Journal of American Studies

http://journals.cambridge.org/AMS

Additional services for Journal of American

Studies:

Email alerts: Click here

Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here

The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land:

Power, Gender and Race in The Shield

MIKE CHOPRA-GANT

Journal of American Studies / Volume 41 / Issue 03 / December 2007, pp 659 - 673

DOI: 10.1017/S0021875807004045, Published online: 24 October 2007

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021875807004045

How to cite this article:

MIKE CHOPRA-GANT (2007). The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land: Power,
Gender and Race in The Shield. Journal of American Studies, 41, pp 659-673
doi:10.1017/S0021875807004045

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/AMS, IP address: 130.241.16.16 on 27 Sep 2015

 Journal of American Studies, 41 (2007), 3, 659–673 f 2007 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0021875807004045 Printed in the United Kingdom

The Law of the Father, the Law

of the Land : Power, Gender and
Race in The Shield
MIKE CHOPRA-GANT

This article examines the construction of gender and race in the television series The Shield
(FX 2002–). The article argues that while The Shield seems to offer an ostensibly progressive
vision of a multi-cultural society in which race and gender represent no barrier to the
possession of legitimate authority, the series premises the possibility of such access to power
on the continuing possession of ‘‘ real ’’ power by a paternalistic white, male figure, thus
presenting a regressive conservative vision of gender and race relations in contemporary US
society.

In his study of the representation of law and morality in television crime

dramas John Sumser argues that by the mid-1990s a profound change
had taken place within the genre. According to Sumser earlier shows had
employed a version of the mythology of the frontier, with the cop positioned
as the ‘‘ moral boundary of society’’ and the private detective as the person
whose actions might extend ‘‘ past the moral boundaries in order to bring
a bit of personal justice to the frontier.’’1 However, in the shows then
dominating the television schedules – Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue,
In the Heat of the Night and Law and Order, among others – authority over
crime had been shifted from cops and private detectives to lawyers, who
functioned to ‘‘ bureaucratize the frontier, ’’ so subordinating the ‘‘ adven-
ture ’’ that had characterized the genre to ‘‘ the culture of the law. ’’2
According to Sumser the subjugation of the individual authority of cops and
detectives to the letter of the law led to a loss of moral certainty, of the clear
sense of justice associated with the cop or detective, which had vanished
when bureaucratized law enforcement required that the crime not only be

Mike Chopra-Gant is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of
Applied Social Sciences at London Metropolitan University, Ladbroke House, 62–66
Highbury Grove, London, N5 2AD, UK.
1
John Sumser, Morality and Social Order in Television Crime Drama ( Jefferson, North Carolina
2
and London: McFarland and Company, 1996), 154. Ibid., 154, 155.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 660 Mike Chopra-Gant
solved, but be solved in a way that would permit its successful prosecution.3
The tension that Sumser identifies, between an ill-defined sense of justice
and a codified, bureaucratized law is a key element in several recent
successful television shows,4 and in this article I am going to examine the
treatment of this conflict in the critically acclaimed television crime drama
The Shield.
The Shield constructs a world that perfectly captures the sense of moral
ambiguity to which Sumser refers. There are no clear-cut moral distinctions
in The Shield, only grey areas. But what makes The Shield particularly deserving
of attention is not simply its depiction of a morally uncertain world where
conflict between codified law and personal justice is employed as a narrative
structuring device, but its alignment of the show’s conceptions of law and
justice with racially marked and gendered characters so that this tension is
played out along the fault lines of race, ethnicity and gender in a way that,
while recognizing the distribution of power among different ethnic groups
and between the sexes in a progressive multi-cultural society, nevertheless
reasserts a conservative vision of the white male hero as the ultimate
guarantor of social order.

THE LAW OF THE LAND

A promotional trailer for The Shield, broadcast on Fox’s FX cable subsidiary
in the period leading up to the show’s debut in March 2002, promised to take
the viewer to ‘‘ the dark side of the badge, ’’ asking, ‘‘ What is a good cop ?
What is a bad cop ? What is justice? ’’ The trailer thus invited the viewer into
The Shield’s tough urban milieu, in which moral certainties have vanished.
In the opening moments of the pilot episode, viewers would meet these
questions embodied in a single character, Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis),
leader of the ‘‘ Strike Team, ’’ an elite police unit with a mandate to deal with
gang-related crime in the fictitious Farmington district of Los Angeles in
which the show is set.
The moral ambiguity of Mackey’s character is clearly signalled by the
opening sequence of the episode, in which Mackey is seen pocketing a stash
of drugs recovered from a street dealer without concern for the suspect’s
Miranda – or any other – rights, and reiterated in a later scene, in which
he discovers the whereabouts of a young girl being held prisoner by a pae-
dophile by brutally beating the suspect around the head with a telephone
directory, prefiguring his actions with the words ‘‘ good cop and bad cop

3 4
Ibid., 155. For example, 24 (Fox 2001–), Deadwood (HBO 2004–).

