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A Belated RIP for Joseph Wambaugh

Doug Watt
@DougWatt
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Joseph Wambaugh Jr. passed away on February 28, 2025. He was a retired police officer and an American writer known for his fictional and nonfictional accounts of police work in the United States. Many of his novels are set in Los Angeles and its surroundings, featuring Los Angeles police officers as protagonists. He won three Edgar Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Unlike Dragnet and Adam-12, his stories portrayed both the good and bad of police work.

Wambaugh worked his way up the ladder of policing in Los Angeles and was a detective sergeant for the LAPD when he retired. The admin cops didn't like his portrayals of the gritty side of police work. The line cops did.

In developing “Police Story” for NBC, Wambaugh “insisted on two nonnegotiable conditions: that the show be as realistic and down-to-earth as possible, and that the show be an anthology series so that it would be possible to show protagonists who are imperfect, unlikable, and even doomed,” Valdivia explains in his review. The creative freedom that came with the anthology format meant that there could be some episodes where the bad guys got away, where the protagonist dies, where the cop “makes a crucial mistake or bad judgment and ends up losing badly, just like in real life. That’s what police work is about, as Wambaugh himself has said, and it helps ground the show in realism,” DVD Verdict’s Valdivia makes clear. As his celebrity grew, he sometimes found himself “hounded for autographs by the people he put in handcuffs,” according to the 2008 NPR profile. On the other hand, the Los Angeles police chief was miffed by portrayals of flawed L.A. cops in Wambaugh’s early novels. He left the LAPD in the mid-’70s, after returning from the leave of absence he took to write “The Onion Field.” Wambaugh told Palm Springs Life in August 2007 that his fellow cops “showing deference to me was pretty unbearable. If they’d shown more resentment or jealousy, it would have been easier to deal with, but they didn’t. They were sweet. They held open doors for me. And that was worse.” NPR revealed that little had changed in 2008: “Joe Wambaugh is treated like a star when he visits the Hollywood police station he helped immortalize. Framed posters of his movies hang on the walls, and when he shows up, he’s invited to address the baby-faced officers during roll call.”

His novels and non-fiction stories dealt with failures of both police officers and criminals. I have seen both of those when I was on the streets.

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Discussion (5)

  • Doug Watt@DougWatt

    The Onion Field could be considered the best of all his books.

    In 2008 Wambaugh told NPR: “I was put on Earth to write ‘The Onion Field.’ That’s how I felt about it. It was such an emotional experience for me. I took a six-month leave of absence from the police department to write that book. I read 40,000 pages of court transcripts; I interviewed about 63 people and wrote the book in three months.”

  • Percival@Percival
    ReplyingtoDoug Watt

    Doug Watt (View Comment):

    The Onion Field could be considered the best of all his books.

    In 2008 Wambaugh told NPR: “I was put on Earth to write ‘The Onion Field.’ That’s how I felt about it. It was such an emotional experience for me. I took a six-month leave of absence from the police department to write that book. I read 40,000 pages of court transcripts; I interviewed about 63 people and wrote the book in three months.”

    The Onion Field was spectacular. I've read some of his other books, but that one sticks.