Lines and Shadows by Joseph Wambaugh

Lines and Shadows by Joseph Wambaugh

Abstract

Lines and Shadows, by Joseph Wambaugh, tells the story of a group of regular San Diego street cops assigned to a task force designated to stop the victimization of illegal aliens by bandits in a hellish no-man's land near the Mexico-United States border. The officers soon realize the issue may be too big for regular street cops such as themselves, and many must deal with the psychological, emotional, and social conflicts caused and manifested by the events that occur during their mission.

Lines and Shadows, by Joseph Wambaugh, tells two stories simultaneously. One takes place at an imaginary line between two very different economies. The other takes place at the imaginary line between sanity and madness. Both of these imaginary lines are crossed as a result of the San Diego Police Department sending a task force of young officers, most of whom are Mexican-American, into a no-man's land south of San Diego known as "Deadman's Canyon", located near the Mexican border. Their function and purpose, they are told, is to arrest bandits that are victimizing illegal Mexican immigrants crossing the border into America.

The main theme of the book can be realized in the epilogue when is states "they did it the only way they knew-not ingeniously, merely instinctively-by trying to resurrect in the late twentieth century a mythic hero who never was…the Gunslinger." (Wambaugh, 1984, p. 382)" The message the author attempted to convey is, simply put, police were never meant to be action heroes. In my opinion, he is telling a story of what happens when law enforcement gets too caught up in the "crime fighting role" of policing. Wambaugh conveys this by revealing to us what happens to each of the members of the task force the more they go out into those canyons.