Over at the Radio Mick Danger website, I’ve been listening to these OTR episodes of Dragnet. I’m too young to have listened to these programs when they were originally aired. But to me, a lifelong Angeleno interested in local history, these shows offer interesting glimpses into the life of downtown L.A. just prior to its decimation by the freeways, and its depopulation in the name of redevelopment. And I find them diverting, although by today’s production values they’re undoubtedly hopelessly slow-paced.
The main protagonist is always Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday, and he has various sidekicks over the eps I’ve listened to. Apparently Officer Gannon didn’t come along until the mid-1960s TV show.
And now to my actual question: I’ve noticed that from one episode to the next, Friday and his partner will work on different types of cases, e.g. Homicide, GTA, Burglary, or Narcotics. Is this actually typical of how big city police detectives work? I’d assumed that a detective would tend to specialize in one area, say homicide, and then just do mainly that. But the fictional cops in this radio program are all over the board. How true to life is this?
By the time Dragnet started airing in the 1940s, most of the major metropolitan had detectives assigned to units like homicide, theft or juvenile crime. So Sgt. Friday wouldn’t be investigating totally different crimes from week to week.
It is worth remembering the methodology behind Dragnet. JKack Webb, an insightful and witty man and jazz aficionado, created Joe Friday as the deadpan foil; off which his professional-but-eccentric partners and the wide range of Angelenos, many of whom had only a passing acquaintance with mundane sanity, would play their own roles. Each episode was to be a dramatization of one or more true-life cases handled by the LAPD. Often the episode was designed to highlight a social ill that Webb wished to bring to better public awareness.
As such, it was necessary, in order to cover the wide range of potential cases the show was designed to look at, for Friday-and-partner to be a roving team working out of various bureaus within the Detectives Division of LAPD. As the ongoing series regulars, they would dramatize the roles of the real-life team of detectives who handled the particular cases for that episode.