Joseph Wambaugh, The Onion Field (1973/2007)

Reading Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 book The Onion Field in the era of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter is a strange experience, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. First off, though, let’s situate this book within the context of the true crime genre. Like any book published after the groundbreaking In Cold Blood, Wambaugh’s book inevitably shows signs of Truman Capote’s influence, especially in the opening section, where Wambaugh begins by exploring the background of each of the book’s main characters while cross-cutting between the detectives and the robbers until the moment of their fateful and deadly meeting. The differences between Wambaugh and Capote, however, are what make The Onion Field such a significant book. Even though In Cold Blood devotes a lot of attention to the police, it is clear that the murderers are not only Capote’s main protagonists but also the figures with whom he identifies most closely. This is not the case with Wambaugh. As a veteran of the LAPD, Wambaugh’s sympathies are squarely with the police and this book marks an important shift in true crime’s tendency to portray members of law enforcement as the main protagonists, and even as victims (this is a tendency that will developed even further by Ann Rule). Let me be quite clear here: I am not claiming that Wambaugh misinterprets the facts of the case by turning the police into victims; after all, one of the detectives is murdered and the survivor has to endure horrific PTSD for years. My point is that this focus represents a significant development in the genre, especially as Wambaugh’s book was originally published a few years after the turbulent 1960’s, when the police were often seen as victimizers rather than as victims. What makes The Onion Field even more significant and more nuanced than some might expect, however, is that Wambaugh’s sympathetic portrayal of humanized and victimized police officers is accompanied by a stinging critique of the insensitivity, even cruelty, of the LAPD as an institution. In other words, both criminals and the LAPD brass are victimizers according to Wambaugh, albeit of different kinds and degrees. This is where, strangely enough, the context of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter comes into play. For obvious reasons (and despite the recent murder of police officers in New York City), many would have difficulty in thinking of the police as victims today. Instead, they are more often seen as aggressors. This is why it’s so interesting that part of the LAPD’s response to the events depicted in the book was to change police policy so that officers would never surrender their weapons but instead aggressively engage criminals whenever necessary. As an excerpt from Patrol Bureau Memorandum Number 11 (written by Inspector John Powers just five days after the detective’s murder) puts it: “Just as the armed forces protect the nation from external enemies, local police departments protect their communities from internal criminals every bit as vicious as our enemies from without. The police are engaged in a hot war. There are no truces, and there is no hope of an armistice. The enemy abides by no rules of civilized warfare” (quoted on pages 236-237 of the Kindle edition of The Onion Field). It is impossible to read those words today and not be reminded of the ongoing debates about the militarization of the American police. Contemporary events, in other words, have given The Onion Field a new but perhaps not entirely unexpected significance.