Shots Fired recap: 'Truth'
We pick up right where we left off last week, with Ashe discovering Cory hiding out in his dad’s apartment. She calls Preston and gets him to come over so he can hear Cory’s story of Joey’s death. According to Cory, he was riding his bike home late at night when he saw a police sedan chasing down Joey. He watched the car corner him, then two cops emerge to throw him to the ground. The whole time, Joey was screaming for his mom, slowly progressing from anger to desperation. Cory says he saw an old man at the scene shoot Joey after he refused to let the cops handcuff him.
This horrible revelation switches up the dynamic between Preston and Ashe. Where Preston is usually urging caution to Ashe’s passionate pursuit of justice, this time he’s the one incensed, and she’s telling him to take things slow. Her warnings fall on deaf ears, and Preston calls their Department of Justice superior to tell him what they’ve found. Unfortunately, their boss being an old white guy and all, he doesn’t think an African-American high school dropout’s claim will stand up against the word of the cops in a city with such high racial tensions already. He agrees to keep the case on his radar, which is not nearly as much as they wanted from him.
The Beck family gets a scare that night when one of the boys hears something moving outside. When Joshua Beck goes out to investigate, he finds the words “Killer Cop” spray painted on their house in bright red. The next day, Sheriff Platt promises to station a squad car outside the house since “we take care of our own,” but it rings false to Beck. He’s stuck on desk duty, the union dropped him, and if he had caught this vandal in the act and shot them, what would have happened? Would the department have stood up for him the way they presumably would have one of the white deputies? Platt doesn’t seem to have an answer.
After chewing out Preston at breakfast, Ashe goes to investigate Jesse Carr’s weed connection. In a pretty hilarious moment, she catches the frat’s dealer in a college library. He tells her that Jesse wasn’t a fan of weed, as far as he knew, and he makes it his business to know these things. He also brushed off Ashe’s idea that they would’ve used a dealer out by the houses when he was right here, but then he lets her take a sample of his weed.
Still fuming over Cory’s revelation, Preston demands recent arrest records from Platt, to be delivered in the hour. When Platt says, “You need to learn how to talk to people,” Preston thinks he’s telling him to know his place. In a great defiant moment, he tells Platt, “You may not respect citizens of this community, but you will respect me.” He’s using his federal authority to stick up for himself in a way that other Gates Station residents can’t.
Platt’s response is to take Preston on a ride-along. He pulls over a van full of white guys, bearing a Confederate flag bumper sticker. After getting them out of the car with their hands behind their heads, Platt tells Preston to pat them down. The situation is resolved without incident, but the tension is palpable. Platt tells Preston that same tension is what his deputies feel when they’re patrolling the houses. Things get testy after Preston responds that maybe there wouldn’t be tension if Platt’s deputies didn’t kill innocent people, and Platt (not the first person in the episode) tells Preston to be careful making statements he doesn’t have convincing evidence for. However this growing tension between DOJ investigators and the Gates Station cops is resolved, it definitely won’t be pretty.
On Pastor Janae’s advice, Gov. Eamons has decided to do something about the inequality of education for black and white residents of their state. Since the best school near the houses is getting shuttered, she’s offering to bus residents to a good school farther away… in a mostly-white neighborhood. White parents are outraged about this, but thankfully Eamons sticks by her proposal — even after most people in attendance demand that she send her daughter to a school by the houses to prove how “open-minded” she is. As it turns out later, her daughter agrees with this and challenges her mom to live her values. We’ll see where that goes.
If there’s rot in the Gates Station police department, then Lieutenant Breeland is probably involved. Preston and Ashe start following up with people who have filed complaints against him. One older woman tells them he used to regularly harass her and her husband, and when her husband finally protested, Breeland arrested him. Though her husband was released soon, the damage had been done, and he died shortly after the incident. Needless to say, nothing was done about her complaint. Deputy Brooks is somewhat less forthcoming — although he’s helped the investigation in the past, when they ask him about Breeland, he defers to his union rep.
One of the things Preston and Ashe had demanded from their superior was protection for Cory and his family. He seemed ambivalent on the prospect, which makes it scary when that mysterious man in the black car pulls up outside Cory’s dad’s apartment. He fixes a silencer to his gun and breaks in like an assassin, making several precision shots — but there’s no one to shoot. Cory and his family did get protection after all. Nevertheless, I’m thinking we haven’t seen the last of this guy.
Eamons’ town hall may have been messy, but she’s convinced she’s on the right path with this — so convinced, in fact, that she’s starting to reconsider approving Arlen Cox’s proposed prison. Cox promises his prison will create tons of new North Carolina jobs, but he wants to up the occupancy rate to 88 percent – which, as Eamons realizes, will lead to more arrests, longer sentences, and all kinds of other things that will only make the problems in the community worse. She storms off, and it’s starting to look like Cox might throw his support and his big money over to Penn Moder.
Preston and Ashe finally confront Breeland himself. He offers his defense, saying that profiling works (on white people and black people) and that he doesn’t believe in “good guys” and “bad guys” since he learned his abusive father helped a lot of other people in his life. Preston and Ashe say they’re trying to keep the police accountable, but Breeland sees them as a young guy making a name for himself and a woman trying to fight her own demons. He isn’t scared of them, and he tells them to leave town.
After the town hall, Sean Campbell doesn’t want to take the bus to school. He’s convinced, though, after his mom breaks down in tears at the thought of losing him like they lost Joey. He reluctantly agrees, and though he’s initially intimidated by the look of his new school, a friendly white kid asks him to help pass out T-shirts. It’ll be interesting to check back in on this story line, as we watch the fight against racism echo across every strata of society, from police departments to the governor’s mansion to schools.
Preston and Ashe, meanwhile, make a big breakthrough thanks to some helpful weed. Toxicology reports show that the weed found in Jesse’s car doesn’t match the college dealer’s strain, but it DOES match the weed found on Joey’s body. So either they knew each other, had the same dealer, or someone planted Joey’s weed in Jesse’s car. Here it is: the first major connection between the two cases. It’s strong enough that even their DOJ boss is impressed, telling them to open an official investigation into Joey Campbell’s death as well. It’s reminiscent of the real-life DOJ’s investigation of Ferguson, which started as an inquiry into the Michael Brown case and eventually grew into a critique of the entire police department.
Preston and Ashe are so happy by this breakthrough that they go out dancing, although they ultimately stop short of sleeping together. But the tension is felt, and their relationship has leveled up a notch. They’ll need each other watching their backs, especially now that Breeland is looking into Ashe’s file.
