To be fair, the Magic Search Engine is on all TV shows, not just detective ones.
Anyone who dies, including the most lowly homeless person, has at least ten people who have a motive to kill them.
You may think forensic psychologists and forensic psychiatrists are mental health professionals in private practice with their own offices, who contract with courts, law enforcement, and private attorneys to provide opinions and testimony regarding criminal defendants and individuals involved in the legal system, such as competency to stand trial, sanity at the time of offense, risk assessments and future dangerousness, mitigation evidence, mental evaluations of sex offenders, psych evals of police officer candidates, and so on. In reality, forensic psychologists and forensic psychiatrists are more or less full time members of the law enforcement team, who spend 95% of their time at the police station helping detectives apprehend criminals with supernaturally prescient predicitons about the subjects they’re looking for.
Prosecutors never merely give a defense attorney a recommendation to convey to their client. Instead, the prosecutor accompanies the defense attorney to the jail or has the defendant and his attorney brought into the DA’s office so he or she can bark it across the table at them. The defense attorney will then tell his client he should accept it by whispering in his ear or nodding almost imperecptably. Prosecutors are always driven hardasses, defense attorneys are frequently borderline sleazy, and relations between the two are never amicable.
Prosecutors and police officers are always personally invested in the outcome of every case they come in contact with.
Which is understandable since they’re usually only working on one case at a time. Once it’s solved or verdict given, then they can move on.
Very true. Fortunately, that only takes about an hour.
This is a vluable cost saving measure, they only protect those witnesses that are going to be attacked. That way they have more budget money left over for mood lighting in the forensics lab and neat holographic modeling tools. 
Jessica Fletcher is extremely good at framing firends and family members for crimes. 
Shorter and more to the point: Courtrooms have windows.
I’ve always thought she was the most successful mass murderer in U.S. history- she makes H.H. Holmes look like a drunk bar bully.
A good psychological profile stops just short of giving the perp’s probable Social Security number and street address.
Standard procedure when the cops come to your place of business to ask you anything is to run like hell. This is doubly so if you have only a tenuous connection to whatever they’re investigating and rather think they’re here about some minor infraction you got away with six months ago.
Also, immediately before you run, it’s standard to throw whatever you happen to be holding at them.
Male cops spend most of their free time in strip clubs. The strippers generally wear a thong and a bra throughout their performances. Female cops in a strip club are generally working undercover as a stripper, a pretty common assignment for female cops, which might JUST explain why most of them are so good looking.
Half the people selling crack in downtown NY are white.
A 125 pound woman can disable a 225 pound thug with a single roundhouse kick to the head.
If it’s downtown Manhattan where the crack is being sold, they probably are.
It’s never lupus! No, wait, that’s what I learned about medicine.
YOU CAN’T POWERBOMB KIDMAN! No, that’s wrestling.
I got it. Police computers can do anything except operate silently and present information in smaller than 36 point font. Also, any search will consist of a rapid-fire series of mug-shots. Fingerprint searches will always connect random points on the images with bright green lines.
If you’ve ever handled a penny, the government has your DNA. That’s why they keep them in circulation.
This is why The Wire was brilliant. And depressing.
Every female cop wears a push-up bra and a blouse cut down to her navel. Crime scene investigators (not wearing any equipment) will lead the SWAT team ( with vests, helmets, and plastic shields) into the bad guy’s apartment.
If you refuse to answer a question you can be charged with obstruction of justice.
No professional will ever protect your privacy unless they are a crook.
The cops gut instinct is infallable.
Juries will convict on pretty thin evidence.
Along with, “But counselor, let’s speed this up.”
And occassionally “You’d better be going somewhere with this.”
Serial killers don’t succeed in staying free by attacking people chosen more or less at random and leaving few (but consistent) clues. They stay free because they are homocidal geniuses who view their murders as works of art or something, and they’re just too awesome to be caught by anyone but the equally awesome detectives. And their victims never go free and if they do, the killer simply MUST hunt them down to complete their terrible work of death.
Seriously, I saw a horrifically bad use of this last ngiht, and I’m not even sure what show it was. Some show with a big “profiler” theme, where you catch criminals by making up profiles of them. Leaving aside the fact that profiling is almost totally bunk, I hate the “superhuman-serial-killer” bit. This guy totally fooled the cops in every way, he never failed ot kill his victims despite attacking them under conditions which definitely did not lend themselves to flawless execution* and with the prospect of the victims receiving medical help. Somehow, in his greatest con the cops never noticed that the victim didn’t have a goddamn boyfriend. At the same time he inflicted lethal wounds on himself, then was rescued perfectly by the ambulance he called on himself. He even succeed perfectly in a mass murder attack on half a dozen people, getting away scot free in the middle of a city, with no one aware of it till later. Then he was caught, but it was OK, because he escaped from prison the same night, and there was absolutely no chance anyone could catch him (his face plastered all over the news) because hbe was just so smart n’ stuff.
News Flash: the Joker works as a character because he lives in a world full of superheroes and villains. And he has some low-grade, but very focused superpowers. And we all know, deep down, that the writers are on his side. He would grossly out of place (hell, he’d tell the same himself) if you tried to put him in a gritty crime drama. The Joker can’t exist without Batman (literally, in the comics).
*pun intended