Thinking about L&O: Sex Crimes reminds me one thing my Dad, the former urban prosecutor, taught me: never talk to the cops without a lawyer. Not for any reason.

“Are cops that bad?” I asked him at the time. We probably first had this conversation when I was 16 or so, years after he had finished working as a prosecutor.

“No, not at all. Maybe about 5% are really good, honest guys who are doing it because they care about justice. And maybe 2% are real scumbags; evil pieces of shit. But the rest of them are just doing their job. Which means they don’t give a shit about you. If you fit what they want, they’ve don’t really care if you’re guilty or not. You’re guilty enough.”

“Oh.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re bad guys. But they’re not your friends either. And they’ll lie in a second about why they want to talk to you. So always get a lawyer.”

“What if they say it’s an emergency or something?”

“That’s almost always bullshit. If it’s an emergency, you’ll know it without them needing to tell you.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Never admit to anything.”

In a similar vein, my Dad can’t stand cop shows, because they always glorify cops as they piss all over the 4th Amendment. The Sipowicz character on NYPD Blue was always a scumbag, more interested in pounding on suspects instead of justice -- even after he sobered up. Even the smoother characters, like Briscoe on Law & Order, are exactly the kind of cops my Dad was talking about. Nice enough guys, doing a hard job, but not on your side. But the very nature of these shows means these cops (and prosecutors) are presented heroically, as doing the right thing in virtually all circumstances. Which is basically nonsense.

Doing a hard job, but not on your side. Which is why you always call a lawyer.

(Oh, and: the Chris Meloni character on L&O: Sex Crimes is just awful: the Kenneth Starr of TV cops, only heavily armed. He would have been the first guy to instigate things at Abu Ghraib. Just a foul, foul character. I pray for him to catch a bullet every time I watch that show.)