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land 661
have left for the day. I’m a different kind of cop.’’ Any lingering doubts about
the morality of his character are banished by the closing sequence of the pilot
episode, in which Mackey shoots dead a fellow cop, Terry (Reed
Diamond) – who has been planted in the strike team to gather evidence
of Mackey’s suspected illegal activities – thus committing what the show’s
creator, Shawn Ryan, has called an ‘‘ unforgivable act, ’’5 and what
regular viewers of the crime drama genre will instantly recognize as the crime
guaranteed to make its perpetrator ‘‘public enemy number one.’’ That
Mackey succeeds, as the season progresses, in gaining if not forgiveness then
at least the sympathetic identification of the viewer, against these seemingly
impossible odds, provides a clear indication of the show’s ideological
investment in defending a white male perspective on the problems of
maintaining social order against challenges represented by The Shield’s diverse
range of ethnic minority and/or female characters.
The racial polarization of competing claims to power and legitimacy in The
Shield is evident from the outset. Mackey’s chief antagonist at the start of the
series is Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), the Mexican American
head of the Farmington precinct. While Mackey has worked his way up
through the ranks and learned his style of law enforcement on the streets of
LA, the captain is a more bureaucratic type of cop, a ‘‘ test-taker, ’’ as Aceveda
himself puts it, a cop who acknowledges other officers’ perception of the role
played by his ethnicity in the achieving his position : ‘‘ I know what everyone
here thinks _ came time to name a new captain, I was the right colour
at the right time.’’6 Whereas Mackey represents the maverick style of law
enforcement identified by Sumser as being a distinguishing feature of earlier
generations of cop show, his instinctive sense of right and wrong having
been gained through his experiences as a street cop, Aceveda is, at the start
of the series, strictly a ‘‘ by-the-book’’ type of cop and he pursues a campaign
to expose what he suspects is Mackey’s involvement in a range of illegal
activities.
Aceveda’s suspicions are well-founded. Mackey maintains order on the
streets by cooperating with gang leaders in the district, acting as a ‘‘ landlord’’
to the local drug dealer and using the strike team to drive out competing
dealers – thereby avoiding violent turf wars – and taking a cut of the dealer’s
profits in return for guaranteeing the latter’s monopoly in the district.
Between them, the characters of Mackey and Aceveda circumscribe the
extremes of the show’s conception of social order. Aceveda represents

5
Season 1 DVD : Special Features (Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, 2003).
6
Season 1, Episode 1: ‘‘ Pilot. ’’

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 662 Mike Chopra-Gant
the force of governance, the law of the land, while Mackey more pragmati-
cally maintains an uneasy order based on his personal judgement of what is
necessary – of what is right and just – in the circumstances.
Although at the outset Aceveda is portrayed as the pious guardian of the
law, intent on bringing down the renegade cop, the captain’s integrity is
compromised. Aceveda is politically ambitious, aspiring to elected office in
city government. Although he manages to maintain his probity for most of
the first season, Aceveda’s political ambition ultimately forces him to
compromise with Mackey. When Deputy Police Chief Gilroy ( John Diehl)
tries to play both men off against each other to evade arrest for his own
illegal activities, during the early episodes of season 2, the two antagonists
have little option but to call an uneasy truce, and if they do not exactly work
together then at least they do stop working against each other for a time.
These compromises damage Aceveda’s claim to the moral high ground in the
show, and this position is filled by another character who is more consist-
ently given moral authority – detective Claudette Wyms (C. C. H. Pounder).
Wyms is an experienced cop and, crucially, an African American woman.
In the pilot episode, although it is clear that Wyms does not approve
of Mackey and his methods, it is less clear that she believes that the realities
of policing The Shield’s tough urban setting can easily be changed, as this
conversation between Wyms and Aceveda illustrates:
Wyms: _ as long as Mackey’s producing on the street he’s got friends ; Gilroy,
even the chief
Aceveda: So he’s bulletproof, huh ?
Wyms: From you, yeah !
_
Wyms: You think taking on Mackey is going to change people’s minds.
Aceveda: Ah, I’m just talking.
Wyms: Right now Vic Mackey must look like a mighty big catch to you. Do the
smart thing though, son, cut bait.
Aceveda: Doesn’t bother you, the things he does?
Wyms: I don’t judge other cops.
Aceveda: Mackey’s not a cop ; he’s Al Capone with a badge.
Wyms: Al Capone made money by giving people what they wanted. What
people want these days is to make it to their cars without getting
mugged ; come home from work, see their stereo still there ; hear about
some murder in the Barrio, find out the next day the police got the guy.
If having those things means some cop roughs up some nigger or some
spick in the ghetto, well as far as most people are concerned it’s don’t
ask, don’t tell. How you figure on changing that ?7

