Column: Why MacGyver never carried a gun: The LAPD officer who transformed TV policing

You may not recognize the name Stephen Downing, but if you’re a fan of American cop shows over the last 50 years or so, you are no doubt familiar with his work. Downing, a longtime Long Beach resident who died of sepsis in November at 87, drew on his years of experience as a Los Angeles police officer, crafting stories for “Dragnet,” “Adam-12,” “Emergency” and “TJ Hooker,” among many others. Many L.A. cops have some tangential relationship to the entertainment industry — they moonlight as security guards on sets or at red carpet events. Downing, who retired as a deputy chief in 1980, was one of the few to make it really big in both professions — like Joe Wambaugh, with whom he worked on the 1970s TV drama “Police Story.” Downing's big break reads like a great Hollywood twist. One day in 1968, the Hanford, Calif., native who had studied creative writing in college happened to pick up the phone at the 77th Division in South Los Angeles when Jack Webb, the “Dragnet” actor and producer, called. Webb wanted technical help for a show he was developing, “Adam-12,” about a pair of patrol partners. Downing offered himself up, and soon decided to try his hand at scripts. “It’s harder than it looks,” Webb told him. “So my dad went home on a weekend, wrote the script, sold it and ended up writing more than 400 hours of television,” said his son, Michael Downing, also a retired deputy police chief. Before Stephen Downing retired from the force in 1980, he used pseudonyms to avoid angering his superiors, some of whom resented his remunerative outside work. “He used his police salary to pay his taxes,” joked his son. At Downing’s entertainment pinnacle, he spent seven years as showrunner for “MacGyver,” the iconic series starring Richard Dean Anderson as the genius fixer who extricates himself from thorny situations using duct tape and a Swiss army knife instead of guns and violence. MacGyver’s humane, anti-violence philosophy was a perfect reflection of Downing’s approach to law enforcement. “I think he saw too much violence in the world, too many weapons being used and there were alternatives to that,” his son told me. “I think that’s the way he wanted the DNA of MacGyver to be. Downing had long discussions with Henry Winkler and John Rich, the show's executive producers, and he convinced them it was the right thing to do.” “I loved him very much,” said Winkler, who remained close with Downing over the years. Making Downing showrunner, Winkler told me, “was the smartest thing we did. He ran the show and he ran it impeccably…. and of course, who better than the assistant chief of police?” After "MacGyver" ended in 1992, Downing told The Times that he received “tons of mail lamenting the loss of this role model for kids: a hero who didn’t use a gun and demonstrated that if you use your mind you can get along pretty well in this world.” That response, he said, was what made him proudest. His sense of integrity and justice didn't just influence American entertainment. They had a profound effect on policing in our city. Shortly before his retirement, Downing served on the use-of-force board that evaluated the horrific 1979 police killing of Eula Love, a 39-year-old African American mother and widow who had an altercation with utility workers after her gas was turned off. A visibly distressed Love was holding a boning knife when two officers shot her eight times at close range. Downing persuaded Police Chief Chief Daryl Gates, not exactly known for his embrace of progressive policing, to create new training programs for the L.A. police academy. “He convinced Gates that we needed to rewrite the use-of-force policy,” Michael Downing said. “We needed a bunch more training.” Although I had corresponded by email with Downing for years, I did not meet him in person until 2013, when I organized a panel discussion at Cal State Northridge about the 1967 anti-Vietnam War protest in Century City that devolved into a police riot. Downing, then a young officer working for Chief Tom Reddin, was appalled by his department's response. (My father and I were able to offer our views of the melee from the perspective of a left-wing college professor and 11-year-old sixth-grader, respectively.) Downing's distaste for corruption led him to play a part in the downfall of former L.A. Police Chief Willie Williams, who had been hired after the 1992 riots to implement reforms recommended by the Christopher Commission and help repair relations between police and the community. Though popular with residents, Williams had a soft spot for freebies. Downing, long retired by then, reported to the Los Angeles Police Commission rampant rumors about Williams allegedly taking free hotel rooms in Las Vegas and soliciting free tickets from Universal Studios. The commission rebuked Williams and declined to renew his contract, letting him go after his first term. (But not before his attorney threatened to sue Downing for libel.) In his later years, Downing, a bearish guy who loved a nightly Manhattan, became an outspoken political commentator. A lifelong Republican until 2016, he had a Substack blog and contributed for a decade to the Beachcomber, a Long Beach community newspaper. He even helped break a story about the Long Beach Police Department's questionable use of a communications app that automatically deleted messages. If you are a regular reader of these pages, you have undoubtedly seen one of his many letters to the editor or his occasional opinion essays about the ills of modern policing — including the rampant militarization of local police forces, deputy gangs in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — or the war on drugs, which he loathed. “Prohibition is not the answer and it will never be the answer because it does not and will not work,” Downing told my colleague Steve Lopez in 2012. Downing was a co-author of the ballot argument in favor of 2016’s Proposition 64, which legalized cannabis for recreational use in California. He was furious about the Trump administration's airstrikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, irate about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that have been unleashed all over the country and was a harsh critic of immigration agents in masks. “When the public can’t distinguish law enforcement from a street gang in tactical gear, we’re no longer talking about policing — we’re talking about power untethered from accountability," he wrote in a Times opinion essay in October. Over coffee in South Pasadena last week, I asked Michael Downing whether he thought of himself as the son of a cop or the son of a TV writer. He thought for a moment. “I think of myself more,” he said, “as the son of a great human being.” Bluesky: @rabcarian Threads: @rabcarian