Priests, Prophets, and Centurions: Catholic Representations of the LAPD after the Watts Rebellion

Film historian Noah Tsika (2021) argues that the representational content of police-themed media has been overvalued in scholarship. A key aspect of Tsika’s intervention is to criticize the popular notion of “copaganda” as a unified police-public-relations function. Instead, he observes dissonance and ambivalence across police-themed films. This article accepts Tsika’s critiques while arguing for an interpretation of police media that pays attention to the role of institutional and cultural Christianity in both the content and the material conditions of police media production. Focusing on the Catholic themes of two works of police-themed media set in 1960s post-Watts Los Angeles, I examine how different Catholic sensibilities inform the moral rhetoric of the seminal television procedural Dragnet and the 1970 novel The New Centurions. This close reading goes together with an examination of the institutional alliances forged between mass media, the state, the church, and corporations. The second run of Dragnet (1967–1970) emerged in the wake of the breakdown of the Production Code, Hollywood’s self-imposed censorship standards that key Catholic actors and institutions created and administered starting in the 1930s. The procedural storytelling in Dragnet has a ritualistic sensibility, evoking a priestly ethos of police bureaucracy maintaining cosmic order. Former LAPD detective Joseph Wambaugh’s 1970 novel The New Centurions serves as a harsh rebuttal to this televised public-relations version of policing. In fact, Dragnet and The New Centurions are as much divided as they are united by their shared Catholic influences—the former represents the department optimistically while the latter turns to fire-and-brimstone jeremiads to denounce the breakdown of Western civilization taking place in the City of Angels. Wambaugh’s novel critiques Dragnet through its social and psychological realism; The police procedures it represents does not glorify the department but instead shows its weaknesses and brutalities. Despite being divided in their representations of the LAPD, Dragnet and The New Centurions share common enemies: the social movements for liberation that disrupted the postwar United States. In both cases, racialized, radicalized, and queer subjectivities appear as the barbarian hoards. I argue that this very significant overlap indicates something shared among police media that is not a unified propaganda function, but instead, a common moral rhetoric of human depravity and sacred violence against sinful anarchy. This rhetoric is equally useful for police public relations as well as Wambaugh’s more anarchic visions of spontaneous militias forming after the breakdown of morality and the state.