Realistic Cop TV

A good friend asked me to provide an episode on what I consider to be the most REALISTIC law enforcement shows and movies.  

It's hard to capture the transitions from boring / mundane to life changing excitement and back, but I'll try to name the ones I like best in this category!

Enjoy the weather!

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Good morning. My boy Josh asked me to do an episode on the most realistic cop shows. Josh, I got some bad news for you, dude. I haven't seen one. And the main reason is shows and movies have a couple requirements that real life just doesn't have. You can't let people get bored where they tune out. Things have to be wrapped up appropriately. They have to be wrapped up within a certain amount of time. And that pretty much sums it up. So a few that I think do things well, but nothing can really give you a view into the law enforcement perspective without ride-alongs or without doing the job, in my opinion. It's kind of like a war. Imagine a war movie where you just watch a unit deployed and they're just doing patrols through the woods or through the desert or through the city and nothing's happening. Like that's the reality of most war. That's the reality of most police work, is you're listening to music, talking to your friend. The stories that I tell when you listen to true crime, those are drops in the bucket. And that is not your normal day-to-day. So that's it's it's kind of hard to say, like, oh yeah, this one really covers it. But a few that I think generally do a good job. Bosch, B-O-S-C-H, there's also a series of books. He gets into way more shit and does stuff that's so beyond the rules that you likely would get fried for it much earlier in your career than he did. But they do a good job of kind of showing how he uses investigative techniques, the idiocies of a lot of interdepartmental workings, the bullshit on the inside. He throws like his cap through a window. He deals with a lot of crap and a lot of political crap, and that is real. And then how he investigates by putting things together is pretty well done. I've talked a lot about the wire. Man, as far as drug investigations, it's very accurate. Pretty much every character in that show, you've got some version of that. You got that angry white guy with the crew cut that's like, shut up, shut the F up, shitbird, and talks to people crazy on the street. You got that guy. You got the stocky white guy with the bald head. I can't, I don't remember his name. You got Carver, you got the major, you got Bushy Top, all these guys. You have some version of them at most narcotics units. And, you know, there's internal stuff, there's political crap with that. So that one does a very good job of it. Generally, you watch cops. Man, police work is not like cops. Cops, you're in a foot chase in a fight every episode. So if you go into police work because you've been watching cops, you got something else coming your way. It's gonna be a lot of boredom, things of that nature. Cop shows and movies, man. I don't watch them all the time. I've heard true detective is good, but I've I've never heard that from a cop. So I think that's probably good, you know, fiction TV. But generally, nothing's gonna encompass it. As far as books, I did an episode like six months ago called Are You Not Entertained. I didn't really go into what was real. It was more for entertainment value. But the books by Michael Connolly, that Bosch series are awesome. His Lincoln lawyer series, you know, the Lincoln lawyer is a defense attorney that rides around in a Lincoln. He hires a driver that is always somebody that he recently represented. So it's a criminal that he got off, and that's how they can pay him, is by driving him around. So he's obviously dealing with cops. I think in the books, Bosch is his brother, so there's a lot of overlap since it's the same author. And then they made the Lincoln Lawyer TV show and the Lincoln Lawyer movie. The movie had Matthew McConaughey as the Lincoln lawyer, and then the TV show had, I don't know the actor's name, but I really like him. And those are pretty solid. But sorry, dude, I can't give you a realistic cop movie. Heat is, it's not, it's kind of a cop movie. It follows Pacino and he's battling, you know, De Niro and Val Kilmer, this robbery crew, kind of a little more accurate, where you know his marriage is crumbling, he's getting dragged out at weird times, he's getting in shootouts like twice in the show, but it's mostly just him tracking the guy. So it kind of shows the process, which is what this job's all about, is the process. We're all interested in the results, the shootout, the years, the convictions, but the 98% of this job is simply the process, which is not fun, sexy, it's gritty. It's who stays late when they don't want to stay late, who hits eight hours and goes home, and who goes, I got two more witnesses to interview, or I want to do this trash pull, or I need to type this search warrant, everybody else is going home. Who takes that extra step? That's where good detectives, good investigators, good agents are made. It's not made in the foot chase, it's not made in the fight, it's not made in the shooting. Those things matter, but those are the 1%. And most TV shows, movies, books, they just they focus on the 1% because that's fun. It's sexy. We'd like to look at it. We are entertained. We're not entertained by a detective figuring something out slowly over time. I also just started looking at young Sherlock. It's I watched one episode, obviously, about Sherlock Holmes. It's pure entertainment. He has like some kind of magic powers, but it's also the first episode, he sees that there's two handprints on a window on both sides, like on the windows adjacent to the window that was broken out that the guy escaped through from the burglary. And so he's able to piece together that his hands were empty when he was pulling himself out the window. That's kind of a good insight right there. Although the show is kind of just silly and for entertainment, that's a good thing to look at. That's the way detectives need to be thinking. So I do like that part and little things like that. Where it's it's thinking outside the box. It's beyond DNA, phone records, interviews. It's that sixth sense that a good detective has where they see something else and they're evil, they're able to make one plus one equal two, as opposed to the other two options, which are the detectives that jump to a conclusion without any factual backup, one plus one equals three type of detectives, and the ones that just can't