![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/steve-and-wife-087748-zlcgkmlx-744566-uSbWsAWC-1024x972.jpg\")
Stephen Downing and Adrienne Downing. Courtesy photo.<\/p>\nStephen Downing, who redefined when Los Angeles police officers can use deadly force, transformed public perception of law enforcement through shows like \u201cMacGyver,\u201d and whose reporting inspired reforms in Long Beach, died on Nov. 20 at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. He was 87.<\/p>\n
The cause was sepsis, according to his family.<\/p>\n
For more than 30 years, beginning in the mid-1960s and extending through the 1990s, television viewers with a penchant for cop drama could hardly go a week without running into a show touched by Stephen Downing.<\/p>\n
His writing credits span more than 500 hours of television, primarily crime dramas, starting as technical advisor on \u201cAdam-12\u201d before writing scripts for Hollywood producer Jack Webb\u2019s \u201cDragnet\u201d and \u201cWalking Tall,\u201d and he is listed as producer and showrunner for nearly a dozen series, some long-running hits like \u201cKnight Rider,\u201d \u201cF\/X the Series,\u201d and the \u201cRoboCop\u201d TV show.<\/p>\n
Downing\u2019s crowning television achievement was as showrunner for \u201cMacGyver,\u201d which debuted in 1985.<\/p>\n
Those familiar with its origin story are quick to tell it: Downing is the one who made the call that Angus \u201cMac\u201d MacGyver, the show\u2019s namesake protagonist in a leather jacket, wouldn\u2019t carry a firearm, instead arming him with a dual college degree, creativity and a Swiss Army Knife.<\/p>\n
It was an \u201catypical\u201d action-adventure show with \u201ctwo regular characters\u201d and one that \u201cdidn\u2019t rely on violence,\u201d said Rick Drew, a Canadian television writer who joined the series in season three. \u201cAs a result, it pushed us more towards character-driven stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under Downing\u2019s guidance, storylines had MacGyver protesting alongside Latino farmhands against greedy vineyard owners, conducting research at a school for deaf children and protecting the endangered Black Rhino. At one point, MacGyver even becomes vegetarian.<\/p>\n
The show was a family operation for Downing, with wife, Adrienne, as the show\u2019s publicist, and his daughter, Julie, acting in several of the episodes, most of which were shot in Vancouver.<\/p>\n
In many ways, Downing\u2019s own success mirrored some of the formula he repeated in so many of those episodes. It was a three-act, feel-good story of humble beginnings, a daunting problem and a creative, non-violent approach using wit and virtue to solve society\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n
Born in 1938 in Hanford, Calif., Downing was the son of a farmer and a homemaker. Along with his brother, Roderick, he helped his father pick cotton and citrus near their ranch house.<\/p>\n
As a young man, he became a forest ranger, building trails in the Sierra Mountains. He later became a surveyor, laying out the runways his grandson, an F-18 fighter pilot, would eventually land on and exit from Naval Air Station Lemoore.<\/p>\n
At age 18, he met his wife, Adrienne, at Mearle\u2019s Drive Inn in her hometown of Visalia, about 20 minutes east. The two wed a year later and had their first child a year after that.<\/p>\n
Stephen Downing and Adrienne Downing. Courtesy photo.<\/p>\n
At 21, Downing joined the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1960, starting as a patrolman for its 77th station, the precinct for South Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Almost immediately, Downing would later say, he was met with dishonest supervisors and an overarching air of corruption that loomed over the department.<\/p>\n
As his son Michael Downing \u2014 a former LAPD deputy chief \u2014 tells it, his father vowed early on to outrank those \u201cbad apples\u201d and to fix the problem from the top down.<\/p>\n
In 1965, during the Watts riots, Downing was a sergeant. He was on the street as Black Americans, sick of years of abusive treatment by the police, kicked off an uprising that lasted for six days, leaving 34 dead, 1,000 injured and nearly 4,000 arrested.<\/p>\n
It was also the year he began writing for television, under the first of three aliases he would use for the next 15 years: Michael Donovan, Sean Baine and Adrian Leeds.<\/p>\n
In the LAPD, He advanced quickly, from sergeant to lieutenant, then to captain, commander and finally, after 18 years on the force, became Deputy Chief of Personnel and Training at age 39.<\/p>\n
As a member of the department\u2019s review board in the late 1970s, he helped enshrine rules and disciplines for officers using deadly force \u2014 rules that, despite his high rank, he insisted on personally teaching to recruits in training academies.<\/p>\n
