PARIAHS

After being rebuffed last November while trying to reclaim his job as a Dallas police officer, RODNEY CLARK has finally come to terms with his future. Says Clark, who left the DPD in 1987 after breaking an unspoken code and testifying against a former police partner, “My career as a police officer is dead.”

Clark says that Dallas’s isn’t the only police force that has turned him down in his quest for a job. He has applied for police work in some 17 other cities, including his tiny hometown in Wisconsin, where he was up for the position of police chief. Even there, he was turned away. “I’m being blackballed,” Clark says. “I’m sure of it.”

Clark’s troubles in Dallas, which resulted from testimony he gave concerning slain fellow officer GARY BLAIR, whom Clark said had a history of being abusive to citizens, have dogged him even in his current job as a prison guard in Minnesota. “There was alleged to be a hit contract out on me last year,” Clark says, “and it was coming out of Dallas. My bosses in the prison forced me to either transfer to another lower-level facility or be terminated.” Clark says he “thinks he should sue” the Dallas Police Department for allegedly violating his civil rights in his quest to be reinstated.

In all this darkness, however, Clark may have found a light-in the form of a screenplay about his career in Dallas, which is currently being “shopped” around Hollywood. The story has made the rounds from NBC to Guber-Peters, producers of flam Man, and Clark hopes production will begin sometime this spring. Meanwhile, he is sanguine about the years he has lost pursuing his dream of being a police officer. He says he will look for a master’s degree program to enter, perhaps next fall. “There are lessons I have learned from this,” Clark says. “I have finally put Dallas behind me.”