A cop cannot solve an investigation until he’s on suspension. He can’t, however, be suspended until he tosses his badge onto the captain’s desk.
Said captain is always black and crotchety.
The DA is always young, white and a twat. The mayor is always old, white and a twat.
Talking about your plans after you retire next week after thirty years on the force is tantamount to signing your own death warrant.
Despite the initial fireworks, hotshot rookies always earn the grudging respect of their world-weary partners.
Every investigation will sooner or later lead you to a strip club, although the lacklustre gyrations of a bikini-clad pole dancer will usually stand in for any actual stripping.
At any given time a police station will contain of a bevy of remarkably attractive street hookers, a skinny white purse-snatcher, a giant tattooed biker, a couple of gang-bangers and a jive-talking pimp, all waiting to be processed.
There are no black gangs, white gangs, Latino gangs or Asian gangs. All street gangs are multiracial, and must include at least one white guy with a multicolored Mohawk.
Murders are NEVER committed by poor people- poor people may get arrested, but the REAL killer is a Fortune 500 executive (who keeps a loaded gun in his desk drawer).
At some point, the cop will have a face to face meeting with the bad guy, who, instead of simply having the cop killed, will try to reason with the cop. Said cop, even though he’s piss poor and in danger of having his car/home/whatever repo’d, informs the bad guy that he’s going to do everything he can to take him down.
Cops never carry back up pieces (which is completely untrue based on my experience with cops).
In the inevitable foot chase, somebody will jump from one roof to another.
There will be at least one fire escape, one chainlink fence, some garbage cans, a dumpster, and a few winos to negotiate.
Nobody ever has an apartment that needs to be broken into unless it’s at least five stories up.
If you go out onto the roof from a stairwell through a steel door, when you turn around to go back down, the steel door will be locked – from the inside.
There will be pigeons on the roof , as often as not in cages.
Any time you have a flight of stairs to use to try to escepe, always go up.
If you’re in a high-speed car chase in an alley and you have to cross traffic to continue in the alley, there will be no cars in cross traffic, even if traffic is stopped on the crossing street.
If a copy is chasing a criminal, he will not caught him. Even if the cop is a young guy in grat shape and the criminal is a major drug user. And nobody in the street will think to trip the criminal.
All female cops have great bosoms. If they are black, they are fat with great bosoms.
All judges are either old, Black or female, and preferably more than one of these.
Black people are typically either criminals or jaded, bitter civil servants. They are rarely hero cops, and never female love interests unless Halle Berry is cast.
1930’s Cop Movie: decent, but the cops are a little too “Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy.”
1940’s Cop Movie: These guys are tough, smart and talk fast. Don’t fuck with them.
1950’s: still smart, tough & fast-talking, but now they have to deal with mixed-up teenagers, so they either screw it up or understand better than anyone else in the movie (like Edward Platt in “Rebel Without A Cause”)
1960’s: Two-dimensional characters who oppress hippies
1970’s OK, some of those hippies were like Charles Manson, so cops are smart & tough again, but don’t talk as fast; perhaps because some of them are now Black and they have to pronounce their jive slowly so us ofays can understand. Car chases become obligatory.
1980’s: Where most of this threads stupid clichés come from. Final shoot-outs in abandoned factories become obligatory.
1990’s-2000’s: The 1980’s were so bad I stopped watching. Throw-away lines and hidden elements of Post-Modern self-parody become obligatory
The crusty, curmudgeonly, veteran whose seen it all will always be partnered with the rookie straight out of cop school, who will proceed to teach the veteran a few new tricks.
High-speed car chases are possible, even in the traffic-clogged downtown cores of major American cities at rush hour.
Any car chase must involve a trip down an alley at some point, culminating in the chased car shooting out of the alley and miraculously missing all traffic and pedestrians. The cop car will have swerve to avoid such things.
The off-duty cop who finds himself in the middle of a situation and who tries to call for backup will not be believed. This goes double if the off-duty cop is from out of town. (The Axel Foley Rule.) After the cop’s identity is established, he or she will be told to butt out and let the locals take over, but they will prove to be incompetent, and it will be left to the lone cop out of his jurisdiction to save the day. (The John McLean modification to the Axel Foley Rule.)
Female police officers are remarkably more attractive than the average population. But the higher they rise in rank the more hard boiled they become. They’re nearly undatable by the time they make lieutenant and completely so by the time they make captain.
Other than a veteran due to retire soon, the police officer most likely to die in the line of duty is a fresh faced rookie with a wife and infant child, who happens to stop in a convenience store late at night.
A detective working Homicide or Narcotics will exchange gunfire with a suspect an average of twice a month.
If a cop is visiting another country, where he has no jurisdiction and has been specifically told to stay out of the local investigation – man, that’s a license to commit mayhem.
Also – “by-the-book” procedures never work if a criminal is at all clever. You need a maverick smartass who plays by his own rules.