The New Centurions

A hack adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh's novel which makes you see why he subsequently bulldozed into control of his own work on the screen. Every symbol of social unease is grabbed and used with unbelievable crudity in throwing together a series of all-in-a-day's-work episodes: battered baby, rent extortionists, marital strife, gay entrapment (for a giggle), it's all there, except that the more you're supposed to sympathise with the cops, the more sympathy you in fact feel for their victims. It's sort of bound together by a strange initiation theme, in which an older cop teaches the young one all he knows before blowing his own head off.