Biografie

Downing has achieved notoriety as an activist working to end the war on drugs, serving on the Board of Directors of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and as an Investigative Journalist, joining forces with the ACLU and Al Jazeera to uncover the Long Beach Police Department's TigerText disappearing messaging scandal in 2018.

Graduate of Yale University.

Downing was the show doctor responsible for the character MacGyver's aversion to guns, with MacGyver only using a gun as a weapon in the pilot before Downing was brought on. The show's strong stance against firearms earned it a boycott from the NRA in 1990.

Downing worked for the LAPD for over 20 years, retiring in 1980. His first Hollywood job was as a technical advisor on Adam-12, advising Jack Webb who would later buy Downing's first script for the T.V. show Dragnet. While an LAPD officer he used three screen names to stay off the department's radar.

As of 2020, Downing is working on a screenplay about Shona Banda, a mother suffering from Crohn's Disease who became a victim of the state of Kentucky's War on Cannabis.

We liked the voice overs, but it also got to the point that the scheduling problem for Richard [Dean Anderson] became near impossible. He'd work twelve hours on the set and then have to come into the sound studio to record them to picture. It became both a scheduling nightmare and a major fatigue factor for our star. Unlike many shows on television, Mac was in most every scene we shot, and he never had a day off when the company was shooting.

Staying within budget on a big action show is always a major difficulty. It was squared rooted with MacGyver because we had the MacGyverisms to come up with for every show, the rigging and science to make them work and then the fact that the show had both Great Scope and Small Detail, which makes budgeting, 2nd unit photography and insert photographic a very expensive proposition to deal with.

I wrote on weekends. I would come home on Friday and write a full script over the weekend. My wife would deliver it (to the producers) Monday morning. My police department job, though, always came first and the producers always honored this.

Jack wrote the pilot for 'Adam-12,' and after he finished the episode I told him, 'I can do that.'