At the beginning of The Thin Blue Lie, Mayor Frank Rizzo (played by Paul Sorvino) is trying to change the charter of the City of Philadelphia so that he can run for an unprecedented third term in 1978. But in 1976, Jonathan Neumann (played by Rob Morrow) joins the staff of a Philadelphia newspaper. During his first week, while he is assigned to general news coverage, a story catches his attention about a possible wrongful conviction of a mentally challenged white youth for burning down the house of a Puerto Rican family who has just moved into a white neighborhood. When Neumann's assignment switches to a regular beat, the municipal courts of Philadelphia, he is hot on the case. Before he wins the Pulitzer Prize for his exposé, he finds hundreds of similar cases, gets hassled by the police, locates a few deepthroats, and traces the entire conspiracy to direct orders from the mayor himself, who was Philadelphia's chief of police before his election as mayor. Rizzo justifies orders to police that they must find a culprit for every murder, regardless of guilt, resulting in a mania to reduce crime, because he believes that police are the "thin blue line" between criminals and the public. Titles at the end of the film reveal that the case developed by Neumann's journalism resulted in federal indictments of Rizzo and others on civil rights and other charges. An exposé of the magnitude of The Thin Blue Lie should not be relegated to a mere television film that is shown from time to time on cable. At a time when the USA Patriot Act and executive orders about detainees from Afghanistan and Iraq have been called into question, The Thin Blue Lie can be viewed as a paradigm for uncontrolled law enforcement in which the ends justify any means, however totalitarian. The Thin Blue Lie, however, portrays only a subset of the abuse of power by Frank Rizzo, who as police commissioner earlier authorized brutal assaults of high school students seeking Black studies classes, of anti-war and anti-racist demonstrators, and of raids on the American Indian Movement, voter registration groups, and the Black Panther Party. In the latter case, Panthers were forced to strip naked on the street in front of news cameras. MH
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