You could not acknowledge the identify Stephen Downing, however when you’re a fan of American cop exhibits during the last 50 years or so, you’re little question aware of his work.
Downing, a longtime Lengthy Seashore resident who died of sepsis in November at 87, drew on his years of expertise as a Los Angeles police officer, crafting tales for “Dragnet,” “Adam-12,” “Emergency” and “TJ Hooker,” amongst many others.
Many L.A. cops have some tangential relationship to the leisure trade — they moonlight as safety guards on units or at pink carpet occasions. Downing, who retired as a deputy chief in 1980, was one of many few to make it actually huge in each professions — like Joe Wambaugh, with whom he labored on the Seventies TV drama “Police Story.”
Downing’s huge break reads like an excellent Hollywood twist. In the future in 1968, the Hanford, Calif., native who had studied inventive writing in school occurred to select up the telephone on the 77th Division in South Los Angeles when Jack Webb, the “Dragnet” actor and producer, known as. Webb needed technical assist for a present he was growing, “Adam-12,” a few pair of patrol companions. Downing provided himself up, and shortly determined to strive his hand at scripts. “It’s tougher than it appears,” Webb instructed him.
“So my dad went residence on a weekend, wrote the script, bought it and ended up writing greater than 400 hours of tv,” mentioned his son, Michael Downing, additionally a retired deputy police chief.
Retired LAPD deputy chief Stephen Downing at a lectern throughout a press convention in September 2010 for Proposition 19, a then California poll measure to regulate and tax marijuana.
(Damian Dovarganes / Related Press)
Earlier than Stephen Downing retired from the power in 1980, he used pseudonyms to keep away from angering his superiors, a few of whom resented his remunerative exterior work. “He used his police wage to pay his taxes,” joked his son.
At Downing’s leisure pinnacle, he spent seven years as showrunner for “MacGyver,” the enduring collection starring Richard Dean Anderson because the genius fixer who extricates himself from thorny conditions utilizing duct tape and a Swiss military knife as a substitute of weapons and violence. MacGyver’s humane, anti-violence philosophy was an ideal reflection of Downing’s strategy to regulation enforcement.
“I believe he noticed an excessive amount of violence on the planet, too many weapons getting used and there have been options to that,” his son instructed me. “I believe that’s the best way he needed the DNA of MacGyver to be. Downing had lengthy discussions with Henry Winkler and John Wealthy, the present’s government producers, and he satisfied them it was the appropriate factor to do.”
“I cherished him very a lot,” mentioned Winkler, who remained shut with Downing through the years. Making Downing showrunner, Winkler instructed me, “was the neatest factor we did. He ran the present and he ran it impeccably…. and naturally, who higher than the assistant chief of police?”
MacGyver star Richard Dean Anderson, left, with collection government producer Henry Winkler and collection showrunner Stephen Downing.
(Michael Downing)
After “MacGyver” resulted in 1992, Downing instructed The Occasions that he acquired “tons of mail lamenting the lack of this position mannequin for youths: a hero who didn’t use a gun and demonstrated that when you use your thoughts you will get alongside fairly properly on this world.” That response, he mentioned, was what made him proudest.
His sense of integrity and justice didn’t simply affect American leisure. That they had a profound impact on policing in our metropolis.
Shortly earlier than his retirement, Downing served on the use-of-force board that evaluated the horrific 1979 police killing of Eula Love, a 39-year-old African American mom and widow who had an altercation with utility employees after her fuel was turned off. A visibly distressed Love was holding a boning knife when two officers shot her eight instances at shut vary. Downing persuaded Police Chief Chief Daryl Gates, not precisely recognized for his embrace of progressive policing, to create new coaching applications for the L.A. police academy.
“He satisfied Gates that we would have liked to rewrite the use-of-force coverage,” Michael Downing mentioned. “We wanted a bunch extra coaching.”
Though I had corresponded by electronic mail with Downing for years, I didn’t meet him in particular person till 2013, after I organized a panel dialogue at Cal State Northridge concerning the 1967 anti-Vietnam Conflict protest in Century Metropolis that devolved right into a police riot. Downing, then a younger officer working for Chief Tom Reddin, was appalled by his division’s response. (My father and I have been capable of supply our views of the melee from the attitude of a left-wing school professor and 11-year-old sixth-grader, respectively.)
Downing’s distaste for corruption led him to play an element within the downfall of former L.A. Police Chief Willie Williams, who had been employed after the 1992 riots to implement reforms really useful by the Christopher Fee and assist restore relations between police and the group. Although well-liked with residents, Williams had a gentle spot for freebies.
Downing, lengthy retired by then, reported to the Los Angeles Police Fee rampant rumors about Williams allegedly taking free lodge rooms in Las Vegas and soliciting free tickets from Common Studios. The fee rebuked Williams and declined to resume his contract, letting him go after his first time period. (However not earlier than his lawyer threatened to sue Downing for libel.)
In his later years, Downing, a bearish man who cherished a nightly Manhattan, grew to become an outspoken political commentator. A lifelong Republican till 2016, he had a Substack weblog and contributed for a decade to the Beachcomber, a Lengthy Seashore group newspaper. He even helped break a narrative concerning the Lengthy Seashore Police Division’s questionable use of a communications app that mechanically deleted messages.
In case you are an everyday reader of those pages, you may have undoubtedly seen considered one of his many letters to the editor or his occasional opinion essays concerning the ills of contemporary policing — together with the rampant militarization of native police forces, deputy gangs within the L.A. County Sheriff’s Division — or the conflict on medicine, which he loathed.
“Prohibition just isn’t the reply and it’ll by no means be the reply as a result of it doesn’t and won’t work,” Downing instructed my colleague Steve Lopez in 2012.
Downing was a co-author of the poll argument in favor of 2016’s Proposition 64, which legalized hashish for leisure use in California. He was livid concerning the Trump administration’s airstrikes on alleged drug boats within the Caribbean, irate concerning the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids which were unleashed all around the nation and was a harsh critic of immigration brokers in masks.
“When the general public can’t distinguish regulation enforcement from a road gang in tactical gear, we’re not speaking about policing — we’re speaking about energy untethered from accountability,” he wrote in a Occasions opinion essay in October.
Over espresso in South Pasadena final week, I requested Michael Downing whether or not he considered himself because the son of a cop or the son of a TV author.
He thought for a second.
“I consider myself extra,” he mentioned, “because the son of an excellent human being.”
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