Police procedural


The police procedural, police show, or police crime drama is a subgenre of procedural drama and detective fiction that emphasises accurate depiction of the investigative procedure of police officers, police detectives, or law enforcement agencies as the protagonists, as contrasted with other genres that focus on non-police investigators such as private investigators.
However, there is more to the police procedural than simply featuring a police officer as the protagonist. Many mysteries that feature a policeman as the hero, Earl Derr Biggers's series of novels featuring Honolulu Police detective Charlie Chan, Ngaio Marsh's series of novels and short stories about Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard, or the TV series Columbo, to use three famous examples, are not meant as authentic depictions of the law enforcement profession, but are merely giving the protagonists an official position so that they have a "franchise," so to speak, from which to work.
As its name implies, the defining element of a police procedural is the attempt to accurately depict law enforcement and its procedures, including police-related topics such as forensic science, autopsies, gathering evidence, search warrants, interrogation, and adherence to legal restrictions and procedures.
While many police procedurals conceal the criminal's identity until the crime is solved in the narrative climax, others reveal the perpetrator's identity to the audience early in the narrative, making it an inverted detective story.
The police procedural genre has faced criticism for its inaccurate depictions of policing and crime, depictions of racism and sexism, and allegations that the genre is "copaganda", or promotes a one-sided depiction of police as the "good guys".

Early history

The roots of the police procedural have been traced to at least the mid-1880s. Wilkie Collins's novel The Moonstone, a tale of a Scotland Yard detective investigating the theft of a valuable diamond, has been described as perhaps the earliest clear example of the genre.
As detective fiction rose to worldwide popularity in the late 19th century and early 20th century, many of the pioneering and most popular characters, at least in the English-speaking world, were private investigators or amateurs. See C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Miss Marple and others. Hercule Poirot was described as a veteran of the Belgian police, but as a protagonist he worked independently. Only after World War II would police procedural fiction rival the popularity of PIs or amateur sleuths.
Lawrence Treat's 1945 novel V as in Victim is often cited as the first police procedural, by Anthony Boucher among others. Another early example is Hillary Waugh's Last Seen Wearing... 1952. Even earlier examples from the 20th century, predating Treat, include the novels Vultures of the Dark, 1925, and The Borrowed Shield, 1925, by Richard Enright, retired New York City Police Commissioner, Harness Bull, 1937, and Homicide, 1937, by former Southern California police officer Leslie T. White, P.C. Richardson's First Case, 1933, by Sir Basil Thomson, former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and the short story collection Policeman's Lot, 1933, by former Buckinghamshire High Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Henry Wade.
The procedural became more prominent after World War II, and, while the contributions of novelists like Treat were significant, a large part of the impetus for the post-war development of the procedural as a distinct subgenre of the mystery was due, not to prose fiction, but to the popularity of a number of American films which dramatized and fictionalized actual crimes. Dubbed "semidocumentary films" by film critics, these motion pictures, often filmed on location, with the cooperation of the law enforcement agencies involved in the actual case, made a point of authentically depicting police work. Examples include The Naked City, The Street with No Name, T-Men, He Walked by Night, and Border Incident.
Films from other countries soon began following the semi-documentary trend. In France, there was Quai des orfevres, released in the United States as Jenny Lamour. In Japanese cinema, there was Akira Kurosawa's 1949 film Stray Dog, a serious police procedural film noir that was also a precursor to the buddy cop film genre. In the UK, there were films such as The Blue Lamp and The Long Arm set in London and depicting the Metropolitan Police.
One semidocumentary, He Walked By Night, released by Eagle-Lion Films, featured a young radio actor named Jack Webb in a supporting role. The success of the film, along with a suggestion from LAPD Detective Sergeant Marty Wynn, the film's technical advisor, gave Webb an idea for a radio drama that depicted police work in a similarly semi-documentary manner. The resulting series, Dragnet, which debuted on radio in 1949 and made the transition to television in 1951, has been called "the most famous procedural of all time" by mystery novelists William L. DeAndrea, Katherine V. Forrest and Max Allan Collins.
The same year that Dragnet debuted on radio, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sidney Kingsley's stage play Detective Story opened on Broadway. This frank, carefully researched dramatization of a typical day in an NYPD precinct detective squad became another benchmark in the development of the police procedural.
Dragnet marked a turn in the depiction of the police on screen. Instead of being corrupt laughingstocks, this was the first time police officers represented bravery and heroism. In their quest for authenticity, Dragnet's producers used real police cars and officers in their scenes. However, this also meant that in exchange, the LAPD could vet scripts for authenticity. The LAPD vetted every scene, which would allow them to remove elements they did not agree with or did not wish to draw attention to.
Over the next few years, the number of novelists who picked up on the procedural trend following Dragnet's example grew to include writers like Ben Benson, who wrote carefully researched novels about the Massachusetts State Police, retired police officer Maurice Procter, who wrote a series about North England cop Harry Martineau, and Jonathan Craig, who wrote short stories and novels about New York City police officers. Police novels by writers who would come to virtually define the form, like Hillary Waugh, Ed McBain, and John Creasey started to appear regularly.
On 2 December 1956, in the annual retrospective look at the previous year in crime fiction, New York Times Book Review mystery critic Anthony Boucher, noting the growing popularity of crime fiction in which the main emphasis was the realistic depiction of police work, suggested that such stories constituted a distinct subgenre of the mystery, and, crediting the success of Dragnet, as well as writers like John Creasey in his "J.J. Marric" persona, and Evan Hunter, in his "Ed McBain" persona, for the rise of this new form, coined the phrase "police procedural" to describe it.
As police procedurals became increasingly popular, they maintained this image of heroic police officers who are willing to bend the rules to save the day, as well as the use of police consultants. This would allow Hollywood to form a friendly relationship with law enforcement agencies who are also responsible for granting shooting permits. This, however, has garnered criticisms.

Written stories

French ''roman policier''

French romans policiers value induction over deduction, synthesis of character over analysis of crime.
The Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon feature a strong focus on the lead character, but the novels have always included subordinate members of his staff as supporting characters. Simenon, who had been a journalist covering police investigations before creating Maigret, gave the appearance of an accurate depiction of law enforcement in Paris. Simenon influenced later European procedural writers, such as Sweden's Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Baantjer.

1940: John Creasey/J. J. Marric

Perhaps ranking just behind McBain in importance to the development of the procedural as a distinct mystery subgenre is John Creasey, a prolific writer of many different kinds of crime fiction, from espionage to criminal protagonist. He was inspired to write a more realistic crime novel when his neighbor, a retired Scotland Yard detective, challenged Creasey to "write about us as we are". The result was Inspector West Takes Charge, 1940, the first of more than forty novels to feature Roger West of the London Metropolitan Police. The West novels were, for the era, an unusually realistic look at Scotland Yard operations, but the plots were often wildly melodramatic, and, to get around thorny legal problems, Creasey gave West an "amateur detective" friend who was able to perform the extra-procedural acts that West, as a policeman, could not.
In the mid-1950s, inspired by the success of television's Dragnet and a similar British TV series, Fabian of the Yard, Creasey decided to try a more down-to-earth series of cop stories. Adopting the pseudonym "J.J. Marric", he wrote Gideon's Day, 1955, in which George Gideon, a high-ranking detective at Scotland Yard, spends a busy day supervising his subordinates' investigations into several unrelated crimes. This novel was the first in a series of more than twenty books which brought Creasey his best critical notices. One entry, Gideon's Fire, 1961, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Mystery Novel. The Gideon series, more than any other source, helped establish the common procedural plot structure of threading several autonomous story lines through a single novel.