Dragnet 1967/The Shooting Board

The Shooting Board
Season 2, Episode 2
Airdate	September 21, 1967
Written by	David Vowell
Directed by	Jack Webb
Produced by	Jack Webb
← 2x01 The Grenade	2x03 → The Badge Racket
Dragnet 1967 — Season Two

This article about an episode needs to be expanded with more information. Please help out by editing it.

The Shooting Board is the second episode of the second season of Dragnet 1967, and the nineteenth episode overall.

Starring: Jack Webb (Sgt. Joe Friday), Harry Morgan (Officer Bill Gannon)

with Art Balinger (Capt. Hugh Brown), Leonard Stone (Lt. Danny Bowser), William Boyett (Lt. Pierce Brooks), Harry Bartell (Dep. Chief Roger Murdock), S. John Launer (Dep. Chief R.A. Houghton), Dennis McCarthy (Insp. John Powers), Anita Eubank (Marianne Smith), Jeff Malloy (Officer Vincent), Gary Brown (Officer Paul)

Plot Overview

After investigating a liquor store robbery for over 18 hours with little success, Friday and Gannon clock out at 2:00 AM and head to their homes to get some much-needed sleep. Upon arriving at his apartment, Friday discovers he is out of cigarettes, so he walks over to an all-night laundromat two blocks from his apartment building to buy a new pack of cigarettes. Upon entering, Friday spots a burglar using a slip wire to try to steal coins from a change machine. When Friday identifies himself as a police officer and orders the burglar to turn around with his hands up, the burglar instead whips out a gun and opens fire at the detective, who fires back twice and hits and wounds the burglar on the second shot. The burglar throws trash cans and sends laundry carts at Friday to impede him while running to the laundromat's back exit where his accomplice, a blonde teenage girl, grabs him and pulls him out to make their getaway in a waiting car, a blue 1964 Dodge convertible. Because he had used his gun during the shootout and had hit the burglar, Friday phones in the incident to the complaint board at Parker Center and requests a radio unit to come to the laundromat, then requests a switchover to the division headquarters office, where Friday asks for a shooting team to be sent over. After the phone call, Friday goes over to the cigarette vending machine, only to discover to his chagrin that the machine is out of order.

After speaking with the radio unit officers and giving them a description of the burglar, his accomplice and their getaway car, Friday speaks with shooting team investigators Danny Bowser and Pierce Brooks when they arrive at the laundromat. Brooks finds a blood trail leading to the back door, but the officers do not find the slip wire the burglar had been using, assuming he had taken it with him when he fled the scene after getting shot. Friday describes what happened leading to and during the shootout and where he was in the laundromat at the time, but when they look for the bullet fired by the burglar, they are unable to locate it in the area where Friday was standing, even though he is positive that he was shot at first and that the bullet should be near where he was. After Friday's earlier explanation of his working a long day plus overtime, Brooks deduces that Friday was tired and that the events he described did not happen exactly as he described them. Brooks and Bowser tell Friday that they will have a Scientific Investigation Division team check out the laundromat in the morning to look for the bullet, then they return to Parker Center to get Friday's statement on the shooting. Friday expresses frustration over the incident as without the evidence they need (the spent bullet and the slip wire), Brooks and Bowser explain that they cannot prove a burglary had taken place or even that Friday had been fired at.

Later that morning, Friday returns to Parker Center and meets Gannon, who reports that the body of the now-deceased burglar who had been shot was found and had been identified as Arthur Ashton, who had a record as a petty criminal, while his female accomplice, who was arrested and brought in shortly after Ashton died, is identified as Marianne Smith. Friday and Gannon's Homicide superior, Captain Brown, asks to talk with Friday about the shooting. Brown explains that pending a board of inquiry, he has to take Friday off of field duty, then tells him that he has vacation time accumulated and asks if he wants to use it, but Friday declines, saying that he wants to see the case solved and his name cleared, adding that prior to the shootout, he had only had to fire his gun at criminal perpetrators on two separate occasions. Brown sympathizes with Friday regarding his concern over the case, then recommends that he take a smoke break at the cafeteria. Gannon soon returns and reports that Bowser and Brooks have brought the girl in for questioning, adding that SID found the slip wire in the getaway car but could not find the gun Ashton used. The moment Smith enters the room with Bowser and a female officer and sees Friday, she starts putting on an act for everyone present, screaming hysterically as she falsely accuses Friday of murder in an attempt to get him deeper in trouble.