7
Season 1, Episode 1: ‘‘ Pilot.’’

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land 663
By the middle of season 2, however, when she becomes convinced that
Mackey and the strike team – aided by Aceveda’s unwillingness to wield
authority over them – are impeding a serial murder and rape investigation,
Wyms becomes the real antagonist to Mackey and the character who
embodies the principles of morality and law initially associated with the
captain. Wyms maintains this position through seasons 2 and 3, eventually
coming close to attaining real power within the Department in the latter
part of season 3, when she is groomed by the chief of police to succeed
Aceveda after his election to the City Council. Although The Shield
comes close to legitimizing Wyms’s position as the moral centre of the
show and giving her character the status to challenge Mackey’s patriarchal
power, this possibility is ultimately denied when Wyms effectively becomes
the victim of her own high principles, losing her chance of the captaincy
and even jeopardizing her career, by pursuing the retrial of all of the cases
handled by a public defender whose drug addiction has come to light
in the course of an investigation. While Wyms’s rejection of political
expediency deprives her character of the power to challenge Mackey,
she nevertheless retains her moral authority throughout season 4. Between
the characters of Aceveda and Wyms it is possible to perceive a clear
pattern in The Shield, where legal and moral authority are consistently
vested in non-white and/or female characters: the Mexican American
captain, the African American female detective who is the moral centre
of the narrative. In this respect The Shield conforms to a trend that has
become increasingly common in some of America’s most popular television
programmes.

RACE AND AMERICAN QUALITY POPULAR TELEVISION

One of the major complaints levelled against some of the most successful
American television programmes of recent years has been the lack of visi-
bility of non-white characters and the absence of engagement with issues
concerning race and ethnicity. Although there was an increase in the number
of African American-produced television shows during the 1980s and early
1990s,8 the concomitant rise in the number of roles for African Americans
appeared to be going into reverse as the 1990s progressed and, ‘‘ by 1999
African American representation on television was on the brink of another

