The
Cop Column
August,
2005
Sgt.
Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office
TV
Cops: Fact or Fiction?
From Car 54, Where are You? to CSI, law enforcement has long been
popular on television. Yahoo! lists fan
web sites for 91 police TV shows.
Many
programs do try to depict authentic police procedures and techniques. But, on
TV, excitement trumps reality; a totally faithful show would fail. TV producers
would gladly air video of an officer dragging a kicking, screaming drunk into
jail. But they would not show the same officer sitting at a desk for a couple
of hours filling out paperwork after the excitement was over.
What
other liberties do the writers, directors, and producers take? Here’s one cop’s
personal Top Ten list:
10- Flawless Driving. Real cops are
actual human beings and would never attempt most of the fancy driving tricks of
their TV counterparts.
9- Lots of Shooting. More bullets fly
in a single episode of some shows than all the deputies in
8- Few Dead Ends. Showing all the
meticulous but ultimately fruitless work real investigators perform would
require the entire season to cover one major case.
7- Nothing Else to Do. TV cops don’t seem to suffer from
the distractions of their real-life counterparts. In
6- Conflict with the Feds. On TV, FBI and other Federal agents
muscle into the scene and start bossing around the local cops. That’s
baloney.
5- Technical Wizardry. In real life,
fingerprints, photographs, audio recordings, and other evidence are often poor
quality and useless. The magic computers that fix those problems on TV are
fiction.
4- Jack of All Trades. On TV, the star single-handedly
performs the jobs of several specialists: collecting evidence, interviewing
witnesses, comparing fingerprints, tracking down suspects, making arrests, and
more.
3 Knock-Knock…
Who’s There? The rules real cops must follow get in the way of
storylines. Solution: ignore the rules and procedures for search warrants.
2- Why Did You Do It,
Scumbag? The
aggressive, confrontational manner of talking to suspects seen on TV could get
a real cop fired. More likely, such an officer would quickly learn that
technique doesn’t work. He’d either change his way of doing business or find
another career.
…and
my Number One example of Artistic License in Cop TV Shows:
1-You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The
TV shows have the Miranda warnings all wrong. We do NOT “read their rights” to
every person arrested. We read the Miranda advisement when we are asking
questions that might produce an incriminating response and the person might not
feel free to stand up and walk away… whether they are under arrest or not. Jack
Webb’s invention
of using the Miranda Warning as a dramatic device to signal an arrest is pure
-30-