FILMMAKER'S STATEMENT

When I made Law and Order my experience with the police had been limited to parking and speeding tickets. Nevertheless like most people I had an opinion about the police that was uninformed and based on stereotypes. I brought those cliche views to the shooting of the film. My bromides were reinforced after seeing, on television, the Chicago police riot during the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968. That experience reinforced the cliche that the police were "pigs". However, once I began to ride around in the police cars in Kansas City, I realized that the so called "piggery" was in no way restricted to the police when I saw the things that people do to each other that makes it necessary to have police. This, of course, is also a cliche, but one that was less evident in the fall of 1968. The experience of riding around in the police cars for six weeks was a real education for me. At the extremes I saw some of the horrible things people do to each other (which includes but is not limited to the occasional brutality of the police) as well as the kindness helpfulness of police officers. As a result of the experience of seeing what the police actually do I tried to make the film a more complex and nuanced account of police behavior which did not isolate the police from the rest of us. The film has sequences that show police kindness, cruelty, helpfulness, indifference, sensitivity,callousness and professionalism in responding to situations as varied as taking care of a lost child to thwarting a hold up to strangling a woman accused of prostitution. The viewer has an opportunity to see a wide variety of human behavior and come to their own conclusions about the nature of community police work and at the same time understand my point of view toward the police as it is shown in the structure of the film and the sequences I chose to include.

-Frederick Wiseman