I didn't want to go yammering in the replies for this thread so I'm breaking off to my own timeline to talk about the difference between cop shows and actual police.
Full disclosure, I'm in the UK so our cops are a little different to those in the states. https://twitter.com/jaythenerdkid/status/1275625792257417216

I can think of 7 interactions I've had with the police. 3 of them were reporting crimes, the other 4... Well we'll get to those.
The three crimes: one was our house getting burgled, one was the time I got mugged, and once was more a lost item but I needed a crime number.

They never found the burglar, they never caught the muggers, my lost handbag never got handed in. I'm willing to concede that last one wasn't really their fault.
But as I learned, the police don't really invest much resource into investigation.

When you see a cop show on TV they take fingerprints and look for evidence, they build photo fits of the suspects, try to figure out motive and MO, it's a whole process, hence the term "police procedural". But when I got crimed I saw none of that.

I was a kid when our house got burgled and the main result of it was being informed that our door wasn't secure enough. They never caught the burglar and we spent about £600 on a new front door and an alarm system.

The mugging involved a police visit to my university dorm and an interview at the station. The interviewer seemed mostly interested in the ethnicity of the suspects and asked about 3 times if I thought it was a racially motivated crime (it wasn't, they just wanted my purse)

The lost handbag... Well I was a doofus and left it on the roof of our car when I went into a party. In the party I got paranoid and loudly accused the one person there thatI didn't know of having stolen it. I wasn't even that drunk. Let's move on from that.

So I know what you're thinking. If they don't investigate crimes, what do they do all day? The other 4 times I have had encounters with the police are more reflective of what I think actual police work entails.

Event 1: after uni I spent a couple years living with my first car owning gf and we loved going for night drives to 24 hour shops for snacks.
We got stopped several times by the police asking why we were out at that time. We weren't speeding or driving badly, just out late.

Event 2: one time she said I should have a go at driving, so we went to a big empty car park at night and I had a little test drive, like they do in the movies.
Turns out my poor clutch control was enough to rouse the suspicions of a cop car that was parked up by the store.

What's interesting about that time was I could tell they were trying to intimidate me with lines like "ignorance of the law is not freedom from it", but they didn't have a leg to stand on because it wasn't a public road. They still tried it on though.

Event 3: I was saving this one even though it was before those other 2. We were on our way to a christening during that fuel shortage in the late 90s and there was a queue of traffic all the way up the street to the petrol station.

We could see all the way down the road one way, so we knew nothing was coming but a bus blocked our view the other way. Shouldn't have mattered but a cop car was going full speed the wrong way up that side of the road and we had a head on collision.

Our car was totalled, just totally fucked, the entire front end was just crumpled and the engine got damaged. Other drivers were asking us if they could siphon our tank because we weren't going to use it
Then the cops arrived.

So the driver of this cop car that hit us at full speed, going the wrong way down a residential road towards a blind junction without sirens or lights on clearly had the composure to realise they had fucked up massively, and immediately called for backup.
And backup came.

I forget exactly how many but at least 3 other cars turned up, started grilling my dad about his driving, asking other motorists to give their version of events.
Of course the road was one big stationary queue and they were bored. They saw EVERYTHING.
That cop was in the wrong.

When they realised they were in the wrong, that my dad wasn't drunk and had taken the junction sensibly, in lieu of an apology for destroying our car they said we should try to be more careful, and this time they would let us off the hook.
Teenage me was outraged.

I thought they should offer compensation for the car or at least discipline the driver, but later my dad took me aside and said that you just had to let the police get away with this shit because if you tried to fight it they would make your life hell and never leave you alone.

The last interaction I hope to ever have with the police was when a retired police officer joined our local magic club. He seemed cordial enough and even invited me to his birthday party.
I went along and had a slice of cake, we all did a few magic tricks. It was nice.

Then sitting around with drinks he started to reminisce about how police work was so much better when you could just beat a 'young lad' up in an alleyway to set them on the straight and narrow.
I was shocked, mostly that he had actually said that out loud. I wanted to know more.

I asked why he wouldn't just arrest said youths for a punishment that was, you know... legal.
He said that if they arrest them they have to go through the courts and it's a whole thing and if the kid (he was saying 'kid' at this point) gets a criminal record it'll ruin his life.

I'm not sure if he honestly believed that being assaulted with a truncheon was more humane than going to court, but rather than unpack all of that I instead asked "If you didn't go through the courts, how would you know the guy was actually guilty?"
His reply?
"Ah, you can tell"

It's worth mentioning at this point that our magic club also has its fair share of mentalists, a few of whom have been known to do psychic readings, tarot and the like.
This ex cop was one such person, and I asked him a while after this party how he pulled that off.

See I can do tricks that look like I'm reading your mind or predicting the future but ultimately I wouldn't send a person away thinking I'd actually read their fortune with these kinds of methods. That would be unethical. So how did he do it, how did he justify that to himself?

That was the day he told me he was actually psychic. Like, one magician to another, no bullshit, he said he could sense energy from people and he used that in his readings.
Somehow this made "You can just tell when someone is guilty" seem even more sinister.

Just to collate this in a single tweet were talking about a guy who was convinced he could psychically sense bad vibes off people and would use this sixth sense to choose youngsters to physically assault because he thought it was a net benefit to them.

Now, astoundingly characters like that never end up in cop shows. Nor do the police who turn up to another cops idiotic car crash to intimidate the other driver into backing down.
There also aren't many shows about the police who pull over every driver they see at night.

Because TV shows about actual police work would be dull, unsympathetic, and kind of bizarre. Like who's your protagonist in a show about cops teaming up against regular citizens to stop them exercising their rights?

So instead cop shows invent better criminals. Sometimes you get cat burglars, sometimes a diamond heist, drug traffickers or child sex slave ring, but mostly it's murders. Serial killers, assassin's, professional hits, gang rivalries, etc.

This is because in order to sell the fiction that the cops are an unquestionable force for good, you need to constantly remind the audience that the criminals are bad. Irredeemably bad, to the point where if they end up at gunpoint, the audience is hoping they will die.

Brooklyn Nine Nine walks a tightrope because it often portrays criminals in a sympathetic light, even to the point of having one of the detectives befriend his one time criminal nemesis in later seasons. It also frames many of the police as thoroughly unpleasant people.

When you look at the most popular episodes of the show, they're not even doing police work. They're playing office politics with another district, competing in the jimmyjab games to pass time or organising their own heists.

Think about that for a second. The most iconic and well loved episodes of a police procedural are the ones where the protagonists plan their own crimes.

There was a UK show not entirely unlike Brooklyn Nine Nine. It was called The Thin Blue Line and it had many similar traits. Inept officers who could pull it together at the last minute, the cast was diverse with a couple of non white cops and a couple of women.

There were no openly gay police in it but one of the guys was very camp because that's just how TV worked back then.
The funny thing is, I can't remember a single crime from that whole show. It was almost entirely set inside the station.

I'm sure there were crimes in the show, but that's not what it was about.
It was about the stereotype of the British bobbies getting their hats knocked off and chasing a kid down the street (though it left out the part about them getting roughed up in an alleyway).

I think this is why shows centering around criminals are so popular, like Breaking Bad, Ozark and Better Call Saul. In order to correctly portray police on TV, they have to be cast as the villains.