In Bullitt, when the Lieutenant goes out to lunch with his gal he calls his department, gives them the number of the restaurant, and tells the hostess if a call comes for him they should get him. Man that must have been a pain in real life!
Contrast to today’s “FBI” serieses, where everyone uses their cells as active two-way communications. They can have a running dialog between each other AND HQ all at the same time. I haven’t seen that since the quasi-futuristic series “Search” back in the 70s (and it wouldn’t have been possible back then) but it is pretty useful.
Of course, they still manage to contrive a situation at least once in every episode where they have a foot chase across Manhattan. And they have magical “facial req” that can follow someone across town through several unconnected camera systems.
The frustrating thing about the show The Rookie is they sometimes get things right in a way that other shows have never done. Most of the time they do things that make me want to throw something at the TV. That’s why I’ve seen very little of it despite being a Nathan Fillian fan.
In one scene I saw, a rookie is taking pictures of a scene. The training officer asks if it’s the department phone. He says that’s way back where we parked the car. She asks if he wants his phone and all of its contents including his private photos entered into evidence. He goes back and gets the department phone. That felt very real to me. For good reason it’s been policy to only use department phones when needed.
DNA still takes weeks if you are lucky and that’s if there are samples to match. An unknown sample entered into CODIS with hope that it makes a match may take months or longer.
There are probably more than what I know. Companies are always trying to make new products they can sell to agencies. A contract with even a relatively small government agency can be lucrative for a small company.
We didn’t deal with those small companies. We had a contract with Axon for the body cameras. They have an integrated evidence program that combines body camera footage with evidence entered using the department phones. A clear electronic chain of custody is available during discovery. It’s all done through their site at evidence dotcom. The fact that they were able to get that domain name is an indication of how big they are in the business.
I’ve seen enough cop shows to not sweat the small stuff. I would have to cut out more than half of tv if I didn’t. It’s not small procedural things that annoy me. It’s that no one acts or reacts like real people do.
With The Rookie when it comes to procedural things the most frustrating aspect is they seem to make a real effort to get things right at times. Like the camera thing I mentioned. Then the next minute they get something wildly wrong. It is the first show I’ve seen that incorporates the use of body cams well so points for them.
Your line of work is far more popular as a TV series setting than mine.
It would definitely suck to be scrolling through the channels after a hard day at work and find that show after show is, yep, more work. And badly portrayed work at that.
I’m part of a public safety (search & rescue) drone team; we have been explicitly advised not to use any personal equipment on a call, even if it’ll boost the teams capabilities. if something gets subpoenaed, you’re not getting it back until the trial is done. Look at the Bryan Kohberger/Univ of Idaho murders. He was arrested Dec 30, 2022 & is set to go on trial this summer. 2½ years of not having your equipment, whether that’s a phone or a drone. Our chief has told us there’s a much greater likelihood of getting agency equipment back that Joe Member’s personal equipment out of evidence lockup but even they may need to fight if it came to that.
I recall all of those fictional detectives working with the police, or sheriff in Cadfael’s case, not just to be the muscle to arrest the suspect at the end but to gather some of the information they needed. I can certainly recall multiple Poirot episodes with Poirot calling Inspector Japp from some small town asking for information that then completes the puzzle for him.
And modern policing has, going back to the “Peelers” in 1829, been about having multiple men* in multiple places with the same training and coordinated by the fastest communications available. Not having to be everywhere at once and catch the bad guy with your bare hands, as dramatic as that is in fiction from the penny-dreadful to the latest streamed show, but to gather data and issue orders by telegraph, telephone, radio, etc.
When writers of fiction want that one-on-one, no-safety-net feeling for crime fighting, they write Westerns. With a sheriff or marshal with a deputy or two, with other towns a day’s ride or more apart that may or may not be connected by telegraph. The posse has to chase and capture the fleeing bank robbers because if they get away, they really get away. Marshal Dillon has to catch those highwaymen by himself and bring them in alive, over a couple of days. (Seriously, so many episodes on Gunsmoke where Dillon is working solo outside of Dodge, transporting or bringing in multiple bad guys on multiple-day horseback rides! Presumably without meth to stay awake for multiple days.)
*And women now, of course, but not in the eras of those fictional detectives.
In the scene he wasn’t taking the pictures for personal reasons. He was taking evidence photos with his personal phone because the department phone wasn’t with him.
Working as a security guard, cell phones were pretty essential to my job as well. When I would be sent out on a patrol, I would be issued a work phone that I would use to keep in contact with dispatch, take pictures of security violations, and even write reports.
Usually technology outpaces the law. Here in New Jersey there is something called Cathy’s Law which restricts first responders from sharing pictures of victims. It comes from an incident where a volunteer fireman posted the picture of a fatal car accident victim on Facebook. The incident happened in 2009. It took until 2012 for the law to be enacted.
Just taking pictures could not be made illegal. They are an important tool for investigation. Doing it with a personal phone opens up a lot of issues regarding discovery, foundation and chain of evidence. Not against the law just really bad practice.
On the other hand, they screw it up sometimes. I was just watching a very recent episode of L&O: SVU. The detectives knew that someone had built a large bomb, but they didn’t know where he planned to detonate it. When they find out, there are a couple minutes of the whole team driving their black SUVs across the city to evacuate a hotel where an international conference of some kind is happening. I was watching that and said “why the hell don’t you just call the local precinct?” I don’t care how fast you drive, a cell phone, or radio, is faster.
There was a proposed reboot of The Rockford Files a few years ago. In the original, Rockford had lots of clever tricks to get information from people, including a small printing press so he could make any business card he needed. I wonder what the new Rockford could have done with cell phones and computers; maybe a domain and e-mail address at jimmyjoe@meeker.com
My dad worked at Hyperion, LA’s main sewage treatment plant. He’d be watching, say, Mannix and would suddenly say, “Hey. That was filmed at work.”
Hyperion had (probably still has) a lot of big, above-ground pipes and underground corridors. LA rented it out to TV shoots more often than you would think. On Mannix, it was standing in for an oil refinery.
One of the cool things about growing up anywhere in greater Los Angeles was seeing local stuff you’re familiar with being filmed for other purposes. Even cooler if, like your Dad, it was his place of work.
The breakwater in the opening titles of Gilligan’s island was near where I lived. Every time they set sail I’d think: “I’ve been there; there are no tropical islands within a 3-day boat ride, much less 3 hours.”
ISTM that current TV & movie production is not nearly as LA-centric as it was in the '60s-70s. So while LA backdrops aren’t rare, they’re not nearly as universal as they once were. Ditto NYC standing in for “generic older northern US city”.
I had an experience like that yesterday, but better. I went to see a movie at the Somerville Theater, and I sat in the balcony. In the movie there was a scene that was shot in the balcony of the Somerville Theater, about 20 feet from where I was sitting. Kinda messed with my head a little, but in a good way
Back to the cell phone issue, it reminded me of Sue Grafton’s detective series that follows Santa Teresa P.I. Kinsey Milhone.
She started writing the series in the '80s. Later she said she tried to incorporate cell phones but they screwed up too many suspenseful scenes, so she declared that all her stories (A is for Alibi, etc.) were set before computers and smartphones were ubitquitous…
Though written between 1982 and 2017, the Kinsey Millhone novels are all set in the 1980s, with each novel chronologically taking place only a few weeks (or at most a few months) after the previous one.
Thinking about that some more. If Rod Serling had written this, then in that movie, while you were watching it, the camera would have shifted and you would have seen yourself in the corner of the movie on the screen.