8
See Kristal Brent Zook, Color by Fox : The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television
(New York : Oxford University Press 1999) ; and Donald Bogle, Prime Time Blues: African
Americans on Network Television (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 664 Mike Chopra-Gant
decline. ’’9 In some of the most significant television shows of recent years
there has been a noticeable shortage of ethnic minority characters. Several
contributors to a recent anthology on Sex and the City remarked on the
predominantly white milieu depicted in the show.10 Albert Auster has criti-
cized ‘‘ must-see ’’ television comedies, and particularly Friends, for presenting
an image of a ‘‘ totally sanitized bohemia _ without any poor, or the ethnic
and racial tensions that plague the city, ’’11 and other commentators have
condemned the continuing lack of ethnic diversity in network television
programming.12
According to Herman Grey, the situation is rather better in the category of
hour-long drama shows that includes The Shield since these shows – and
he specifically identifies ER, Homicide and NYPD Blue – provide ‘‘ the most
integrated casts and story-lines ’’ in terms of race and ethnicity.13 Despite the
decline in African American roles at the end of the 1990s, Nama argues that
pressure brought to bear on the television networks by lobbying groups such
as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) has more recently resulted in an increase in roles for African
Americans. Accompanying that numerical increase in roles, however, there
has also been a fundamental change in the ‘‘ mode of African American
representation. ’’14 This new mode is characterized by a shift away from the
problematization of ethnic minority characters that typified earlier modes
and by a ‘‘ utopian reversal’’ that increasingly constructs ethnic minority
characters as successful, middle-class professionals, with
just over 70 % of African American characters occupying professional or manage-
ment positions on network television. In the fictional world of television, African
9
A. Nama, ‘‘ More Symbol than Substance : African American Representation in Network
Television Dramas, ’’ Race and Society, 6 (2003), 21–38, 24.
10
See Astrid Henry, ‘‘ Orgasms and Empowerment : Sex and the City and the Third Wave
Feminism,’’ in Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, eds., Reading Sex and the City (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2004), 65–82; and Susan Zieger, ‘‘ Sex and the Citizen in Sex and the City’s New
York,’’ in ibid., 96–111.
11
Albert Auster, ‘‘ It’s Friendship _ ’’ Television Quarterly, 28, 3 (1996), 2–7, 6.
12
See, for example, A. D. Collier, ‘‘ ER Star Eriq LaSalle ’’, Ebony (August 1999), 52 ; Herman
Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for ‘‘ Blackness ’’, (Minneapolis : University of
Minnesota Press, 1995) ; Brian Lowry, ‘‘ NBC: Last Minute Deal Locks in Friends for Fall, ’’
Los Angeles Times, 15 May 2000, F.1 ; Broadcasting and Cable, ‘‘ New Study by the Screen
Actor’s Guild Found that African-Americans on Television are ‘ Ghettoized ’ and
Underrepresented on both Fox and NBC, ’’ Broadcasting and Cable, 28 February 2000, 69;
Zook.
13
Herman Gray, ‘‘ Black Representation in the Post Network, Post Civil Rights World of
Global Media, ’’ in Simon Cottle, ed., Ethnic Minorities and the Media (Maidenhead and
Philadelphia : Open University Press, 2000), 118–29, 123.
14
Nama, 24; emphasis in original.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land 665
Americans appear to be doing quite well. They are literally, symbols of success and
possibly even the end of racism.15
Surveying some of the most recent successes in the television crime drama
genre it may seem that there is a reasonably good presence of non-white
characters in key roles and, crucially, in roles that do not problematize race or
ethnicity.16 Against this, however, I would argue that the evident liberal de-
sire not to present race as a problem goes so far in these shows that racial and
ethnic difference almost disappear; we may see non-white faces but there is
an almost complete absence of any attempt to address the issues relating
to race and ethnicity that continue to exist in multi-cultural societies. So
although these characters are visibly ethnically marked, the failure to engage
with these issues limits the ability of these characters to signify racial or
ethnic difference. Writing towards the end of the 1990s, Zook argued that the
challenge for the television networks ‘‘ is to create characters like those
played by Andre Brauer (Homicide) and Eriq La Salle (ER): characters who
‘ transcend’ race.’’17 On the evidence of highly rated contemporary crime
dramas, Such as CSI and Law and Order, this appears to be a challenge that the
networks have attempted to meet, but the result of their efforts has been
a mode of representation that renders race and ethnicity almost invisible
despite quantitatively increasing roles for non-white characters. While these
characters may contribute to what Nama calls the ‘‘racial verisimilitude ’’
of these shows,18 the lack of engagement with issues relating to race and
ethnicity relegates the characters to the status of ‘‘ background images that
are seen but do not talk, talk but do not act, ’’19 a situation that is registered in
the complaint by the female actor S. Epatha Merkerson, of her role in Law
and Order: ‘‘ why am I in a position of authority yet you rarely see me on-
screen.’’20 Micheal Pounds makes a similar observation with regard to the
treatment of ethnic characters in Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation,
seeing them used solely as ‘‘ fonctionnaires, just a detail to move the plot
along. ’’21 In some of America’s most popular television shows it seems that
the response to the complaint that race is only present when it is a problem

15
Ibid., 24.
16
Numerous ethnic minority characters, constructed as educated professionals, populate the
diegetic worlds of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, Law and Order,
Law and Order : Special Victims Unit, Law and Order : Criminal Intent, and 24.
17 18 19
Zook, 107. Nama, 25. Ibid., 33.
20
Quoted in Bogle, Prime Time Blues, 437.
21
Micheal C. Pounds, Race in Space : The Representation of Ethnicity in Star Trek and Star Trek :
The Next Generation, (Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1999), 173.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 666 Mike Chopra-Gant
has swung so far the other way that race is hardly present at all, despite
characters from non-white backgrounds being given highly visible roles.
Against this background The Shield stands out as different. The Shield con-
structs African American and Mexican American characters as legitimate
possessors of legal power and/or moral authority, and so conforms to the
general trend of depicting ethnic minority characters as successful and well
integrated into the fabric of mainstream American life. However, it also
makes race highly visible by repeatedly undermining this ostensibly pro-
gressive image of a racially integrated society by revealing the failure of the
mechanisms of the law and of the ideals of high moral principle, represented
by these ethnic minority characters, to deliver a convincing sense of justice.
There is an elusive ideal of ‘‘ natural’’ justice in The Shield, which is presented
as being just beyond the grasp of the law, respect for the suspects’ rights
consistently confounding the attainment of this ‘‘ authentic’’ justice. While
ethnic minority characters are invested with legal and moral authority, this
sense of authentic, ‘‘ natural’’ justice is unquestionably the possession of the
middle-aged, white father figure, Vic Mackey. The Shield goes further than
simply suggesting that this ill-defined, abstract sense of justice exists beyond
the reach of the law. By consistently privileging Mackey’s maverick solutions
to the problems of law enforcement, it elevates those solutions above the
values of law and morality that Aceveda and Wyms represent, not in order to
present justice and law as being in conflict, but in order to present this
‘‘ natural’’ justice as being an essential precondition for the existence of a
social order in which it is possible to have the indulgence of a system of
law enforcement in which the rights of the accused can be enshrined and
respected, in which we have the luxury of moral principle or ethical law
enforcement at all. Furthermore, through the racialized construction of the
characters associated with these values of law and morality on the one hand
and ‘‘ natural’’ justice on the other, The Shield conveys a compelling sense of
the ultimate dependence of a successfully integrated multi-cultural society
upon the continuing power of a white patriarch, who functions as the
guarantor of egalitarian multiculturalism.

