When I was on the Grand Jury, I went on a couple ride-alongs. Obviously, since they do not want to get a GJ member killed, my officers was not specifically called out to the more dangerous calls, but of course they could happen. Examples-
Homeless Guy screaming threats- possibly dangerous. I was told to stay 12 feet from the guy. This happened three times (two half shifts), one arrest made.
Domestic dispute- can be very dangerous or nothing. I had to stay on the other side of the cop car. Two of these, one was my cop primary, one was us just parked in case something bad happened.
Silent alarms- no danger in the ones we went to- all false, but?
High Speed case- we just roadblocked a possible turn. No actual danger- this time.
Really bad cart chili dog- pretty dangerous.
I mean, watch COPs where they put a couple shifts into one half hours show, heavily edited.
A lot of the stress comes from knowing that at any moment everything can turn to shit and never knowing when that might happen. In the last two weeks I have had days where not much happened except some paperwork calls. We also had two domestic violence calls involving guns where several of us could have been shot as we arrived. Afterwards the guy with the rifle pointed out which officers he had in his sights.
That would be Chicago Fire, which just concluded its ninth season. It really does seem like a modern-day take on Emergency!, down to the point of being set at Station 51. I have to think that’s a deliberate homage.
Which is much better than the other modern equivalent to Emergency!, 9-1-1 and 9-1-1 Lonestar. Those are ridiculous and manipulative. I managed to make it through the ridiculous first episode of Lonestar but that was it.
It was the more mundane aspects I couldn’t suspend belief about.
Having an entire fire station wiped out in a tragedy is certainly not usual but it could happen and it would make for a good starting point. A new crew has to come together and learn how to be a team. Ok I’ll buy it.
Do they use the legal promotion process agreed upon during collective bargaining? No, they go out and recruit a captain from FDNY who also happens to have 9/11 related cancer.
Do they make up the shortfalls in personnel by moving in people from other stations then running a test to hire new recruits? No they go around the country to bring in superstar firefighters from other cities. There are no superstar firefighters. There are no firefighter scouts reporting that Joe Smith is doing great things with hoses in Portland are or there is a new jaws of life guy in Peoria everyone is talking about. No they would hire new people who took the test and teach them to put the wet stuff on the red stuff. And there was the check the box, every single box in one episode, diversity that felt extremely forced.
I don’t need everything in a show to be documentary real. I feel if you are going to have goofy plots like a Texas volcano at least the characters have to be a little grounded in reality. I don’t think Chicago Fire is a great show but I think it does a better job. And I’ve been a fan of Eamonn Walker since Oz.
I don’t know the full context but seeing clips online apparently there was literally an episode that dealt with a group of people in an office building spreading a literal “suicide disease” that caused people to commit suicide when they got it.
First of all, I tip my metaphorical hat to you LEOs. You do a job I couldn’t do.
Ditto the Fire Department. My dad and grandfather were both career firefighters, and they were both braver than I am.
But we see our share of stress on the ambulance, too. A lot of it stems from standing by at a fire or someplace where we’re hoping nothing happens to you folks in blue.
I’ve been shot at before. We had a hostage situation years ago where two cops were shot but still alive. One was still exposed because he couldn’t crawl back into cover. My partner and I did a running crouch to get the officer and pull him back to relative safety. Both cops lived, I’m happy to say.
But a show that features cops or EMS has to focus on the extreme cases. The mundane are boring, and few people would believe the bullshit calls we have to respond to.
Who would watch a show where an ambulance crew had to answer a call for “pain from a sunburn” or the 20 something guy who slammed his finger in the car door and called 911 to see if we thought he’d broken it?
Those episodes would be okay in moderation, but a show that depicted the correct ratio of nonemergency calls to legitimate emergencies wouldn’t do very well, I wouldn’t think.
They do exist though. In the UK we have several shows depicting police, hospitals (A&E) and airport security showing mundane day-to-day activities.
They’re quite watchable, although as a kinda background thing during the daytime, not prime time viewing.
Theres an Australian airport security show that’s actually hilarious for this, and I wonder if they play it deliberately for laughs. Like, they confiscate a fucking banana that some old lady had in her carry-on, and act like they just busted Al Capone.
Live PD and Live Rescue showed these pretty well I think. They had cameras with several cars in a variety of cities so they could switch between them, but they often showed a lot of very mundane calls where not really much of anything was happening. IIRC Live PD became A&E’s highest rated show! I’m still annoyed they felt they had to cancel it for “reasons.”
Of course, they punctuate it with a large fire, or an idiot on top of a high crane, or hanging off a building. And they did use the defibrillator wrong more often than they should have.
The aforementioned Emergency! had a typical episode structure: there would be a serious but fairly mundane rescue (car accident, heart attack, someone in labor), a quirky rescue (someone with their arm caught in the ductwork, or who accidently glued their head to a table, or something), and a great big showy rescue (factory on fire, eighteen car pileup, guy dangling from the top of a 20 story building). I think this is what Just_Asking_Questions was referring to.
The quirky rescues did occasionally feature people who really didn’t need the paramedics, or who were calling just because they wanted attention, or things like that.
It’s the mundane things that get me , too. Could I believe that an entire fire station was wiped out ? Yes. Could I believe that the Austin fire department recruited a fire captain from NYC because he’s the only person who has ever rebuilt a fire company? Yep. Could I believe that Austin made him the captain in command of the station to be rebuilt ? Nope, he would have been a higher rank, maybe a deputy chief or something. Because every government agency I know of has two entry points - there’s the one where you get hired and move up the ladder based on whatever promotion process is agreed to in collective bargaining or required by civil service rules. And there’s another, higher ranked one which is how Bill Bratton moved from department to department without having to serve as a police officer in each one. * But even if I can suspend my disbelief about that, there’s the matter of Rob Lowe’s son - who apparently must have been exempted from all the hiring requirements in Austin in order to follow his father so quickly. And then there’s the matter of the son being assigned to the firehouse his father commands. There’s a limit to how much disbelief I can suspend and this show went way past it. Which is sad, because I really wanted to watch a show starring Rob Lowe but I just couldn’t keep watching this one.
The Closer had some unrealistic parts ( a unit of lieutenants who investigate cases and supervise no one?) but at least they explained why Brenda was a Deputy Chief rather than a captain - she could come into the department as a police officer or as a Deputy Chief , but not at any rank in between.
The coverage in the UK is all through a lens of the stories of the British athletes; where they trained, how they’re feeling, how proud their 3 year old son must be etc etc. Plus the wider story of Britain vs the world in the medal tables – we’re supposed to feel disappointed or ecstatic based on how many medals Britain won today.
Granted, for the first time, the BBC does not have the rights to show the games in full, so I’m sure they would argue that they need to add filler (without using that word).
But in fact the contract still allows them to show many of the competitions in full, which I for one would prefer to see. They are making the editorial decision to do this as a reality show.
