Borderline

By J. D. Reed

LINES AND SHADOWS by Joseph Wambaugh Morrow, 383 pages; $15.95

His policemen walk on fault lines In six novels and one nonfiction work, Joseph Wambaugh has followed their uncertain footsteps, recording the gallows humor and suicidal despair of California's blue knights. But readers have generally been able to take comfort in the notion that the men were, after all, fictive; surely real life was less melodramatic. In this tragic documentary, no such consolations are possible.

As Wambaugh recalls, the San Diego police department formed what came to be known as the Border Alien Robbery Force in 1976 to aid the thousands of illegal Mexican aliens who came north from Tijuana. The original ten officers, eight of them Mexican Americans, did not arrest the aliens: the "wetbacks" were useful as cheap labor. Instead, they cracked down on the knife-wielding thieves and rapists who preyed on the meek pollos in the barren DMZ between countries.

In the black shadows, the Barfers, as they inescapably called themselves, struck with force. "We'll take them down hard. Fists, saps, gun butts," one said. "Until such time as the guy's dead or pretends he's dead." Public approval was swift and loud, and when the bandits abandoned the turf, the Barfers ignored sense, morality and orders, crossing the border after them.

The quick-draw justice played well on the 11 o'clock news. For off-duty Barfers, machismo was the drug of choice. One officer ignored his wife's plea to wear a bulletproof vest because his buddies might laugh. Another pasted a coroner's snapshot of a riddled body in his scrapbook. "Think of it," muses the author, "ten little hardball lawmen, shooting down Mexican bandits where they stand, out there in the cactus and rocks and tarantulas and scorpions ... If that wasn't a John Ford scenario, what the hell was it?"

The "experiment" ended in 1978, and the aftershocks were predictable: divorce, alcoholism, psychoses and stalled careers. Wambaugh ticks off a litany of blame: capricious immigration laws, social hypocrisy, improperly trained lawmen. But his greatest enmity is reserved for the television correspondents who overpublicized and melodramatized ten young men and their "monstrous international dilemma."

In a curmudgeonly voice that could be coming from the next after-hours bar stool, Wambaugh makes his message clear. Lines and Shadows shows a bittersweet concern for illegal aliens, but the author's most passionate prose concerns the troops at the front. When the shooting stops, he says, policemen are still the most alien--and alienated--of all. --By LD. Reed