Later that day, Friday arrives at the board of inquiry meeting, which is headed by Deputy Chiefs Roger Murdock and R.A. Houghton and Inspector John Powers and at which Gannon is also present as a character witness, to determine if Friday's shooting of Ashton at the laundromat was justified. Brooks and Bowser have already filed their reports on the shooting, with Bowser reporting that they and the SID team had not been able to find any bullet holes in the wall, floor or ceiling near where Friday was standing in the laundromat, nor had they been able to find the spent bullet. Brooks adds that Smith, who had been living with Ashton as his girlfriend, had been living in a foster home until she ran away the previous January (but, oddly, had not been reported as having run away until June) and that at the time Ashton was found, she had been holding him in her arms as he died; she had also been working as a coffee shop waitress until she quit her job two weeks prior to the shootout. Brooks also reports that he and Friday had gone through the Los Angeles Police Academy together and thus knows him well, then the subject of Friday's state of being before and following the shooting is brought up by the board, along with the case of the liquor store robbery (in which the store owner had been shot and killed) and that the only known suspect in that case had been cleared just prior to the laundromat shootout.

It is later revealed that the gun that Ashton used in the shootout was found, but Smith had thrown the gun into a barrel of oil behind a gas station (resulting in any traces of Ashton's fingerprints on the gun, as well as evidence of it being used, being erased by the oil) and then lied about Friday, who counters her false claim by reiterating what happened at the laundromat. The board also speculates that while Ashton did have a gun as reported, that gun may have been loaded with blanks, which Friday counters by pointing out that wadding fragments from a blank would have been left behind on the floor or the wall had one been used, and no wadding had been found at the laundromat, proving that blanks had not been used when Ashton fired his gun. Brooks and Bowser reveal that following their interview with Smith, they are unsure if she, the only other witness to the shooting besides Friday himself, was lying about him, though they do conclude that her story sounded rehearsed; after the board asks to have the interview tapes brought in to listen to the following morning, a coroner's report is brought into the meeting, reporting that an autopsy done on Ashton had removed a bullet - the bullet that had killed him - from his body and that the bullet had been fired from Friday's gun. With Friday's career hanging in the balance, the inquiry adjourns until the following morning.

After leaving the meeting, Gannon tells Friday that although he is not saying that the board does not believe him, he lets Friday know that he does believe him. Appearing in his office doorway, Captain Brown concurs on Gannon's statement, then calls Friday in to talk with him. Brown asks to see Friday's badge and starts talking about the badges issued to LAPD officers, the officers themselves and what the badges stand for, then he talks about the shooting board, who set it up and its purpose, and agrees with Friday that he wants to see officer-involved shooting cases cleared up with facts, not opinions, concluding that he does not want to see the badge turned into a hunting license. After finishing his speech and returning Friday's badge to him, Brown gets a phone call from Bowser at the laundromat, asking Friday to head out there as a discovery had just been made. Friday and Gannon arrive at the laundromat to meet Bowser and Brooks, who reveal that they had finally discovered Ashton's spent bullet under unusual circumstances; the bullet, after being fired, had grazed the bottom of a shelf and lifted it in its trajectory before hitting the wall behind the shelf, with the shelf then dropping back in place and hiding the resulting bullet hole. During the search, Brooks and Bowser had found what they initially had dismissed as a carpenter's pencil mark underneath the shelf, until they realized that the mark had not been made by a pencil, but by the bullet fired from Ashton's gun, which was then hidden by the shelf as described. Gannon remarks to Friday that nothing ever happens the easy way to him. A relieved Friday, glad to know that the discovery has cleared him, thanks Bowser and Brooks, who then hand him a bag containing a carton of cigarettes, with a reminder from Brooks to "stay out of trouble".

Friday is returned to field duty when the shooting board rules that he had shot Ashton in the line of duty, and a coroner's jury rules soon after that the shooting of Ashton had been justified, while due to her age, Smith, Ashton's girlfriend and accomplice, was made a ward of the juvenile court and placed in another foster home.

Trivia

The Show

• This episode was later remade on Quincy, M.E. as the third season episode "A Dead Man's Truth"