Title: The Harris Incident
Directed by: Noam Pitlik
Written by: Wally Dalton, Shelley Zellman, and Reinhold Weege
Air Date: November 30, 1978
Previous: The Vandal
Next: The Radical
Guest Starring: Michael Lombard, Ed Peck, Rick Wain, Marilyn Chris
"The Harris Incident" is the ninth episode of the fifth season of Barney Miller.
Barney receives a startling phone call in the office: someone took a shot at Harris! And it was another cop! It seems that Harris was at the scene of an armed robbery, and was in the process of making an arrest, when two beat cops showed up. Officers Slater and Darvec took one look at Harris, a black man with a gun, and assumed he was the armed robber. They shot at him, and the real bandit got away.
Harris is left seething with rage, which is made worse when Slater and Darvec report to the squad room and write the whole thing off as a misunderstanding, and worse still when Barney tells Harris that nothing will happen until the NYPD with its laborious bureaucracy can weigh in. A nasty argument ensues, which leads to a discussion of structural racism in the police department (in 1978!).
Meanwhile there's just one wacky case. Wojo arrests one Stanford Whittney for panhandling, basically because Wojo was offended that a perfectly able-bodied man is begging on the street. It turns out that Mr. Whittney regards begging as a career and is successful enough with it to support a family and keep a maid.
Tropes:
- Bad to the Last Drop: With Yemana away in court (in fact he would never return as Jack Soo was dying of cancer), Dietrich is left to make the coffee. Being Dietrich, instead of making regular coffee he makes some kind of supposedly healthy coffee substitute out of barley. Barney sips, grimaces, and says it tastes like "wood".
- Brick Joke: Earlier on in the episode, to try to explain Harris' feelings (that being the only Black detective in the precinct means that none of them can truly understand on an internal level what he's going through, but can sympathize and give support) to Wojo, he tells the first part of an old "dimwitted Polish" stereotype joke to Wojo. This is meant to demonstrate to Wojo (who is of Polish descent) that everyone has buttons that can be insensitively pressed by others who may not truly understand what they're saying. He tries not to give the punchline, though Wojo wheedles it out of him. At the end of the episode, Dietrich innocently (or possibly not) repeats the punchline, at which Wojo gives him a Death Glare.
- By "No", I Mean "Yes": Barney tries to explain to Wojo that Harris' race gives him a particular set of problems to deal with, after being shot at by fellow cops has (understandably) made Harris angry at the world in general—although here it's not a matter of Insistent Terminology, but Barney grappling with words.note Wojo: I thought those differences weren't important anymore!
Barney: They're not! [Beat] But they are.
Wojo: Thanks for clearing that up. - Continuity Nod: Officer Slater makes his return two years after he was seen in "Hash". He's still a Jerkass, in this episode dismissing shooting at Harris as no big deal.
- Curse Cut Short: When questioned by Barney on what happened to Harris, Slater says that he and his partner thought it was "just another —", with Barney sharply cutting Slater off before he can employ a racial slur.
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: How Mr. Whittney became a beggar. He was fired from his job as a stockbroker, so he was left tramping around trying to find work, until one day he had to ask someone to give him train fare home, and he realized it was easy.
- Height Angst: Levitt makes an unsuccessful effort to express solidarity with Harris by saying that he, Levitt, is a member of another minority group: short people. Harris is decidedly not impressed with the comparison.
- Hot-Blooded: One of many instances of Wojo letting his moral outrage direct his policing. When Barney takes him aside and asks why he arrested a panhandler, Wojo says that he arrested the guy for being an able-bodied panhandler, which Wojo found offensive. Also, one of the few times we see Harris really angry, and with good reason: it's implied that a racist cop and a trainee he's mentoring shot at Harris on the excuse that they believed he was a burglar.
- Profiling: What happened when the two white cops shot at the black man with the gun. Darvec gives this away when he says "We thought he was just another—". The episode ends with Harris talking about institutional racism, saying "It will happen again," only for Barney to offer his support by saying "And we'll handle it."
