Chances are you’ll not acknowledge the identify Stephen Downing, however in the event you’re a fan of American cop reveals during the last 50 years or so, you might be little question accustomed to his work.
Downing, a longtime Lengthy Seaside 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 crimson carpet occasions. Downing, who retired as a deputy chief in 1980, was one of many few to make it actually large in each professions — like Joe Wambaugh, with whom he labored on the Seventies TV drama “Police Story.”
Downing’s large break reads like an amazing Hollywood twist. In the future in 1968, the Hanford, Calif., native who had studied artistic writing in school occurred to choose up the telephone on the 77th Division in South Los Angeles when Jack Webb, the “Dragnet” actor and producer, known as. Webb wished technical assist for a present he was creating, “Adam-12,” a few pair of patrol companions. Downing supplied himself up, and shortly determined to attempt his hand at scripts. “It’s more durable than it appears to be like,” Webb informed him.
“So my dad went house on a weekend, wrote the script, offered it and ended up writing greater than 400 hours of tv,” stated 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 pressure 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 legislation enforcement.
“I feel he noticed an excessive amount of violence on this planet, too many weapons getting used and there have been options to that,” his son informed me. “I feel that’s the way in which he wished 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,” stated Winkler, who remained shut with Downing through the years. Making Downing showrunner, Winkler informed 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” led to 1992, Downing informed The Occasions that he obtained “tons of mail lamenting the lack of this position mannequin for teenagers: a hero who didn’t use a gun and demonstrated that in the event you use your thoughts you will get alongside fairly nicely on this world.” That response, he stated, 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 occasions at shut vary. Downing persuaded Police Chief Chief Daryl Gates, not precisely recognized for his embrace of progressive policing, to create new coaching packages for the L.A. police academy.
“He satisfied Gates that we wanted to rewrite the use-of-force coverage,” Michael Downing stated. “We wanted a bunch extra coaching.”
Though I had corresponded by e mail with Downing for years, I didn’t meet him in individual till 2013, once I organized a panel dialogue at Cal State Northridge in regards to 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 a component within the downfall of former L.A. Police Chief Willie Williams, who had been employed after the 1992 riots to implement reforms beneficial by the Christopher Fee and assist restore relations between police and the group. Although common with residents, Williams had a smooth 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 legal professional 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 Seaside group newspaper. He even helped break a narrative in regards to the Lengthy Seaside Police Division’s questionable use of a communications app that robotically deleted messages.
In case you are a daily reader of those pages, you might have undoubtedly seen considered one of his many letters to the editor or his occasional opinion essays in regards to 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 battle on medication, which he loathed.
“Prohibition will not be the reply and it’ll by no means be the reply as a result of it doesn’t and won’t work,” Downing informed 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 in regards to the Trump administration’s airstrikes on alleged drug boats within the Caribbean, irate in regards to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids which were unleashed everywhere in the nation and was a harsh critic of immigration brokers in masks.
“When the general public can’t distinguish legislation 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 stated, “because the son of an amazing human being.”
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