone are the only formula available for prosecution, the abuse potential should remain the first and central concern.
As someone who, in order to inform policy and advance sociological knowledge, promotes close-up descriptions of social life through immersion fieldwork, I’m concerned about the potential of this controversy to quash the whole field of participant observation research in areas of social life that the government considers rife with criminality. In the history of academic sociology, ethnographic immersion in social life on “the other side” has been an important contributor to political culture in the US, going back to studies of gangs and “vice” institutions in the 1920s, through Becker’s and others’ studies of “deviance” in the 1950s and 1960s… I see Alice in that tradition and fear that academic sociologists, the great majority of whom work at a much safer distance from the people they write about, who indeed spend virtually all of their research life within the halls of academe, will become very wary of fieldwork that takes the researcher intimately into social worlds that are rife with what the government considers crime.
What do you think?