In the summer of 1970, rookie Berkeley police officer Ron Tsukamoto was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop. Immediately afterwards, police said rhetoric from radical groups like the Black Panther Party and the Students for a Democratic Society led to the policeman’s murder. An investigation began to find the killer. But soon, the hundreds of leads dried up and the case went cold.

Ron Tsukamoto was born in the Tule Lake Japanese-American internment camp. He embraced a career in law enforcement from an early age, joining the junior police patrol in elementary school, enlisting in the army reserve during the Vietnam War, and becoming one of the first Asian-American police officers in the country.

By 1970, an increasingly militant counterculture had come to view the police as part of an establishment that had involved the country in an unjust war and brutalized communities of color within its borders. Many activists did not support soldiers or police officers, regardless of their race.

More than three decades after Tsukamoto’s death, a Berkeley investigator decided to come out of retirement to re-open cold murder cases. He made progress quickly on the Tsukamoto case, zeroing in on suspects who he believes committed the crime to impress the Black Panthers.

Officer Tsukamoto takes viewers to the night of the killing, through the investigation that still continues, and into Ron Tsukamoto’s short life to give viewers a glimpse of the chaos that defined the era.