Joseph Wambaugh, cop-turned-best-selling-author, dies at 88
Before Joseph Wambaugh came along, the unofficial bard of the Los Angeles Police Department was Jack Webb, whose unsmiling Sgt. Joe Friday peppered every episode of “Dragnet” with homilies about moral weakness and crime.
“Marijuana is the flame, heroin is the fuse, LSD is the bomb,” Friday seethed to a suspect in a 1967 episode. “So don’t you try to equate liquor with marijuana, Mister. Not to me. … Don’t you con me with your mind-expansion slop!”
Then came Wambaugh, an LAPD veteran whose fictional cops would have had Joe Friday screaming for the California Penal Code and a bottle of disinfectant. Wambaugh’s characters were morally flexible, heroic, repugnant, compassionate, callous, deeply flawed, darkly comical — in a word, real.
Wambaugh, whose 16 novels and five nonfiction crime narratives transformed the portrayal of cops in America, paved the way for gritty TV shows such as “Hill Street Blues” and “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and inspired a new generation of crime writers, died Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., according to Janene Gant, a longtime family friend. He was 88.
https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2025-02-28/joseph-wambaugh-dead
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