NYPD black and blue.

The most disturbing police dramas aren't written to fit the character of Andy Sipowicz; they're written into the very fabric of American life. This month, Patrick McCormick investigates the lack of character development in the way we fight crime.

ANDY SIPOWICZ IS A RACIST COP WHO OCCASSIONALLY tunes up (beats) suspects in the back room. He is also, arguably, the most interesting and complex character in the three police dramas that have dominated prime-time TV for most of this decade. Compared to his colleagues on NYPD Blue and the cops of Law & Order and Homicide, Sipowicz is something of a dinosaur, a retrograde and politically incorrect throwback to the days before Miranda rights and affirmative action. In contemporary TV-land, where all the police lieutenants are black and where female and gay officers mingle freely in the precinct house, Sipowicz's racism and brutality seem, as his Lt. Fancy would note, like an "embarrassment to the job."

Embarrassing or not, however, in the real world Sipowicz is not nearly as rare or anachronistic as we would like to think. A couple of months ago four cops in the Bronx gunned down a West African immigrant by the name of Amadou Diallo, firing 41 shots at an innocent, unarmed man whose only crime was that he fit the general description of a rape suspect: he was a black male. Two years previously a couple of officers from the 70th precinct in Brooklyn took a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima into a back room and tortured him in ways that defy description.

Nor is this problem unique to the Big Apple or to the hard-nosed politics of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Hardly any of us will ever forget the videotaped beating Rodney King received at the hands of some of Los Angeles' finest--or the subsequent filmed beating of two Mexican immigrants by sheriff's deputies from Riverside County. And then, of course, there is always the charming Det. Mark Furman, the man whose over-the-top racism helped give O.J. Simpson his walking papers.

In 1994 the Mollen Commission discovered widespread patterns of indiscriminate brutality directed against minorities by police officers working in the Bronx. One cop, known as a "mechanic" because he would regularly "tune people up," confessed that most of his victims were African Americans or Hispanics and acknowledged that "you'd hate the police too, if you lived in these neighborhoods." Other officers admitted that many beatings were indiscriminate and carried out simply "to show people who was in charge." Following the Rodney King incident, a survey of the L.A. Police Department found that 25 percent of responding cops admitted that "racial bias on the part of officers currently exists," and that such prejudice "may lead to the use of excessive force." Similar findings have shown up in investigations in Philadelphia and Boston, where bias and brutality directed at minorities were discovered to be widespread, even epidemic.

Information like this can be disturbing to those of us who don't mind watching our TV cops rough up an occasional sociopath or serial rapist but would be shocked to think that such violence might be indiscriminate or racist. Maybe that--s why Congress has consistently resisted efforts by the NAACP and others to get an accurate nationwide count of incidents of police brutality, even though such data was mandated by the 1994 Crime Control Act.

Still, as dangerous as the Sipowiczs and Furmans of this world are, they may not be the only--or even the worst--problem African Americans and other minorities confront when dealing with our criminal-justice system. In No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press, 1999), Georgetown University law professor and civil-liberties advocate David Cole argues that we have two separate and grossly unequal justice systems: one for the privileged members of the white middle and upper class and another for the poor and minorities. From cops to courts to prison cells, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities can expect to be treated more suspiciously and punitively by America's judicial processes. They will be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned more often than whites committing the same crimes--and they will do longer and harder time for their sins. Furthermore, Cole argues that middle- and upper-class whites count on a two-tiered criminal-justice system that allows the privileged to enjoy a high level of protection for their civil liberties while the government pursues "a policy of mass incarceration" overwhelmingly targeting the poor and minorities.

Michael Tonry makes a similar point in Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (Oxford University Press, 1995). The percentage of crimes committed by blacks, notes Tonry, has remained relatively stable for the past 20 years. Yet the disproportionate punishment of African Americans has increased markedly. Since the early years of the Reagan-Bush era, the number of blacks in U.S. prisons has tripled, so that African Americans now represent nearly half of all those in jail. Today, nearly a quarter of black men in their 20s can expect to find themselves under arrest, in jail, or on probation or parole.

Much of the problem, argues Tonry, is that since the early '80s the U.S. has prosecuted an inordinately costly and largely useless war on drugs, a war that overwhelmingly targets inner-city blacks and minorities and results in the largest prison system in the world--not to mention the highest incarceration rate of any nation in human history. As a result of this war on drugs and an equally unsuccessful and longer-running war on crime, the prison population in this country has nearly sextupled since the early '70s. At present we have more than 1.8 million Americans behind bars--about half a million more citizens than communist China. And although we have built about 1,000 new prisons and jails in the last two decades, our prison system--into which we try to squeeze an extra 50,000 to 80,000 new occupants each year--is more crowded than ever.

