Claudette Wyms

Captain Claudette Wyms is a fictional Los Angeles Police Department captain in the television drama series The Shield. Claudette is played by CCH Pounder.^[1]

Personal

Claudette has been divorced twice and raised two daughters, Bonnie and Rebecca. Her father, Bryce, sometimes refers to her as "Peaches," much to her partner's amusement. Like Ronnie Gardocki she appears to be an atheist, challenging Dutch Wagenbach when he suggests that a higher power saved a life in peril, asking why that "higher power" failed to save the other victims or prevented the peril from taking place altogether.

Her ex-husband Jeff Franklin was shot and killed by an "E-Park Johnnie" gang member while buying flowers for his fiancé. Her daughter Bonnie was in the car with him at the time.

Career

Claudette has been on the police force for more than 25 years, and was one of the few female black officers in the department at that time. During her early days at The Barn, she went against the lead detective on a case and ended up solving the crime. This earned the respect of Detective Holland "Dutch" Wagenbach, who requested that he be partnered with Claudette. She is one of two regular detectives throughout the whole series who never fired her weapon, the other one being Dutch.

A veteran detective, Claudette is the self-appointed voice of morality at the Barn and often butts heads with Vic Mackey over his tactics. At the start of the third season, Claudette is supposed to take over as captain of The Barn, but David Aceveda stays throughout the rest of the season and even steals some of Claudette's new ideas. At the end of season three, Claudette is being groomed to take over running the Barn as the new Captain but she loses the promotion when she charges a public defender with negligence, resulting in countless convictions being overturned. In season 5, Claudette admits to Dutch that she has had lupus for fifteen years and that it has been flaring up recently. Claudette collapses at the end of the seventh episode of season five, following a particularly harrowing interrogation. She returns to the Barn shortly thereafter and is soon appointed to Captain after bringing Steve Billings's shortcomings to the attention of the Assistant Chief.

Throughout the last season, Dutch discovers Claudette's lupus growing progressively worse. He attempts to ease some of her burdens, hiring a maid to help her maintain a decent household and such. In the season finale, she reveals that she is in the terminal stage and "sooner rather than later" will be dead, but she will spend all her remaining time working in her position. In the same episode she leads the team that enters to discover Shane Vendrell having committed suicide and murdered his family, viewing the scene with a distraught look on her face. Later that night she calls for Vic and Ronnie Gardocki to return to the barn. She makes Vic sit on the "perps side" in the interrogation room and reads him Shane's unfinished suicide note. "You must be pretty proud of yourself with all those arrests and drug busts," she says, adding sarcastically "This is what the hero left on his way out the door." She leaves pictures of Shane and his family's dead bodies as she gets up and leaves, waiting to see if Vic will crack after seeing the damage he did; Vic does tear the room's surveillance camera off its mooring and yells at Claudette to bill him for it, and she says the bill is about to come due. After this, she makes sure Vic watches in horror as Dutch arrests Ronnie for all the crimes Vic sold him out on for the ICE immunity deal, and Vic stands in shock as Ronnie is taken away in handcuffs screaming about his betrayal while everyone in the Barn looks at Vic with contempt and disgust. Claudette then pointedly tells a ruined Vic, "You can go now."

References