Assault On Precinct 13 (1976 Film) - Plot

Plot

The story takes place on a Saturday in Anderson, a crime-infested ghetto in South Central Los Angeles. Members of a local gang, called 'Street Thunder', have recently stolen a large number of automatic rifles and pistols. The film begins the previous night, as a team of heavily armed LAPD officers ambush and kill several members of the gang. In the morning, the gang's warlords swear a blood oath of revenge, known as a Cholo, against the police and the citizens of Los Angeles.

During the day, three sequences of events occur in parallel in and around Anderson:

• First, Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Stoker), a newly promoted CHP officer, is assigned to command the old Anderson police precinct on Gramercy during the last few hours before it is permanently closed. The station is manned by a skeleton staff composed of one officer, Sergeant Chaney (Brandon), and the station's two secretaries, Leigh (Zimmer) and Julie (Kyes).
• Second, a member of Street Thunder shoots and kills a little girl and the driver of an ice-cream truck. The girl's father, Lawson, pursues and kills the hoodlum, whose fellow gang members chase the man into the Anderson precinct. In shock, he is unable to communicate to the officers what has happened to him.
• Third, a prison bus commanded by Starker (Cyphers) stops at the station to find medical help for one of the three prisoners being transported. The prisoners are Napoleon Wilson (Joston), a convicted violent killer on his way to Death Row, Wells (Burton), and Caudell, the sick man.

As the prisoners are put into jail cells, the telephone lines go dead, and when Starker prepares to put the prisoners back on the bus, the gang opens fire on the precinct, using weapons fitted with silencers. In seconds, they kill Chaney, the bus driver, Caudell, Starker, and the two officers with Starker. Bishop unchains Wilson from Starker's body and puts Wilson and Wells back into the cells. When the hoodlums cut the station's electricity and begin a second wave of shooting, Bishop sends Leigh to release Wells and Wilson, and they help Bishop and Leigh defend the station. Julie is killed in the firefight, and Wells is killed after being chosen to sneak out of the precinct through the sewer line. Meanwhile, the gang members remove all evidence of the skirmish in order to avoid attracting outside attention. Bishop hopes that someone has heard the unsilenced police weapons firing, but the neighborhood is too sparsely populated for nearby residents to pinpoint the location of the noise.

As the gang rallies for a third assault, Wilson, Leigh, and Bishop retreat to the basement, taking the still-catatonic Lawson with them. In the climactic scene, the gang rushes the group's last stronghold and Bishop shoots a tank full of acetylene gas, which explodes violently, killing all the hoodlums. Finally, two police officers in a cruiser radio for backup after discovering the dead body of a telephone repairman hanging from a pole. When more police officers arrive and secure the station, they find the only survivors of the assault - Bishop, Leigh, Wilson, and Lawson. Bishop asks Wilson to walk out of the station with him, rather than be led away in chains.