Adam-12 (1968)/Day Watch

Day Watch
Season 4, Episode 10
Airdate	November 24, 1971
Written by	Leo V. Gordon
Directed by	Dennis Donnelly
Produced by	Herman S. Saunders
← 4x09 Anniversary	4x11 → Assassination
Adam-12 — Season Four

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Day Watch is the tenth episode of the fourth season of Adam-12, and the eighty-eighth episode overall.

Reed and Malloy deal with a gas station owner who says he's constantly being robbed at gunpoint by Black men. But, as the gas station owner ratchets up his desire to defend himself at all costs, is the suspect all he seems to be?

Starring: Martin Milner (Officer Pete Malloy), Kent McCord (Officer Jim Reed)

with George Murdock (Mr. Williams), J. Pat O'Malley (Willie), Clark Howat (Harold Johnson), Ronne Troup (Jo), Fred Holliday (Paul Soren), William Elliott (Officer Woods), Craig Chudy (Willis)

Uncredited: Shaaron Claridge (Dispatcher)

Plot Overview

The main call in this episode has irony to it, as will be seen in the end. A strongly bigoted (to say the least) service station owner, frustrated by constantly being robbed, is pinning the blame on Black people. He stops short of using racial slurs, but then makes the big mistake of going on television to vent his frustrations, stating he is armed and ready to fight back.

Later in the episode, the same service station is robbed again by the same suspect (a Black man with an Afro hairdo, wearing a denim-colored jacket and gray slacks), and the owner has been assaulted this time and had his gun taken away. At the end of the episode, Malloy and Reed corner the suspect at an auto salvage yard. Indeed, our criminal seems to fit the service station owner's description to a T ... until Reed realizes something's not right with their man. Indeed, he was wearing a wig and African American face paint. The robber, now in custody, notes that he thought he had the police fooled, but Malloy takes note of the aforementioned irony: One racist robbing another.

The other primary call involves a business man who picked up a young, attractive female hitchhiker who blackmailed him out of $20, and she threatens to go to the police claiming he raped her if he didn't pay up. The officers later find the woman hitchhiking elsewhere and question her, but the man shows up. After a brief dispute, the man backs up his side of the story with a tape recording he secretly made of the conversation with the young woman; he had a voice-activated recording device in his briefcase. Her purse is searched, and she has $260 inside, and immediately, this smells of a scam and the woman is taken into custody.

As a bit of comic relief, there is the annual gag of the drunken man thinking he's seeing things. This time: Pink elephants. Only thing is ... he really was seeing a pink elephant, the statue of one outside a nightclub called the Pink Elephant.