THE LAW OF THE FATHER

The Shield’s positioning of Mackey as the protector of social order is well
illustrated by the closing sequence of the pilot episode, a montage sequence
that juxtaposes images of a safe domestic sphere with shots depicting the city
streets as a place of criminality and danger. The sequence begins with
Mackey and the Strike Team leaving their ‘‘ clubhouse’’ inside the station

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land 667
house in order to raid the home of a drug dealer. As they walk through the
station they pass one of the detectives, Dutch Wagenbach ( Jay Karnes), who
is cleaning out one of his desk drawers after a practical joke played on him by
another cop. Although this part of the sequence takes place inside the station
house and, therefore, outside an obviously domiciliary setting, Dutch cuts a
very domestic figure, wearing rubber gloves and holding a can of disinfectant
spray, thus establishing the opposition between domestic and public spaces
that will structure the closing sequence of the episode. As the sequence
progresses, images of Wyms arriving home and being greeted by her pet
Labrador and of Aceveda sitting in his living room, feeding his baby with a
bottle, are intercut with shots showing Mackey and the team arming them-
selves and driving to the drug dealer’s apartment, reiterating the opposition
between domestic and public and aligning the terms of this opposition with
notions of safety and danger respectively. In one shot we see another cop,
Danni (Catherine Dent), preparing to go out on a date. The opposition
between the domestic sphere as a place of safety and the outside world as a
place of danger is reinforced by these shots of Danni, who initially removes
her service revolver from her purse and places it in a drawer in her living
room. However, as she opens the front door to greet her date and faces the
moment when she must step over the threshold of her house, leaving behind
the safe domestic realm and entering the world of danger outside, Danni
reconsiders her decision to leave the handgun behind and returns to the
drawer to recover her weapon, which she conceals in her purse once again
before moving from the safety of the home to the danger of the streets.
The way this sequence connects these contrasting images, of the world
of danger inhabited by Mackey and the safe world of domestic normalcy,
creates a strong impression of the dependence of the one on the other, of the
necessity for someone like Mackey to be doing whatever it takes to maintain
social order so that the possibility of ordinary domestic life can be preserved.
This is well illustrated near the end of the sequence when a long shot of a
crowd at a football game initially appears simply to offer yet another view of
American normalcy, until a cut to a longer shot allows the Strike Team’s
van to drive into the frame, stopping between the camera and the football
stadium while the team disembark for their raid on the dealer’s apartment.
Although the spatial arrangement of this shot positions the football stadium
as a background to the activities of Mackey’s team, the ideological arrange-
ment of the sequence as a whole reverses this spatial organization, making
Mackey’s activities the unseen background that enables the possibility of the
kind of normalcy exemplified by the football game. Towards the end of
the final sequence of the pilot episode, Mackey commits the ‘‘ unforgivable

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 668 Mike Chopra-Gant
act ’’ – the execution of another cop – that will test the audience’s willingness
to identify with his character and thus to subscribe to The Shield’s ideological
vision of white, patriarchal, ‘‘ natural’’ justice as the essential foundation of
contemporary multiculturalism.

