As The Glass Shield begins, J. J. Johnson (Michael Boatman) has just been appointed the first black officer at L.A.'s Edgemar station. The opening sequence sketches out this eager innocent's vision of comic-book heroism; the events that follow (based on a true story) carry him from cartoon fantasy into the morally ambiguous realm of film noir. “You're one of us, not a brother,” a white coworker reminds J. J., and this divided loyalty becomes the crux of the hero's crisis when he discovers that he's been unwittingly involved in framing a black man (Ice Cube). J. J.'s fellow odd-person-out, Jewish female Deputy Fields (Lori Petty), has good reason to ask him, “Which side are you on?” Terrence Rafferty wrote in the New Yorker, “The truth that informs all the action in the movie is simple and profoundly political: you can't know yourself until you know what you're a part of.”