Son of the Beach?
The 1987 Dragnet movie with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. Aykroyd was Joe Friday and Hanks played his partner, Pep Streebek.
Simpsons just recently did a “Miami Vice” intro/parody recently. Quite hilarious. Which is seldom seen on the Simpsons lately.
I especially liked the beefed up Flanders with prison-Cape Fear tats.
I liked Riptide.
Similar, but goofier. Their boat was in the water
Sandra Bullock’s character in Murder By Numbers was a cop who lived by herself on a houseboat.
See post 14.
Maybe someone mentioned this, but I didn’t see it earlier, so…Simon and Simon. One of them was living on a house boat at the beginning of the series.
One of the first crime solvers on board a ship (boat) Adventures in Paradise. It had a ship traveling all around the South Pacific (sort of a soggy Route 66.
OK, I seem to remember a John Wayne movie McQ with Wayne living on a house boat in Seattle and cleaning up the police department. I could well be wrong, however.
Another Wayne flick where a cop lived on the water…I seem to remember Wayne’s English partner lived on a house boat on the Thames in Brannigan.
Finally, Dr Who often landed on a beach before setting off to solve any number of crimes.
Just reminded me of The Killing (U.S. version), I think the female cop lead lived in a Seattle houseboat for a bit (owned by a friend or relative?; her home life was a mess).
Well, that or a quarry or an abandoned industrial site 
ISTR he moved from a beachfront trailer.
Post #40.
Dexter Morgan lived mostly in a beach front apartment. He wasn’t technically a cop but he worked for Miami PD.
Didn’t Dexter, the serial-killer crime tech live in an apartment right off the ocean?
And he had an easily accessible boat.
In “Backdraft,” which is mostly about firefighters but it spends a lot of time on arson investigation, Kurt Russell’s grizzled veteran firefighter lives on a boat.
Bruce Willis’ character in Striking Distance lived on a houseboat.
The Mel Gibson “trailer bigger on the inside” was parodied in a Charlie Sheen movie, I think it might have been Hot Shots but am not sure. There’s an exterior shot of him and a girl opening the door of the trailer, cut to interior shot, they step into a ballroom.
You may be thinking of Loaded Weapon. The bad guys shoot up what they think is Emilio Estevez’s trailer but Bruce Willis crawls out and they say “Oops, sorry.”
Spoiler, I guess.