Real policemen hardly recognize any resemblance between their lives and what they see on TV.
The first difference is that a policeman’s real life revolved round criminal law. He has to know exactly what actions are crimes and what evidence can be used to prove them in court. He has to know nearly as much law as a professional lawyer, and what is more, he has to apply it on his feet, in the dark and rain, running down a street after someone he wants to talk to.
Little of his time is spent in chatting. He will spend most of his working life typing millions of words on thousands of forms about hundreds of sad, unimportant people who are guilty of stupid crimes.
Most television crime drama is about finding the criminal: as soon as he’s arrested, the story is over. In real life, finding criminal is seldom much of a problem. Except in very serious cases like murders and terrorist attacks, little effort is spent on searching.
Having made an arrest, a detective really starts to work. He has to prove his case in court and to do that he often has to gather a lot of different evidence.
A third big difference between the drama detective and the real one is the unpleasant pressures: first, as members of a police force, they always have to behave absolutely in accordance with the law. Secondly, as expensive public servants, they have to get results. They can hardly ever do both. Most of the time some of them have to break the rules in small ways.
If the detective has to deceive the world, the world often deceives him. Hardly anyone he meets tells him the truth. And this separation the detective feels between himself and the rest of the world is deepened by the simple-minded ― as he see it ― of citizens, social workers, doctors, law-makers, and judges, who, instead of eliminating crime, punish the criminals less severely in the hope that this will make them reform. The result, detective feel, is that nine-tenths of their work is re-catching people who should have stayed behind bars. This makes them rather cynical(愤世嫉俗的).
| Police in 71.________ world | Police on TV |
Knowledge of 72.___ law | He has to know as much as a professional lawyer and applies it to their 73.____ work. | There is no 74.________ for them to know about it. |
Different 75.________ time spent | He 76.________ most of his working life to collecting and providing evidence needed to prove his case in court. | Time is spent finding criminals. Once the criminal is found, the story 77.______. |
Different pressures | 78.________ and the public put much pressure on detectives and policemen. | They got no pressure from the public. |
Relationship with the society | He feels 79.________ from citizens, as they hold different 80.________ toward punishment of the criminals. | No contact with the public. |