A Cops and Robbers Story: Doc Succeeds in Probing Cop Culture, Sags as Character Study

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-

The documentary A Cops and Robbers Story is about Corey Pegues, a high-ranking New York policeman with a secret youthful criminal history. The narrative brings to mind such vintage Sidney Lumet New York undercover cop dramas as Serpico and Prince of the City, with its mirroring codes of organized crime and law enforcement, the threat of exposure and punishment.

Over a career that lasted more than 20 years, Pegues rose through the ranks of the police force to the level of commissioner. Along the way, he battled racial discrimination, with a disproportionate amount of what a colleague calls “garbage duty.” He was also the subject of insinuations that he was too street in his style, too ambitious, and too close to the criminals in the neighbourhood he oversaw. Those suspicions weren’t entirely unwarranted.

As the film reveals early on, a few years before he joined the force in 1992, Pegues ran with an 1980s Queens crack-dealing gang known as the Supreme Team. During his presentations to police recruits, he once found himself using flow charts showing some of the people had been his former friends.

Director Ilinca Calugareanu (Chuck Norris vs. Communism) tells Pegues’ history with archival clips and photos, talking-head interviews with his family, police colleagues and street friends. She also uses extensive use of dramatic re-enactments, with Pegues’ adult son, Corey Jr., playing him as a young man, focusing on a pivotal moment in Pegues’ life in his late teens, attempted to shoot a man who had driven him off his corner. Pegues decided that to save face he must publicly confront and kill the man, expecting to spend no more than five years in jail for the crime.

When it came time to pull the trigger, the gun misfired twice. Pegues fled his neighbourhood and hid out. Without telling his family, he subsequently joined the army, and a few years later, now married with young children, became a police recruit. For years he kept his criminal past a secret from his colleagues, though occasionally, in talks to schools and church groups, he would drop hints about his past.

At times, one can only guess at the amount of inner turmoil this involved. Pegues is a charismatic figure, plain-spoken with a touch of swagger but not introspective. As a character study, the film doesn’t dig much more deeply than a news magazine episode.

As a study in some aspects of police culture, though, the film has a sobering message. The second turning point came when Pegues retired in his mid-forties on a disability pension because of a disc injury sustained on the job.

In 2013, shortly after retiring, he went on a podcast and talked publicly about his criminal past. He didn’t sound remorseful as he later acknowledged, and it rankled people. A New York Post reporter picked up the story which ran under the racially charged headline “Thug Cop” creating a media scandal and blowback from the police union.

In 2014, Pegues, now a media figure, publicly denounced the NYPD for the killing of Eric Garner. Shortly after, Nassau County police raided his Long Island home, at the request of the NYPD, taking away his weapons for violating “good conduct” rules. A clip from a newscaster at the time snidely observes that Pegues still got to keep his pension.

Pegues wrote a book about his experiences, Once A Cop, and there’s a fine scene when friends from the neighbourhood, now grizzled men in their fifties, came to the book signing along with some of the cops that were his friends for years. His daughter’s also a police officer. As he says, “I love police, but just hate bad police.”

You can’t help but think the NYPD, instead of closing ranks and retaliating, missed a public relations opportunity here to put forward one of their own as spokesman who could talk about reform, race in law enforcement, and career opportunities on the right side of the law.

A Cops and Robbers Story. Directed by Ilinca Calugareanu. With Corey Pegues. Available on VOD/Digital platforms beginning February 8.