When Brenda Martin (Moore), who comes from an upper class, New Jersey suburb, staggers into her local hospital in deep shock, she explains her injuries by claiming that she was carjacked while driving through a poor black neighbourhood. Detective Lorenzo Council (Jackson), a housing authority officer, finds himself under pressure to protect his patch, and to catch the culprit. However, the situation becomes more complex when the woman confesses that her four-year-old son was asleep on the backseat.

The stage is set for an explosion of racial tensions, and Council is caught right in the middle. As the largely white police force seals off a housing project in the deprived neighbourhood of Dempsey, and Brenda's unsympathetic cop brother, alternates between tearful televised pleas and brutally beating a Dempsey suspect, Council struggles to keep a foot in both the black and white camps. For instance, when he take Brenda to the Armstrong housing estate, the crowd of tenants cordoned off from their homes and lives, rightly ask him if such effort would be put into the search for one of their children. Council can only look ashamed at this, as he becomes ever more embroiled in the search for Brenda's son.

In an interview with an American film website, Jackson explains how he approached the character: "To my mind, or in my back story, he grew up in those projects and so he knows all of those people, and has been in their houses and grown up with some of their kids." Really, Council's heart remains with "his people," as he puts it in the movie, but his strong sense of justice, along with Brenda's vulnerability, spurs him on to the continuation of the missing child hunt. However, Brenda's vague description of the shadowy black figure that stole her car, and unwittingly took her son as well, throws suspicion upon all of the tenants that Council knows, because it happened in their neighbourhood. What started as an isolated incident quickly ripples out over an entire neighbourhood, and Council, as just one person, has little power to keep the peace- try as he might.

As Jackson says, "All of a sudden he's put into this position where they are asking him that question, 'Are you going to be black or blue?'" but to choose either would be to neglect his duties.

Jackson also draws upon his own real-life experiences for his performance, which add to Council's success in engaging the audience with the slow-moving story. As he mentions in an interview with American National Public Radio, Jackson and his friends were stopped and searched on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles during the filming of Pulp Fiction (1994). They had just been having a conversation, but suddenly found themselves surrounded by "four or five police cars," with the officers pointing their guns at Jackson's group. They found out later that someone had reported a group of black men with baseball bats hanging around. Despite no weapons being found on them, Jackson and the others were politely, but firmly, told to get off the streets. He says, "you try to be as quiet and respectful as you can" in such a "tense situation." Although not entirely quiet, Council does do his best to handle the people enmeshed in the tense situation of Freedomland with respect, to compensate for the rough treatment of the police.

As almost all other reviews of the movie will assure you, Freedomland fails to capitalise upon this initially intriguing premise, due to its inclusion of superfluous characters, and its meandering pace towards the final twist. However, in the latest of a string of 'tough guy' roles, Jackson's portrayal of Council is touching. He is effective in conveying his dilemma to the audience: he is losing the trust of the tenants that he is meant to protect, while what little faith he had in his colleagues is also ebbing away. Brenda's incoherence and drug problems can only add further to Council's difficulties.

Ultimately, there is little he can do to prevent the conflict boiling over, and the Armstrong project becoming a battleground. In one of the most memorable scenes, the riot gear-wearing police, helmet visors down and shields at the ready, line up toe-to-toe with the angry residents. Council, as ever, is hovering between the sharply drawn lines of black and white, power and dispossession. Unfortunately, there is no clear distinction between right and wrong in Freedomland; it is up to him alone to get to the bottom of the case before the clash is repeated.