Mounties are magical.
(Maybe that’s just Due South.)
Texas Rangers are mystical.
As an investigator, any time you are stuck on a case, just go home and chat with your spunky daughter/sarcastic gay neighbour/down-to-earth dad/whatever. They will always make an off-hand remark that will give you a flash of inspiration, enabling you to solve the case.
I thought IRL they were working on being able to get usable DNA from a single microscopic skin flake that anyone might have left behind.
But of course you won’t just hear the statement and then figure something out, instead you’ll say “Wait, stop, what did you just say?” and have them repeat the statement verbatim, out of context. Then you’ll say “you’re a genius!” or something like that.
Also works in the House universe, where people don’t get arrested for breaking into houses.
We would also have accepted “Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time!”.
Sometimes a cop will go off and beat a perp into a near bloody pulp, especially if it involves child abuse. This is when the cop will admit that he (or she) was an abused child themselves, or sometimes it will be because they have children of their own and it was resonant. (Cops who weren’t abused as children or don’t have kids of their own don’t really care about abused kids and to them it’s just the same as picking up a guy for unpaid speeding tickets.)
On Law & Order: The One That Isn’t Crap But Which They Cancelled Anyway, Lenny Briscoe once did just that. Anita van Buren immediately smacked him down for it. Later in the episode she was bored and smacked him around again just for fun.
Despite being largely government-funded, civil-servant staffed institutions, which generally have constant budget shortfalls, all forensic labs and crime scene teams have very expensive-looking state-of-the-art equipment such as tripod-mounted lasers and portable mass spectrometers that NASA would envy.
And they seem to have an unlimited overtime budget, too.
More to the point, no-one goes home or sleeps. Ever.
cops stopped shooting you in the back rather than chase you even a step. now they make a chase exciting.
They can’t if they’re going to have the “Data analyzed while you wait” policy.
Codes of coduct, rules, regulations, actual substantive statutes and constitutional provisons are at best suggestions and guidelines at worst shields for child abusers and murderers which are best ignored.