Downing\u2019s opinions of the department remained mixed between a love for his fellow officers and their mission, and what he saw as corruptible leadership and wasted efforts on the War on Drugs.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had an abiding sense of justice,\u201d said Diane Goldstein, a friend and former officer. \u201cHe was fiercely loyal to the policing profession. He recognised the faults of policing but believed in that inspirational goal that we can always do better.\u201d<\/p>\n
His convictions further deepened following the death of a fellow officer in an undercover drug sting in 1973. Decades after he retired from the LAPD in 1980, and nearing the sunset of his television career, Downing joined the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, formerly known as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, in 2011.<\/p>\n
From this platform, Downing became a staunch critic of drug enforcement, sharing his belief in newspapers and magazines that the policy of prohibition ought to be abandoned as a failure, that drug abuse be treated as a medical problem like alcoholism and that bringing results must not simply serve someone\u2019s campaign cycle.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe earlier experiment lasted less than 14 years, but today\u2019s failed prohibition was declared by President Nixon 40 years ago and has cost our country more than $1 trillion in cash and much more in immeasurable social harm,\u201d Downing wrote in a 2011 Op-ed<\/a> for the L.A. Times.<\/p>\n A year later, Stephen Downing helped drive the \u201cCaravan of Peace\u201d from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in protest of the drug war in Mexico.<\/p>\n Those with the organization said they helped take law enforcement\u2019s drug policies \u201ckicking and screaming into the 21st Century.\u201d These views weren\u2019t always popular among Downing\u2019s fellow officers.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth Steve and I have probably lost a tremendous amount of friends from law enforcement, in some ways,\u201d Goldstein said. \u201cBecause we stuck to our principles and our values that the role of someone within policing should also be to dissent and to hold our own organizations accountable to the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n More recently, Downing criticized the use of masks and unmarked vehicles<\/a> by federal immigration authorities, saying it \u201cerodes public trust\u201d and creates \u201cthe very conditions in which abuse thrives.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have to treat our citizens as enemies, but because he wasn\u2019t afraid to call people out, it angered people,\u201d Goldstein said.<\/p>\n Downing\u2019s crusade eventually took the form of news stories in a recurring column for the Beachcomber, a local biweekly newspaper in Long Beach with about 33,000 subscribers.<\/p>\n He was referred to the paper\u2019s longtime editor, Jay Beeler, who watched Downing\u2019s writing develop over the years into a thoughtful column on the goings-on of the Long Beach Police Department and local government.<\/p>\n According to Beeler, Downing\u2019s copy was a refreshing break from the typical egoism and tardiness of many writers. Stories were clean \u2014 sometimes a little long \u2014 but timely and rarely needed a correction.<\/p>\n Using what many believed was an expansive network of sources inside the Long Beach Police Department, Downing\u2019s reporting, at its height, brought international attention.<\/p>\n In 2018, he worked alongside the ACLU and Al Jazeera to uncover the LBPD\u2019s secret use of the disappearing messaging app TigerText. <\/a>The story drew protest and reprisal from defense attorneys and civil rights activists despite the city\u2019s conclusion<\/a> that TigerText didn\u2019t run afoul of any laws or local policies.<\/p>\n His reporting inspired the work of local advocacy groups, including after his 2017 story<\/a> on a roadside altercation between then-Councilmember Jeannine Pearce and her former chief of staff, Devin Cotter, which led to accusations of domestic violence, preferential treatment by the police, and several ethical violations.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody would have known about this\u201d but for Downing, said local political consultant Ian Patton, who credits his reporting for inspiring Patton to launch a recall campaign against Pearce and later form the Long Beach Reform Coalition that still frequently spars with city government.<\/p>\n In his final years, Downing continued writing about Long Beach.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/steve-downing-home-long-beach-739928-iyekmkjt-504011-F6TkD1FN-1024x753.jpg\")
Stephen Downing at his home in Long Beach. Courtesy photo.<\/p>\n