What is extremely common in TV or movies but almost never happens in real life?

The good guy is chasing after some bad guys with guns. The GG isn’t sure where the BG went so they stop and look around. In the middle of a big open space. Always, fortunately, at a moment when the BG is not looking back at the perfectly placed target being made.

There have been threads about it. Basically it’s a big “what if” that depends on the very specific aspects of each case. If the third party is seen to be acting as an “agent of the state” it would be excluded as if it was a cop who did the improper search. (Illegal search is a loaded term since there are many things that would be ruled improper without breaking any laws). If the third party is ruled to not be an agent of the state then it becomes a big “it depends.”

Not as common as it used to be but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone get hit in the face with a pie.

For a while in the 1970s there was a trend of hitting professors (or other authority figures) in the face with a pie. There were even services that you could pay to do this. Said professors and authority figures were, by and large, not amused. The fad faded. But it wouldn’t have existed in the first place unless the trope of the Pie Fight didn’t already exist.

See “Pieing” on Wikipedia, here:

In the UK we have a new version involving milkshakes and right wing politicians. I’m sure it would be even more popular if the shake machine at McDonald’s wasn’t always broken.

And from Australia, may I present Egg Boy !

The government goes to a small town and forces everyone to evacuate in order to perform some illegal secret experiment and literally everyone just goes along with it immediately.

If the military showed up at people’s doors wearing hazmat gear, with a cover story such as there’s a poison gas leak, and anyone who sticks around will die a horrible death gasping and coughing out lung tissue, there might be one or two stubborn, ornery gits who refused to leave. But I’d guess most people would hightail it out of there toot suite. The couple stubborn ones would get a complementary stay in a government facility until the secret experiment was over.

And the evidence in every case that cop ever worked. The appeals will be backed up for years.

100% true except the movie I was watching it was dudes in plainclothes handing letters to people on farms that said WE NEED YOU OUT OF YOUR HOUSE FOR TWO WEEKS and the farmers were like “Alright”

One rarely gets over a gunshot wound to the shoulder in days.

Nah, you hold your shoulder for a few seconds, maybe hunched over and walking with a shuffle for some reason, and then when those seconds are up you’re all good to punch people, climb a wall etc.

Of course being shot in the shoulder hurts, but that doesn’t actually disable you if you man up and push through the pain.

A 49ers rookie wide receiver, Ricky Pearsall, was shot in the chest near the shoulder just before the season began. The bullet missed anything important, and he was released from the hospital after one night and made his season debut in week 7 (51 days after).

Only if someone removes the bullet with a “plink”. The plink into a jar or emesis pan is what makes everything all better.

Which commonly happens during serial killer investigations. An officer will typically go to a suspects creepy house in the middle of nowhere by his/her self instead with a SWAT team.

Also a lot of cases are solved by talking to a different serial killer or mental patient. Because the guy locked away for the past decade knows where he is.

From a gunshot? You don’t just shrug off a thing like that; your arm will be in a sling for one whole scene.

The NBC series “The Hunting Party” has an interesting take on that. Because the whole premise of the show is that they are hunting serial killers who were supposedly executed and this can’t be revealed publicly, they’re limited in how much they can enlist local law enforcement, even with cover stories.

That was a class in Basic Training “Sucking it up, and powering through a shoulder wound.” There’s a part II for those who have been treated by medics.

In Saving Private Ryan, a soldier had his whole arm blown off and picked it up with his other arm. Seems to me the pain from that would have been incapacitating.