In American cinema the role of the uniformed police officer has varied across time, genre and setting. In the silent movies he - and, up until the Nineties, it invariably was a man - was an authoritarian figure to be mocked and ridiculed. With the arrival of talking pictures he became an established bit part player, always on hand to keep back the crowd or lead the villain down to the cells. No Hollywood version of small town America would be complete without its friendly cop on the beat. An avuncular friend, he was more ready to hand out homespun advice than speeding tickets - just as in the big cities of Hollywood musicals the police officer was there to offer nothing more than a mild rebuke. Film noir, of course, offered up a more ambivalent picture of those who took the pledge to protect and serve. The year 1960 provided a new perspective and, as that decade of anti-authoritarianism progressed, cinema goers became used to seeing the police painted in increasingly darker shades of blue.
1973 - the year Peter Benchley delivered his manuscript - saw the release of three films that neatly encapsulated the perceptions of the American police force in the popular imagination. In Serpico Al Pacino ratted out his corrupt colleagues in the NYPD. The John Milius-scripted Magnum Force had Clint Eastwood taking on a gang of cloned motorcyle cops acting as vigilantes. The Seven-Ups cast Roy Scheider as an undercover cop willing to bend and even break the law in order to secure a collar.
That same year saw the start of the hit CBS show Kojak. Like Starsky and Hutch and later Cagney and Lacey that were to follow it, Kojak avoided the moral ambiguities of law enforcement that were being played out on the big screen. With advertisers to please and the need to wrap up a story within an hour, Seventies cop shows painted police work with broad strokes in bright primary colours.
Closer to reality was the depiction of the profession in popular fiction. Detective fiction in the US had produced a good number of private eyes - from Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade to Ellery Queen and Lew Archer - but it was writers like Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh who popularised the police procedural novel.
There's not much evidence in the text of Jaws to suggest that Peter Benchley devoted a great deal of research into small town law enforcement. He gives us forensic-level detail of Ellen Brody's preparations to commit adultery - "From the back of her closet she took a plastic shopping bag into which she put a pair of bikini underpants, a bra, a neatly folded lavender dress, a pair of low-heeled pumps, a can of spray deodorant, a plastic bottle of bath powder, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste." - but tells us next to nothing about her husband's working practices. Indeed, we read more of Brody at home than of him in the local precinct. When he interacts with members of the public, he is quick to become antagonistic, and his handling of basic procedures - such as informing loved ones of a person's death - would have brought him up before the police commission.
