Four Cops Shot (Season 20, Episode 17)
Premise: Four police officers are gunned down in a pizzeria, and the shooter’s motive, along with a federal push for the death penalty, puts the dead officers’ own conduct under scrutiny.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 17
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson), Lt. Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Julito McCullum as Calvin Stokes, Adriane Lenox as Dolores Martin, Margaret Colin as Mary Markson, Glenn Morshower as the precinct captain, Michael Potts as defense attorney Malcolm Young
- Ripped from the headlines
- The episode is reportedly based on the November 2009 killing of four Lakewood, Washington, police officers who were ambushed in a coffee shop before their shift.
- Director
- Jim McKay
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman & Luke Schelhaas & Matthew McGough
Summary
The Investigation
“Four Cops Shot” opens as Van Buren learns she has finished radiation, with her tumor to be measured again in three months. Then a gunman walks into a pizzeria and kills four officers from one precinct: partners Rebecca Ramos and Fred Colson and colleagues Chris Owen (called Oren in the episode) and Dwayne Garber. Ramos wounds the shooter before she falls.
Ramos’s husband, who suspected an affair, had trailed her and Colson to a Queens bar the night before, and his photos show them with a man in a puffy jacket and knit cap. A bartender says the officers once stepped in when he caught the man using cocaine. Suspecting an unregistered informant, the detectives trace the officers’ drug arrests to Charles Bell, known as High-top, who had sheltered the wounded shooter, Calvin Stokes. Pills prescribed by Dr. Nancy Kooter lead to her office manager, Dolores Martin, Stokes’s mother, and Stokes is found at her house; Bernard saves his life with CPR.
Stokes’s attempted-murder sentence had been commuted on the recommendation of Mary Markson, then attorney general and now a Senate candidate. The precinct captain wants Stokes handed to federal prosecutors, who can seek death; McCoy refuses, and when Van Buren asks about motive, the captain suggests her illness is affecting her judgment. Detectives arrest Dolores Martin after prescription pads from her office turn up at Bell’s apartment. Questioned alone, she says Ramos and Colson threatened to jail her unless her son informed on more dangerous targets.
The Trial
Backed by a brief from Markson, U.S. Attorney Horvath tries to take over the case, calling the murders part of a criminal enterprise, but the judge keeps it in state court because New York arrested Stokes first. The defense seeks manslaughter on grounds of extreme emotional disturbance. Bernard, who wants Stokes executed, is evasive about the officers’ conduct on cross, and Cutter warns the detectives not to sabotage the trial to help federal prosecutors.
Stokes testifies that the officers paid him as an informant, then threatened to imprison him and his mother unless he informed on a dealer known for killing people; when they smiled at him the next day, he opened fire. Ramos’s husband brings in her informant log, and Van Buren insists it go to the prosecutors despite what it shows about the officers. On cross, Cutter reads the entry on the last meeting, in which Stokes demanded a $1,000 bonus and vowed to show them, and argues the shooting was about money.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Stokes of four counts of first-degree murder; he faces four life terms or four consecutive 25-year terms. Van Buren then sends Lupo and Bernard to a new case and tells them to be safe.
Why it stands out
- “Four Cops Shot” was originally intended as the season, or series, finale; NBC then ordered six more episodes after the 2010 Tonight Show conflict.
- Van Buren finishes radiation in the opening scene, and the precinct captain later suggests her cancer is clouding her judgment.
- The federal death-penalty bid fails under Ponzi v. Fessenden, a 1922 Supreme Court decision giving the first arresting sovereign priority.