As Cynthia Fuchs correctly discerns, The Shield’s solution to the dilemma of

how to make its anti-hero ‘‘ even remotely sympathetic _ goes through
kids. ’’22 The protection of children is a key theme that runs throughout
all four seasons of The Shield, typified by numerous minor incidents, such as
Mackey’s rescue of a baby dropped into a heavily polluted swimming pool
when its crazed father jumps from a first-floor balcony with the baby in his
arms,23 and his ongoing concern to preserve the relationship between a
prostitute, Connie ( Jamie Brown), and her child, as well as by major plot
events such as the saving of a young girl sold for drug money by her addict
father and then trafficked by paedophiles,24 the rescue of an underage Asian
girl forced into prostitution in a sex club,25 the rape of a twelve year old girl
by a Mexican drug lord,26 a multiple homicide at a refuge for battered women
and their children and the abduction of a seven-year-old boy from the
refuge,27 the killing of a Farmington patrolman’s ex-wife and son,28 the
investigation into the lynching of a black teenager,29 the abduction of a three-
year-old from the scene of a multiple homicide, the revenge beating meted
out by Mackey to a child-abuser caught on video surveillance30 and the killing
of a young black girl by a gang leader, Antwon Mitchell (Anthony Anderson),
in order to frame Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), formerly Mackey’s
right-hand man in the Strike Team but now working in the vice squad and
using his position to protect Mitchell and his gang.31 But this apparently
specific concern about children is really only symptomatic of The Shield’s
more general deployment of the family – with Mackey positioned as its
patriarchal head – as a metaphor for the wider society depicted in the show.
While Mackey’s home life is shown to be riddled with problems – Mackey’s
family is split, his daughter Cassidy (Autumn Chiklis) living with him while
his two autistic children live with his estranged wife, Corrine (Cathy Cahlin
Ryan) – he nevertheless struggles to maintain both a semblance of familial

22
Cynthia Fuchs, ‘‘ Terrordome, ’’ Flow, 2, 3 (2005), 2, available at http://idg.communication.
utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=656 ; accessed 3 May 2005.
23 24
Season 1, Episode 3 : ‘‘ The Spread.’’ Season 1, Episode 1: ‘‘ Pilot. ’’
25 26
Season 1, Episode 6 : ‘‘ Cherrypoppers. ’’ Season 2, Episode 1: ‘‘ The Quick Fix. ’’
27 28
Season 2, Episode 6 : ‘‘ Homewrecker. ’’ Season 3, Episode 6 : ‘‘ Posse Up. ’’
29 30
Season 3, Episode 9 : ‘‘ Slipknot. ’’ Season 4, Episode 1: ‘‘ The Cure. ’’
31
Season 4, Episode 5 : ‘‘ Tar Baby.’’

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land 669
normalcy and his position as head of the family. Mackey’s constant effort to
single-handedly resolve all of the intractable problems presented by family
life is perfectly mirrored by his attempts to negotiate the moral ambiguities of
contemporary policing and his more successful effort to maintain control
over his second ‘‘ family, ’’ the Strike Team and, through the Strike Team,
society at large. A scene in ‘‘ Our Gang ’’32 reinforces the sense of the Strike
Team as a second family for Mackey by juxtaposing shots of Mackey at home
watching his autistic son Matthew ( Joel Rosenthal) with a flashback scene
showing Mackey introducing Terry to the other members of the Strike Team.
Continuity between the two elements in the scene is created by an edit from a
shot of Matthew, lining up dinner forks on the dining table, to another shot
of playing cards being dealt to Strike Team members. The framing of shots
in both parts of the sequence and the positioning of Mackey as an observer
of two familial scenes both increases the feeling of equivalence between the
two otherwise different settings and establishes Mackey’s privileged position
within both settings as the paternalistic overseer of both his real family and
his symbolic family.
Although the Strike Team are perhaps more routinely depicted as a fra-
ternal group, the many moments of crisis that beset the group expose its
patriarchal power dynamic by revealing the relative infantilism of the other
members of the Strike Team alongside the paternal figure of Mackey. The
continuing narrative of the series is punctuated by numerous such crises,
most often precipitated by the actions of Shane – for example, his visit to a
girlfriend for sex, resulting in the theft of his police vehicle containing
drugs that will implicate the Strike Team in illegal activities ;33 his exacer-
bation of racial tensions in the district by urinating on a black suspect;34 his
active pursuit of more lucrative drug transactions and use of the team’s
accumulated funds to purchase a large quantity of drugs when he takes over
leadership of the Strike Team while Mackey is preoccupied with family
problems;35 and his purchase of a car for his new girlfriend, against Mackey’s
explicit instructions, using money stolen by the Strike Team from Armenian
gangsters.36 More than any of Aceveda’s or Wyms’s concerted attempts
to challenge Mackey’s power, it is these crises precipitated by Shane that
represent the real threat to Mackey’s authority.
The intensity of these crises increases markedly during season 3, as
mounting tensions within the Strike Team threaten to split the group apart.

