Internal Affairs

Internal Affairs is the LAPD office that locks away a homicide file and, in Bigfoot’s account, becomes the custodian of a silence surrounding a detective’s death. Its role is more than procedural: by withholding the record for decades while a suspected killer continues to walk, the unit makes secrecy part of the machinery that protects institutional power.

Authority Over the Record

The clearest fact about Internal Affairs is its control over the file on a detective Bigfoot and Doc discuss as Detective X. When Doc asks whether the man is still on the job, Bigfoot says his status is inactive; Doc then guesses that the file is unavailable too. Bigfoot confirms that Internal Affairs has locked it down until the year 2000. The unusually long closure turns access to evidence into a question of institutional authority: the department can preserve the appearance of an official account while preventing outsiders from examining the record.

The Detective X Case

Doc suspects the detective did not die of natural causes. Bigfoot does not give him a formal case file, but confirms the darker possibility: Adrian Prussia killed Detective X, or arranged the killing. In Doc’s view, if the department knows this, it has neither exposed the crime publicly nor allowed fellow officers to avenge it. Instead, the detective is treated as another police hero fallen in the line of duty, while the file remains sealed. That account presents concealment not as a failure to discover the truth but as a choice about what may be said and preserved.

Prussia and Institutional Protection

Bigfoot adds that Prussia has been the prime suspect in a number of homicides and has walked each time after intervention from the highest levels. The pattern makes the locked file look less like an isolated safeguard than one episode in a system of protection. Doc reacts with anger at what he sees as the unprofessional betrayal of the dead; Bigfoot, however, urges him to ask why Internal Affairs should be drawn into the matter at all, and why it is the office sitting on the story. His implication is that the unit’s involvement may serve a purpose that cannot be understood simply as routine internal investigation.

Secrecy as a Departmental Practice

The exchange is framed by the police rule Doc calls the Eleventh Commandment: officers do not criticize fellow officers. Bigfoot acknowledges that the rule limits what he can say, then falls silent before naming Detective X’s status. Internal Affairs’ closure of the file gives that professional reticence an administrative counterpart. Together, silence among officers and restricted access to records make it difficult to distinguish legitimate confidentiality from a cover-up. The narrative does not resolve what explanation the department would offer; instead, it shows how the absence of an available file leaves suspicion to circulate while accountability remains out of reach.