Victor Mackey of The Shield

Victor Mackey, the main character of FX's The Shield, is the sort of rogue cop that makes other rogue cops nervous. Other rogue cops content themselves with the occasion roughing up of suspects and other violations of procedure which makes Police Captains have heart burn. Victory Mackey, played with a combination of moral desperation and at times barely restrained (and not so restrained) fury by Michael Chiklis, has committed murder, robbery, and a host of lesser crimes. Mackey is also one of the most effective cops ever to grace the television screen. If you're being held hostage by some drug crazed serial killer, you could do far worse than to have Victor Mackey come crashing through the door with a joyful snarl on his face and a big automatic in his fist.

Victor Mackey, leader of an anti gang Strike Team in the fictional Farmington District of Los Angeles, sets the tone of corruption and mayhem from the very beginning of the series. Victor Mackey and his Strike Team are tamping down on gang violence in the same way that medieval barons kept the peace, through fear, intimidation, and the occasional shakedown of drug dealers. Victor Mackey doesn't seem to care if drugs get sold in his little domain so long as the dealers don't shoot each other too often. It's a curious kind of law enforcement, but it tends to work after a fashion.

Victor Mackey will brook no interference in his way of doing things. When his first Captain, the politically ambitious David Aceveda, a man with corruption issues of his own, infiltrates a spy into the Strike Team, Victor Mackey summarily executes him during a drug bust, making it look like one of the drug gangsters had done it. This is a crime, no matter what one thinks of Victor Mackey's effectiveness as a cop, that should buy him the needle. It is a crime, however, that continues to haunt Mackey and his Strike Team members throughout the series. So far Victor Mackey has been slippery enough to evade responsibility, but one always gets the sense that retribution, in some form, is just one slip up away.

The same powers that be that are repulsed by Victor Mackey's philosophy of law enforcement are sometimes willing to take advantage of it. In one early episode, the Farmington police have in their custody a vicious child rapist who has hidden away his latest victim but refuses to say where. With time being critical, Aceveda sends in Victor Mackey into the interrogation room. "What's this?" sneers the child rapist. "Good cop, bad cop?"

"No, good cop, bad cop went home for the day," Victor Mackey replies tonelessly. "I'm a different kind of cop." And then he proceeds to give the child rapist a savage phone book beating that quickly extracts the location of the child victim.

Most modern cops catch crooks through forensic evidence or good shoe leather police work. Victor Mackey does it the old fashion way, but beating the evidence out of suspects.

One of the themes of The Shield is that everything has consequences. No matter how clever or how ruthless one is, everything must be answered for. The case in point is the story arc when Victor Mackey and the Strike Team plot to rob a money laundering operation run by the Armenian Mob. The robbery succeeds, though in a horrific fashion. The money, meant to be a retirement fund for the Strike Team, turns out to be ashes in the mouths of Victor Mackey and his fellow rogue cops.

Victor Mackey tends to have a corrupting influence on those around him. Forrest Whitaker plays an Internal Affairs officer named Jon Kavenaugh who is out to take down Victor Mackey and his Strike Team at all costs. Kavenaugh begins a straight arrow, unwilling to bend the rules even to help his slightly lunatic wife. But Victor Mackey so frustrates his efforts to gather enough evidence that even he begins to cut corners, falsifying evidence, and eventually winding up in jail himself with Mackey on the other side jeering at him.

The Kavenaugh investigation has one horrific consequence. Kavenaugh has the goods on one of Victor Mackey's strike team, Detective Curtis "Lemonhead" Lemansky a big, lovable lunk of a man who would have been a good man had he not fallen under the malignent influence of Victor Mackey. Fearful that Lemansky might talk, another strike team member, Shane Vendrell, a man of low intelligence and hot temper, drops a grenade in Lemansky's lap, silencing him forever. The consequences of this act are still reverberating.

Victor Mackey has his other good points besides being an effective cop. He loves his children, including two with autism. Indeed much of what he does is to get the money necessary for their special needs. He even loves his ex wife after a fashion, though he also has had a string of mistresses and casual lovers, including a uniformed officer named Danielle Sofer, with whom he has fathered a child. His Lothario habits seem to be a way to not only relieve tension, but to chase some sort of human intimacy that forever seems to elude him.

Victor Mackey is a hunted man and a haunted man. He must know, in the back of his mind, that everything he has done has to be answered for, one way or the other. Various enemies are closing in, even as he tries to keep one step ahead of the fate that surely awaits him by the end of the series. It will be fun to watch him try, while at the same time taking down evil doers who do not happen to carry a badge.