POLICE HEROES

For hardcore cop groupies, Weegee-like snapshots of cops in action.

Is every police officer a hero? With 740,000 cops in America, TV producer Whitlock settles for 25 incidents of valor, using interviews and descriptions to crack open the car chases, shootings, rescues, and other similar events that season the policeman’s working life. His tales are cinematic. There’s the shootout in a cop bar in Las Vegas as Dennis Devitte, an off-duty officer, shot it out with an armed robber, Emilio Rodriguez, taking eight bullets. There’s the high-speed car chase in Boca Raton that led officer Paul Holland through four cities at up to 90 miles an hour and ended with a gun battle. There’s the truly painful story of Pittsburgh policeman John Joseph Wilbur, who approached a suspicious car in which two men were apparently doing crack. They took off, with Wilbur unwillingly along for the ride, his wedding ring caught in the driver’s door. Dragging himself up while the car bounced him along the street, Wilbur was able to get off some shots before the ring broke. Not a subtle writer, Whitlock works at two speeds: tabloid and super-tabloid. His officers are invariably modest, brave, and altruistic. His conviction that police are some rarer breed of human being takes an idea that has some merit at its core (some policemen do perform heroic acts) and inflates it until it becomes an authoritarian fantasy. That said, these stories are invariably gripping. The author devotes his final chapter to a rundown of the law-enforcement personnel killed at the World Trade Center, but, however nobly intended, his thumbnail sketches don’t get us any closer to the police actions taken that day.

More Dragnet than Hill Street Blues, an ambition it succeeds in.