Unfortunately, but not unforeseeably, the cost of these wars, and of America's burgeoning prison system, has fallen disproportionately on the poor and minorities. In an Atlantic Monthly article on "The Prison Industrial Complex," Eric Schlosser notes that "although the prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense." Tonry makes a similar point when he notes that "blacks are arrested and imprisoned for drug crimes in numbers far out of line with their proportion of the general population, of drag users, and of drug traffickers." In an essay in The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford University Press, 1995), Norval Morris notes that" this huge differential (between blacks and whites) ... is surely the product of intense targeting, by police and prosecutors, of drug use in certain areas and not in others."

Ironically, America's criminal-justice system and prison industrial complex may turn out to be our most effective and perverse "affirmative action" programs. Here, in the wars on crime and drugs, is big government spending targeted at blacks and Hispanics in hugely disproportionate numbers--offering simple, direct, and ultimately useless solutions to a myriad of social and economic ills. In spite of the fact that study after study has shown that stiffer prison terms have little or no effect on criminal behavior, that our incarceration rates and prison sentences are wildly out of sync with other democracies, and that the vast majority of people in our prisons are poor, uneducated, and drug-involved, we continue to arrest and incarcerate at unheard of rates. We continue to round up "all the usual suspects."

At the same time we rush to dismantle drug-rehab programs, cut back on aid to the poor, and abandon any of the social infrastructures that might make survival possible for those in high-poverty neighborhoods around the country. As Elliott Currie notes in Crime and Punishment in America (Metropolitan Books, 1998), the consequences of spending money on prisons and not on social programs is a deepening cycle of poverty, violence, and more crime.

Maybe, then, it's a good thing that Sipowicz is on prime-time TV each week, that we're forced to acknowledge the ugly presence of racism and brutality--not just in a few rogue cops, but in the very heart of our criminal-justice system. And maybe, as politicians in the coming election begin their rants about being "tough on crime" and resurrect again the phantom of Willie Horton, it would be good for us to remember Andy Sipowicz--and Rodney King, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo.

McCORMICK'S QUICK TAKES

October Sky (Universal Pictures) In Joe Johnston's feel-good film about a real-life West Virginia schoolboy who grows up to be a NASA engineer, hope is the fuel that propels both him and his fledgling rockets. Watching the trace of Sputnik's comet tail in the evening sky, Homer H. Hickam, Jr. (Jake Gyllenhaal) catches the "rocket" bug. He and his high-school buddies (including an extremely likable geek played by Chris Owen) bring more pluck than precision to their initial efforts, discovering a need to master some hard science and get outside help in accomplishing their dream. What Homer also discovers, however, is that sometimes dreams-like his and his father's-collide. Playing the older Hickham, Chris Cooper is a coal miner who thinks his son's flights are folly, but whose love and grudging respect ultimately make room for a sort of peace. ***

Pleasantville (New Line Cinema) Ever wonder what Harriet Nelson and Barbara Billingsley did when we weren't watching? Or what it might be like to live in the same Nick-at-Nite neighborhood as the Nelsons and Cleavers? Then Gary Ross's little trip back to a past that never was is probably just the vacation you had in mind. David and Jennifer are a couple of modern teens who fall through the looking glass of their TV and land in a monochromatic yesteryear where father certainly seems to know best Though David is initially as taken with this world-one without crime, divorce, or diversity-as any conservative politician, he and his sister soon discover the limits of "Plasticville" and begin infecting its residents with all sorts of uncomfortable ideas. In spite of a Hollywood finish and some simplistic notions, this is an often original and entertaining film with fine performances, especially by Joan Allen as a growing-up Mrs. Cleaver.** 1/2

The Deep End of the Ocean (Columbia Pictures) How does a family ever deal with the disappearance of a child--or recover enough sanity to do more than shuffle along in the shadow of such a loss? These are the unanswerable questions facing the characters in Ulu Grosbard's film version of Jacquelyn Mitchard's bestselling novel. Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer) leaves her two sons alone for the time it takes to check into a hotel and finds herself in a nightmare world where your 3-year-old is on the cover of milk cartons and where your husband and family are drifting effortlessly out of reach. Still, the greatest challenge to this fractured family comes with the possibility of recovery, with the realization that sometimes love is more about giving and forgiving than about having and getting back. ***

Dancing at Lughnasa (Sony Picture Classics) If parting is such sweet sorrow, then it's easy to understand the pleasure of watching Brian Friel's drama about a Donegal family on the cusp of unweaving. Played by the inimitable Meryl Streep, Kate Mundy is the fiercely protective but also frustrated matriarch of a clan of five sisters slipping slowly into spinsterhood. In Pat O'Connor's film we catch Kate, Agnes, Rose, Maggie, and Christina at the moment when their memories and passions are outstripping their prospects. But Dancing at Lughnasa is not all sadness. Its characters are vastly alive, raging, crying, and laughing against the fate that has not yet closed in on them, living in the barely hopeful present with a frailty and courage no longer naive, but not yet defeated.* * * *

By PATRICK McCORMICK, an assistant professor of ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.