After Axel was thrown through a window by Maitland's thugs, and was arrested by the 2 cops and put in the back of the police, I noticed the cop car didn't have a plastic/metal screen between the front seat and back seat. I thought "what if the perp was violent", the perp could easily bite, head butt or kick the officers.
I guess it's Beverly Hills and violent thugs like that don't exist there.
If you ever been to Beverly Hills, the cops harass anyone they think don't belong there. They don't get to much trouble out there.
”Deh Deh Deh, DA Dabacco”-Puert Rican dude from the ”I aint your Papi” episode of COPS.
That doesn't answer the question posed by the OP at all.
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Y'know I've seen this film so many times (one of my all-time favourite comedies) and this has NEVER occurred to me!
Maybe back in the 80's when this film was produced crime wasn't as rampant in Beverly Hills as it is today?
I get the same impression when I watch old re-runs of The Dukes of Hazzard.
Roscoe's car (or Enos' car) never had any partitions. In retrospect, I think: rural Georgia + the early 80s = low crime rate.
Anyways, The Duke boys were always being framed and were not really criminals. Any dangerous criminals on that show were from out-of-town and we presume eventually transferred to a State Penitentiary.
As far as I know, the "screen" that separates the rear from the front wasn't as common back then. I remember seeing older police cars even in the 90s that didn't have the plexiglass or chain link dividers.
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It was probably put there (or NOT put there) to show the difference between the mean streets of Detroit and the poshness, limited crime of Beverly hills.
There was a movie called Downtown with Anthony Edwards and Foret Whittaket which used this suburban-inner-city gap in police procedures.
'downtown'! yeah. i liked that.
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I actually loved the line he used in the backseat of the car.This car is nicer than my apartment.
shareIt may have been left out for cinematic reasons, just as the rearview mirror is frequently removed to prevent camera obstruction.
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"It may have been left out for cinematic reasons, just as the rearview mirror is frequently removed to prevent camera obstruction. "
If you look at the scenes with Eilbacher and Murphy in her red Mercedes SL, you'll notice the rearview mirror is removed, probably for that very same reason.
So, I'll bet the cage was removed, or rather, not even present from the beginning because of that. How the hell would the audience see Eddie Murphy throw his oneliners otherwise?
Another reason is because none of the police cars seen are real policecars, they are prop cars made to look like police cars. You'll notice all the police insignia on the cars are large stickers, they probably change the stickers to make the cars look like they come from different districts for every movie they appear in. This is most notably notices in the Detroit scenes, were all the police cars look like badly disguised civilian cars.
It doesnt matter as he's disarmed and cuffed and it's not a real police vehicle. I'm not sure if the 80's police vehicles had that cage like thing to separate the rear part. But now i see them everywhere.
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In general, what they do or don't do procedure or equipment-wise in Hollywood movies is not a good indication of real life, and certainly staging and framing of the scene in the police car would have taken precedence over realism in the choices that were made (you wouldn't have been able to see the star's face if the car had a cage).
However, in reality police cars did not begin to have cages (screens) until gradually starting in the '70s, and it was still by no means universal in the early '80s when BHC was made. For example, if you watch '70s police shows such as "Adam 12" in which real (or realistic) police cars were shown, none of them had cages or screens even in big city agencies such as the LAPD.
Before screens, it was standard procedure in some agencies to handcuff the arrestee (sometimes with their hands in front of them) and put them into the front passenger seat next to the officer so he could keep an eye on them on the way to jail. If it was a two officer unit, in some agencies the procedure was for the second officer to sit in the back seat with the arrestee on the way to jail and watch the arrestee, and to restrain him if he became combative or tried to get loose. As dangerous as those things sound, before cages became commonplace, there weren't many better options.
It's just one of many aspects of law enforcement equipment and procedural evolutions since BHC was made 30+ years ago.