TORONTO (AFP) — Not all cops are corrupt -- but most grudgingly turn a blind eye to fellow officers' bad deeds, actor Edward Norton suggested Tuesday at the premiere of the movie "Pride and Glory" at the Toronto film festival.
"If you ask people who do that work ... and you ask them, 'What would you do in that situation?' most of the cops we talked to said that people's boundary lines were pretty far out," Norton told a press conference.
"I got a sense talking to certain cops that they almost resented being put in a position of having to be the one who would betray the institutional bond," the actor said.
Norton ("Fight Club," 1999, "American History X," 1998, "Primal Fear," 1996) described this ambivalence as "being at war with your own instincts."
The film "Pride and Glory" by director Gavin O'Connor, himself the son of a retired policeman, wrestles with this contradiction.
As the son, brother and brother-in-law of policemen in the film, Detective Ray Tierney (Norton) struggles to choose between arresting fellow cops and turning a blind eye to their blatant corruption touching his biological family.
"Growing up in New York, we always heard, 'Cops bleed blue,'" said O'Connor, citing an unwritten code of honor among police officers in which reporting another officer's errors, misconduct, or crimes is regarded as a betrayal.
The phrases "blue wall of silence," "blue code of silence" or "thin blue line" were first coined in US newsprint, and then became popular culture references alluding to the blue uniforms worn by US urban cops.
"I wondered if you took this notion of a police fraternity and then you take a real family of cops and you put them in a blender, what would happen," said O'Connor. "Where would your loyalties lie?"
The film, which features a commanding performance by Jon Voight as the Tierney family patriarch, also has the potential to speak to broader issues in America, such as methods used in US President George W. Bush's "war on terror" to extract information from suspects.
This is primarily what attracted Norton to the role, he said.
"These are guys who live every day on the edge of darkness. They're dealing with the most difficult, dangerous fringes of society," said Noah Emmerich, cast as Ray's older brother Francis in the film.
"Because we live in a democracy, there are tremendous constraints on what they're allowed to do, because we have great individual freedoms," he said. But "it makes their job very, very hard to do."
At this moment in the United States, "this balance of security and safety with freedom is very tough," Emmerich said.
The script was written in 1999, two years after a Haitian immigrant was beaten and sodomized with a toilet plunger while in New York City Police Department custody.
But it could be easily applied more broadly to current America, said Norton.
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