solve the problem. So it's like, I didn't either I didn't even know there was a problem here, or they just don't think outside the box. Like one plus one, I have no idea what that equal. I can't put together what I'm seeing into a conclusion that's accurate. So it's either jumping to a random conclusion, he definitely did it, he was there. That's a bad conclusion to draw. Just because you were at a murder scene doesn't mean you did the fucking murder. So there's the guys that jump to that, and then there's the guys that just don't come to any conclusion and are fine with leaving it unsolved. What we want to be and what we can take away from some of these shows is develop the process of what do these things I see mean and what makes sense. It's what a lot of this comes down to. It's something I've said frequently in interviews when I'm interviewing suspects is hey, look, I'm not the when I'm ready to confront them about a lie. I'm going off track here, but there's a lot of overlap because we're talking about shows that are realistic. So I'm talking about real shit. We're gonna talk about real life real quick. When I'm doing an interview with somebody, one of my favorite ways of confronting them in a lie is I let them get their story out. They say all this stuff. I'll give you an example after this. And then I simply say, All right, I hear what you're saying, and I'm not the smartest dude in the world. You know that. We've been talking, you know I'm not some fucking rocket scientist, but I will say this. I have kids. Do you have kids? I'll be like, yeah, I got three kids. All right. When your kids lie to you, I'm not calling you a liar, so don't take it like that. But I am saying when your kids lie to you, do you know when it doesn't make sense? Like if there's only one home and something's broken, and they say, I have no idea what happened, does that make sense? All right, so what you're saying is this. Let's go through what you just told me. This is a real example of a case that I had go to trial. You're saying that you are a convicted felon. The guy that wanted the gun is a convicted felon, but you know another gang member that is not a convicted felon. So you set up this meeting between these two guys. So this is your felon buddy, we'll call him Johnny. He needs a gun because he wants to go shoot some people, and he can't get one. He doesn't have one available right now. So he called you for it, and you said, Yeah, I got a guy, he'll go in the gun store for you and everything if you give him the money. And you went, introduced them, rode in the car with them. You felt this whole time that it was a bad idea. This interview was played at the trial. The guy got convicted. You told them you thought it was a bad idea. You rode in the car thinking about your girlfriend and your child and how much you love her and how you didn't want to be involved with this shit because it was going to get us in trouble. You got to the store and went inside. You saw them exchange money, you saw Johnny pick out the two guns he wanted. Johnny handed you the money, you handed the money to the non-convict, who then purchased the guns, did all the paperwork. You guys left the store together, put the guns in Johnny's trunk. You didn't put them in the trunk, and you feel that this was a bad idea and you didn't want to be involved in it. All you cared about, this was literally played in front of the jury. I said, all you could think is, I don't like to do crime. I don't want to do crime. I just want to go home to my family. I said, based on your actions, does that add up to what was actually going on? Were you actually telling them we shouldn't do this while you drove the car to the gun store after introducing them? So help me understand if that makes sense. And so I confronted him with his lie. That was played for the jury. My conclusions about him lying were played for the jury. I didn't say, you a motherfucking liar, none of that happened. Because that just shuts them down. That doesn't help anything. So some of these shows, first 48 crap like that, they are real life. And you can take away realistic stuff, both that works and doesn't work. And you'll see investigators on those shows that leave the interview room and go, he wasn't going to talk. There was nothing I could do. That's bullshit. A lot of time you did it to yourself. So a lot of these have a nugget of real life dropped on it. The fugitive shows, justified, where they're shooting somebody every show and going, that's justified. There's nuggets in all these that are realistic. But if you want to watch a realistic cop show, it's going to be kind of mundane. First 48 is real life, real detectives, but heavily edited. So you're getting the 1%. The 99% of the process is just getting ignored. You got to go on a ride along, man. You got to go see if you can be with a homicide unit. If you're a patrol officer and you want to see what homicide's like, what investigations, what narcotics, what SWAT's like, K9, I don't give a damn, training unit. If you want to see what it's like, if you're a civilian, you want to see what patrol's like, take your ass on a ride along. Go to the precinct, do the form, see what it's actually like. I would suggest night shift and asking if you can for a proactive officer so you don't watch them sleep. And if you want to see what a specialized unit is like, go find the unit commander or get a buddy that you have on the unit that can ask them if you can come out and go to a training with them and go out there and be motivated. That's how you're going to see what it's actually like. That's how you're going to see if you want to go to canine what the training logs are like. I mean, you think canine, you think, oh, we're out here biting people, sniffing out dope, doing work. They do a ton of training. They have to train those dogs consistently to keep them certified so that what they sniff and when they alert is admissible in court. That stuff's not sexy. You want to watch a canine episode of them training their dog? Of course not. You'd be interested for two minutes, and then you'd be like, okay, they're doing the same thing. But that canine handler is getting in the reps and training that dog. And that way when the dog's action is needed, the dog can track, the dog can bite, the dog can search, the dog can find bombs, drugs, and all the shit. So hope you've enjoyed this. Josh, sorry for giving you not what you asked for, but you got the very long version. You probably wanted 10 seconds of watch these shows. It's not going to happen, dude. Hope you guys have a great day. Bye.