32 33
Season 1, Episode 2. Season 1, Episode 5: ‘‘ Blowback. ’’
34 35
Season 1, Episode 7: ‘‘ Pay in Pain.’’ Season 2, Episode 1 : ‘‘The Quick Fix. ’’
36
Season 3, Episode 2: ‘‘ Blood and Water. ’’

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 670 Mike Chopra-Gant
The growth of these tensions, which undermine Mackey’s power base, co-
incides with an alteration in Shane’s status that changes the relationship
between his character and that of Mackey within the show’s symbolic
economy. Throughout its first two seasons The Shield manifests no interest in
developing the characters of Strike Team members other than Mackey.
While the show presents a detailed picture of Mackey’s home life and his
relationships with family members, the viewer is given no insight into any
aspect of the lives of Shane, Lemonhead (Kenneth Johnson) or Ronnie
(David Rees Snell) outside their activities with the Strike Team. This changes
in season 3 when Shane’s relationship with a new partner, Mara (Michele
Hicks), becomes a focal point of the narrative and a source of conflict be-
tween Mackey and Shane. What initially appears to be no more than a spat
between close friends – precipitated by the threat of a woman disrupting
their friendship – is revealed to have more serious implications for power
relations within the Strike Team when Shane reveals that Mara is pregnant.37
As a prospective father himself, Shane’s increasingly belligerent attitude to-
wards Mackey can be interpreted as a sign of his refusal to remain in a
subordinate position in the Strike Team and of his own claim to possession
of the law of the father.
At the start of season 4, radical changes in the power dynamic of The Shield
seem to be taking place, with the arrival of a new character, Monica Rawlings
(Glenn Close), the new captain of the Farmington Precinct. The introduction
of this white, female authority figure, the accompanying departure of
Aceveda for public office and the disempowerment of Wyms appear to set
the stage for a reconfiguration of the power struggle against the patriarchal
Mackey along gendered lines alone, without the racial element that defined
this struggle in earlier seasons. However, the relationship between Mackey
and Rawlings never really coalesces into a straightforward competition for
power. Rawlings’s background – a street cop from Farmington who has
worked her way up to her position of authority – is sufficiently similar to
Mackey’s for the two characters to recognize the mutual benefits of coop-
eration rather than conflict. Although Rawlings remains wary of Mackey
throughout the season – sufficiently so to initiate a covert Internal Affairs
Division investigation into his activities – and although they do have their
moments of conflict, their relationship generally lacks the enmity that has
characterized Mackey’s earlier relationships with The Shield’s ethnically
marked figures of legal or moral authority, Aceveda and Wyms, who in

37
Season 3, Episode 4 : ‘‘ Streaks and Tips. ’’

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land 671
season 4 become antagonistic figures towards the new power nexus formed
between Mackey and Rawlings.
As at the close of season 3, the main threat to Mackey’s power in the first
half of season 4 emanates from Shane, whose desire to possess patriarchal
authority himself has caused the Strike Team to split apart and who, at the
start of the season, is working as a vice cop and building his own power base
among the gang leaders and drug dealers in his district. However, motivated
entirely by personal gain and lacking the innate sense of the greater good that
Mackey’s character has always possessed, Shane proves to be an inadequate
father figure. The closing scene of ‘‘ Tar Baby’’38 amply illustrates Shane’s
inadequacy as the holder of patriarchal power. Shane and his partner, ‘ Army’
(Michael Pena) have been providing information to local gang leader,
Antwon Mitchell, in order to protect his drug distribution operation.
Throughout the earlier episodes of the season, Shane has insisted that he
holds the dominant position in his dealings with Antwon. However, in ‘‘ Tar
Baby’’ the fallacy of this belief is revealed when Antwon’s gang overpower
Shane and Army and Antwon uses their service revolvers to execute – in
the presence of the helpless cops – a fourteen-year-old girl who has been
providing information to the police about his operations. Not only does
Shane’s inability to save the girl reveal his failure as a father figure (in stark
contrast to the instances enumerated above in which Mackey has come to the
rescue of children), but Antwon’s possession of the girl’s body – murdered
with weapons belonging to Shane and Army and thus incriminating
them – decisively shifts power from Shane to Antwon, from the white man
to the black man, a change Antwon takes pleasure in reinforcing and framing
in patriarchal terms in his final words to Shane in this episode : ‘‘ From now
on, I say ‘ suck my dick’, you say ‘you want me to lick your balls Daddy?’ ’’.
In the succeeding episodes, Shane’s surrender of power to Antwon de-
velops into a threat to Mackey himself when Antwon solicits Shane to kill
Mackey in order to secure the return of the body of the murdered girl.39
Antwon explicitly frames Shane’s powerlessness to refuse his demands in
terms of the latter’s status as a literal father to his son and, implicitly, his
symbolic position as a putative patriarch. As Antwon explains it to Shane, ‘‘ I
send her body to the po-po,40 you go to jail. You go to jail, who’s gonna
protect that pretty little wife and son of yours ? ’’ It is this ultimatum that
leads to the restoration of the law of the father to Mackey, as Shane comes to
appreciate his inability to effectively wield patriarchal authority and finally

