Really the Blues

By Jose M. Ferrer III

THE NEW CENTURIONS by Joseph Wambaugh. 376 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $6.95.

Criminologists, law professors and judges have theories and ideas and observations about crime, but policemen know. Because they are just ordinary men, the burden of knowledge generally makes them clannish, somewhat smug and unusually prone to divorce and suicide. In the case of Joseph Wambaugh, a sergeant in the Los Angeles police department, firsthand knowledge has led to a workmanlike first novel, short on nuance, but notably convincing. It follows three L.A.P.D. rookies through five years on the force, climaxing in the terrorized disorder of the police effort to contain the 1965 Watts riot.

Along the way, Wambaugh's three cops find battered children, chain-swinging homosexuals, a drunk so close to death from malnutrition that even the skin on his hands has rotted off, a shotgun blast in the stomach, an actress-carhop who has used so many names that she has almost forgotten the one she was born with. Finally, one of the officers meets a sudden, cruelly meaningless death while investigating a routine family quarrel.

Such incidents have been written about before as well as dramatized for TV audiences. In such cases they are usually presented for thrills, or to sharpen the pace of a story. In Centurions, they are encountered as a policeman would encounter them, matter-of-factly, almost at random, and all the more real for it. Wambaugh has also portrayed cops beating suspects, insulting Negroes, bending arrest reports to satisfy courtroom requirements, or stashing liquor in their favorite call boxes. The policeman-author, who is now a burglary detective, has been admonished by L.A. Police Chief Edward M. Davis, officially, because he failed to get permission to publish The New Centurions. Presumably, though, the department also was not pleased by Wambaugh's literary lapse of organizational loyalty. Of course, it is those very displays of unblurred vision that keep Wambaugh's book unpreachy, believable and out of trouble with the reader.

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