Crimebusters Galore

A recent piece in the conservative magazine "Insight" proclaimed this the year of the crimebusters. District Attorneys in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia have all provided newspapers with headlines as they bring in one successful indictment after another. In the process, political corruption and organized crime have been death severe blows.

But the rise of the D.A. has been more than a news story. It has entered the popular imagination, and a crimebuster, Eliot Ness, stands as the hero of one of the summer's most popular movies: The Untouchables.

Let there be no illusions about what the vogue of crimebusting means. Criminal rights are out of fashion, and the public-defender-as-hero era of popular culture has passed away.

Crime has long been a topic for movies, and in the late '70s D.A.'s even played a central role, but a very different one. Their job in movies such as Serpico and Prince of the City was to expose police corruption, all the while indicating just how inevitable that corruption was. The movies were not hard on cops so much as they were hard on the system. D.A.'s were portrayed as ambition-driven climbers, eager to use informants as stepping stones to more impressive jobs.

In the Untouchables,that healthy cynicism about the role of law enforcement officers has given way to pure myth. One crusading knight, in the character of Ness, is out to stop the terrorism of one arch villain. The Chicago gangster Al Capone. It doesn't matter that the legal touches of the dramatic ending--involving a switch of juries--are patently illegal.

In Prince of the City, the investigative process is shown to be a brutal affair. In the Untouchables it is celebrated. As the Ness gang attempts to draw a confession from one of Capone's men, they shoot a dead body in the view of the captured assailant. The man is terrorized into confessing. The audience invariably cheers, for the good guys have won. Never mind if such tactics raise serious questions about the rights of the arrested.

What is disturbing is that the desire for billboard morality, and its clear, if mythic, delineations between right and wrong, appears as firmly in the minds of the D.A's as it does in the souls of moviegoers.

In the words of perhaps the most well-known of the current crop of zealous D.A.'s, Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. Attorney for the prestigious Southern District of New York City, "there is a proportion of the human race that is evil."

Such a conviction makes it thus easy to believe that there is a corresponding proportion of people that is "good." As a result, the evil deserve what they get from the "good."

Giuliani continues, in his May interview with New York magazine, to say that until Reagan came to office, "all we were doing was constantly expanding benefits and so-called civil rights... never thinking about what that was doing to lawful authority."

The law and order craze that Reagan stood for, and which Attorney General Edwin Meese embodies, rests on a simplified view of society. It is much easier to trample the civil liberties of the accused when those being affected are deemed "evil." Meese said as much by arguing that the only people who need fear constitutionally questionable drug tests are drug users.

Alan Bloom, the author of "The Closing of the American Mind," bemoans the relativism which he says holds away over the minds of the young. All things are thought to be equal--good and bad are merely labels, and therefore mean nothing. But one wonders if its complement--mindless absolutism--and the conviction that the world is made up of some angels and some devils, bodes any better.

That mentality is one trial right at the moment, with Lt. Colonel Oliver North serving as the Eliot Ness stand in. After lecturing the congressional commitee for days on patriotism, Senator George Mitchell reminded him that others love America just as much as he does. Mitchell's point was that it is destructive to concentrate on labelling people as patriots or traitors, good men or bad. What is valuable is to understand what it means to love one's country, or to stand for justice. Such an understanding requires more complex thinking, but results in a more humane world.