38 39
Season 4, Episode 5. Season 4, Episode 7: ‘‘ Hurts. ’’
40
Street slang meaning police.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 672 Mike Chopra-Gant
accepts Mackey’s superior claim to power when the two men confront each
other :41
MACKEY: You got one shot. Take it.
SHANE: No. No. I would never choose him over you. We let that money-train
bullshit get in the way but you’re my friend. I need you. Will you help
me ?
This restoration of the normative power relation between Mackey and Shane
marks a decisive shift in The Shield’s narrative, away from the preoccupation
with the fragmentation of the Strike Team and Shane’s challenge to Mackey’s
authority that characterized the earlier part of season 4. Throughout the
season a controversial property seizure programme instigated by Rawlings,
and supported by Mackey and other white officers, but vehemently opposed
by ethnic minority characters – most notably Aceveda, Wyms and Julien
(Michael Jace) – has provided a secondary narrative strand, which becomes
central following the removal of the challenge to Mackey’s authority and
ultimately leads to Rawlings’s forced departure at the season’s close. While
Mackey’s continuing possession of the law of the father is far from assured,42
there is at least an unstable equilibrium in which this white patriarch main-
tains his hold on power by repeatedly defending his position against frequent
challenges to his authority from The Shield’s array of ethnic minority and
female characters.

CONCLUSIONS
Conflict between the law and moral principle on the one hand, and an ab-
stract sense of ‘‘natural ’’ justice that is consistently held by the figure who
most clearly represents white patriarchal power on the other, lies at the core
of The Shield’s narrative throughout the four seasons screened by the time of
writing. These competing ideologies are not ranked equally and it is the latter
that is consistently privileged by the show and allowed to undermine the rule
of law, substituting its own arbitrary sense of ‘‘ justice ’’ for legally prescribed
remedies. This prioritization of the law of the father over the law of the land
is well illustrated by an incident in ‘‘ Dead Soldiers, ’’43 in which Mackey, the
embodiment of the principle of patriarchal ‘‘ justice, ’’ seizes a law book from
the hands of a Mexican gang leader and uses it to beat the man around the
head, thus substituting his own brand of arbitrary retributive justice for the

41
Season 4, Episode 8 : ‘‘ Cut Throat. ’’
42
The ongoing Internal Affairs investigation and Dutch’s affair with Mackey’s ex-wife
43
threaten his standing as both symbolic and literal father. Season 2, Episode 2.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16

 The Law of the Father, the Law of the Land 673
rule-governed remedies enshrined in the book, perverting the idea of codi-
fied law that the book itself symbolizes. That the conflict between this brand
of arbitrary ‘‘ justice ’’ and the law is played out along racial and gendered lines
in The Shield is not a concealed ideological facet of the show but is promi-
nently displayed throughout the series, from Mackey’s racialized expression
of contempt for Aceveda’s authority in the pilot episode – ‘‘in the real world
I don’t answer to you. Not today, not tomorrow, not even on Cinco de
Mayo ’’44 – to the polarization between white and ethnic minority characters
over the property seizure policy that dominates the latter episodes of season
4. While these incidents may contribute to the realism of The Shield’s depic-
tion of a racially diverse milieu in which conflicts between individuals of
different races are inevitable, these are not mere disputes between equals
since these clashes ultimately provide the opportunity for the triumph of the
white, patriarchal values represented by Mackey and thereby serve to shore
up the image of the power of the white male in contemporary society. So
while The Shield may at first sight appear progressive in its presentation of a
relatively well integrated multi-ethnic milieu in which race is no barrier to the
attainment of authority, this appearance is consistently undermined by the
show’s depiction of the reliance of this idealized egalitarian social order upon
the continuing power of the white man.

44
Although not actually Mexican Independence Day, Cinco de Mayo is commonly confused
with that celebration of Mexican autonomy, and that is the symbolic function of the
reference in this quotation.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 27 Sep 2015 IP address: 130.241.16.16