The New York police department has come under scrutiny after a report that it has been using the film Road House to train its police officers.
The New York Post reported on Tuesday that officers were shown a scene from the 1989 cult classic as part of a three-day “retraining course”.
Road House stars Patrick Swayze as James Dalton, a tough, no-nonsense nightclub bouncer with a mysterious past who rides in to clean up a dirty, no-good Missouri nightclub/bar.
In the clip reportedly played to New York police officers Dalton gives an informal seminar to security staff at the nightclub, called the Double Deuce.
“If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice,” Dalton advises in the film, set in the west Missouri town of Jasper.
“Ask him to walk. Be nice. If he won’t walk, walk him. But be nice. If you can’t walk him, one of the others will help you, and you’ll both be nice.
“I want you to remember that it’s a job. It’s nothing personal.”
When one of his charges asks whether being called a “cocksucker isn’t personal”, Dalton says it is not.
“It’s two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.”
Road House was released in 1989 to mixed reviews and disappointing box office returns.
In the film a man named Brad Wesley makes his money extorting Jasper businesses for cash, and is determined to continue doing so. There is only one thing in his way: Dalton.
Swayze demonstrates hitherto unseen fighting ability in the film – his breakthrough with Dirty Dancing had come just two years earlier – as he fights a succession of Wesley’s goons, even ripping out the throat of one with his bare hands.
The NYPD is unlikely to want officers to follow Dalton to such extremes, but did not respond to questions about whether it would continue to use Road House footage in training sessions.
The police department also did not comment on whether it would expand the sessions to include footage from the rest of Swayze’s repertoire, which includes the Oscar-winning Ghost, in which Swayze plays a ghost, or Point Break, in which he plays the charismatic leader of a gang of bank-robbing surfers.
The NYPD is the largest police department in the US. The LAPD, the third-largest force in the nation, told the Guardian it did not use Road House in its officer training, and had “no plans to do so”.
