Dirty Harry Turns 50: What if Harry Had Worn a Body Cam?

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 34 No. 3
• Publication year: 2021
• Author: By Colin C. Alexander
• topic: Civil Rights,Constitutional Law,Criminal Law

Dirty Harry Turns 50: What If Harry Had Worn a Body Cam?

By Colin C. Alexander

Colin C. Alexander is an Assistant District Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco. He is solely responsible for any opinions expressed in this article.

A renegade cop holds back the torrent of crime in San Francisco, plugging the dam with the barrel of his .44 Magnum.

Controversial when released in 1971, Dirty Harry was banned in Finland for over a year but was also used as a training film for police in the Philippines. Fifty years after the film was released, we watched it again to see how it holds up today, with a focus on the film's depiction of race, constitutional law, and police procedure.

Dirty Harry's script was originally set in New York and titled Dead Right, with Frank Sinatra set to play the lead. After Frank bowed out, Paul Newman also passed because of the film's conservative themes, suggesting Clint Eastwood as a better fit for the film's hero, Harry Callahan.

The film is a type of morality tale, tailored for a market of older men feeling unmoored in a lawless world. Callahan's world can't be tamed by political hacks, bumbling bureaucrats, and do-gooders, requiring instead the stern hand of a violent father figure. Think Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Sylvester Stallone, replaced today by Liam Neeson, Bruce Willis, and Denzel Washington. Men of similar ages ice their backs, avoid spicy food, and go to bed early, but these men cannot be underestimated, because when violence erupts (often in the form of a kidnapped daughter or brutalized wife), these leather-hard men unlock their gun cabinets and get to work.

There is a guilty pleasure in the stark morality of these films. Rather than having to contemplate society's role in shaping criminality (through poverty, education, race, addiction, and mental health), we are presented with evil villains devoid of humanity — in a word, monsters. While some films play lip-service to exploring options in society's tool box, the genre provides one tool to combat crime: violence, meted out personally. In the end, we know the good will heroically triumph, and the bad will die terrible, well-deserved deaths, sometimes accompanied by terse one-liners.

Everyone remembers Harry's line, near the film's beginning, to a wounded bank robber, inches away from getting his hands on a fallen shotgun: "I know what you're thinking. 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"

Confronted with the barrel of Harry's .44 Magnum, the robber assumes Harry's confidence

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indicates a loaded gun. The robber's hand retreats from his weapon. But he isn't satisfied with the unanswered question. The bank robber, played by Albert Popwell, says to Harry, "I gots to know."

Harry obliges the robber. Instead of telling him, or showing him the empty barrel of the revolver, Harry again points the gun at the robber. Harry revels at Popwell's response, eyes wide with fear, as Harry pulls the trigger, dry firing the gun in the robber's face. The speech was a bluff. The confidence wasn't in a loaded gun, but something inherent in Harry.

Harry's shoot-out with his .44 Magnum on a crowded San Francisco street is frighteningly reckless. It is difficult to accurately aim a pistol at a distance. And there's the issue of over-penetration. If not loaded with an expanding bullet, the round of the .44 Magnum could penetrate its target, and the...