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Where have you gone, Officer Krupke?
Whereas West Side Story's gruffly benevolent flatfoot dispensed authority with a scowl and a poke of his nightstick, lately movie cops are portrayed as casually malicious, brutal, and often racist. In Panther such depictions are a blast at past injustices, but police in films set today are no kinder. The white cops of Higher Learning go easier on a neo-Nazi maniac than on the black man who subdues him. New Jersey Drive's sadistic Lieutenant Roscoe pursues car thieves with a ferocious single-mindedness -- Miranda rights be damned. In Kiss of Death, vengeful detective Samuel L. Jackson self-indulgently pummels convict David Caruso. ''In the past,'' says Spike Lee, Drive's executive-producer, ''police were held up on a pedestal: righters of wrong, protectors of the weak. That's not the case anymore.''
Clearly the shield has lost much of its luster. ''The idea that police could conceivably lie on the stand, alter evidence, or be involved in brutal activities graces our newspapers every day,'' says Drive writer-director Nick Gomez, who drew on Newark police scandals for his film. ''Motion pictures and other popular arts reflect that. Hip-hop has been talking about this stuff for a decade.''
Of course, not everybody appreciates such portraits. Newark mayor Sharpe James condemned Drive's script as ''trash.'' Yet the beat goes on: This week, My Family opens, a film that shows policemen coldly hunting down a Hispanic suspect, and June's Glass Shield deals with corruption in the L.A. sheriff's office.
''There's no better person in the world than a good cop, and no worse creature than a bad one,'' says the Miami Herald's Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter Edna Buchanan. ''That's what's being shown now to people.''
