Officer Ed Lacy, Don Murray, an 18-year veteran of the New York City Police Department, has been demoted from detective back to patrol duty for his violent, racist tendencies and trigger-happy behavior. He still has friends on the job and ingratiates himself as a booster for a politician named Kevin Reilly George S. Irving, who is hustling to become the city’s next mayor.
Responding to a call on Manhattan’s West Side, he encounters Sally Deveraux, Diahn Williams, a young musician who has been abducted by a mentally unbalanced stalker named Rabbit Shazam James Earl Jones. Rabbit holds Sally hostage and threatens and terrifies her, though he does not physically harm her at that moment. When Sally’s neighbor notices something is wrong and calls the police, Lacy arrives to find Rabbit at knifepoint in the hallway. Rabbit surrenders quickly when Lacy threatens to shoot him, but in the course of the arrest Lacy strikes Rabbit and then shoots him twice in the chest, killing him. Sally is shocked, and in her confusion she does not remember the incident clearly, while Lacy tells the detectives that Rabbit was still holding the knife when he was shot, and Sally reluctantly agrees to this version of events.
Lacy is hailed as a city hero, and Reilly makes him a central figure in his campaign. For a while, the public buys the narrative that Lacy acted in a moment of necessary force. Yet Sally gradually recalls what really happened: Lacy killed Rabbit while the suspect was unarmed and had already surrendered. When Lacy presses her to revert to his version, Sally stands firm and refuses to go along with the cover story.
The backlash is swift. Lacy becomes a public pariah, suspended without pay, while Reilly cuts all ties with him. With the fall from grace comes paranoia and menace as Lacy’s grip on reality slips. He begins to threaten Sally directly and enlists a sleazy ex-cop to help “scare” her, a plan that backfires and results in the deaths of two civilians. With nothing left to lose, Lacy retaliates by killing the ex-cop and then tracks Sally down to a Manhattan school where she works, driving her out of the city to a remote pet graveyard. He ties her up and plans to shoot and bury her in the graveyard, but Sally fights back, freeing herself and stabbing him with the pointed stand from her cello, inflicting a severe wound and escaping into a nearby forest.
Lacy pursues, and the final image leaves his fate unresolved: in a tense standoff with Sally in the sights of her escape, he is either dead while still clutching his gun or dying but poised to fire, leaving the outcome ambiguous and unsettled. The film lingers on the consequences of violence, power, and obsession, framing a once‑trusted officer's descent from upholder of the law to a dangerous antagonist who cannot escape the consequences of his own actions.
