History PoliceAreUseless / LiveActionTV

* ''Series/TheSopranos''. Apparently there is no law enforcement in the state of New Jersey. Tony and his crew are endlessly worrying about the FBI, but there's never a hint of state and local cops investigating them for their various crimes. It's hinted and shown that the Mafia has influence and leverage over the civil servants who can control the local police (e.g. Zellman) and some cops are on the Mafia's payroll; Bobby mentions a local cop as one of his sources of information. Season 1 explores this with Vin Makazian, the detective who feeds information to Tony, and yet Tony treats him with contempt and not as a valuable asset.
** The shooting of the waiter in that one Season 4 episode is the most surprising. Some guy goes out to confront two known gangsters, gets shot and there is no fallout for Chris and Paulie whatsoever. You would think such a case would quickly catch up to them, as one can't just pop somebody in a popular restaurant parking lot in Atlantic City like it's the 1920s. Not to mention a whole table of mobsters, including the boss of New Jersey, several of his capos, and the underboss of the Lupertazzis, spent the rest of the evening gambling in the same building, AFTER having eaten a meal served by the waiter who was found dead. Not to mention other spur of the moment crimes it wouldn't have been hard for the police to trace back to the gang, like the Pine Barrens; JT Dolan, Chris's sponsor; Tony killing Ralph; Janice and Ritchie; the guy Vito hits with his car on his way back to New Jersey. The only ones not really drawing heat are Ralphie and Ritchie, since nobody except maybe their spouses would report them missing, but most of the others, especially the ones who were civilians and not in the life should have drawn so much heat.

** This makes sense to anyone who knows New Jersey politics; the state gives local government a lot of power and has a very town-centric mindset; areas that might be one municipality elsewhere often form several in New Jersey. Where Tony and his gang operates (Essex and Hudson counties) is essentially a city of 1.4 million people divided in 34 separate municipalities.[[note]]The two counties' land area is roughly equivalent to Queens plus Manhattan (i.e. smaller than New York City) and only a bit larger than Philadelphia, with a population of 1.5 million, and Philly is geographically small (of the top 20 largest cities in the US, only San Francisco has a smaller land area). To put it another way: One of the nation's largest and densest cities is in New Jersey; it's just that it's divided into 34 municipalities in two counties.[[/note]] Consequently, police forces are weakened by division: the towns with the most crime tend to be the poorest and most underfunded (and therefore most likely to be corrupt), while the ones with the cash to fund a good police force tend to be low-crime anyway, with cops mostly focusing on traffic violations and adolescent shenanigans rather than Mob business. So more generally, organized crime had, thanks to RICO, really become a main focus for the Feds by the 1990s, more or less preempting the local law-enforcement efforts.

* ''Series/TheWire'' plays this for drama: the Baltimore Police Department, like the rest of the city's institutions, is dysfunctional at the deepest level. It has cops who are corrupt, self-serving, lazy, brutal, or just plain stupid. But even the ones who take their job seriously and want to change Baltimore for the better are hamstrung by a system where petty drug arrests are prized over serious investigations, and where even acknowledging that murders ''happened'' is discouraged if the department's yearly clearance rate is too low.

** Arguably becomes worse in the middle of Season 3 when, after only a few weeks of Oliver being absent, Central City's crime rates skyrockets and the city government withdraws the police from the Glades after being threatened.

* [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in the episode "The Haunted Mask II" of ''Series/{{Goosebumps}}'': "The police don't help, Chuck. All the police in the world don't help."

** In "The Gary Grill", two cops accuse Drake and Josh, high school students in California, of stealing a bunch of grills from ''New Jersey'', even ''mocking'' them when they try to explain what actually happened. Fortunately, they do release them upon finding the real thieves.

* Oh so very much in ''Series/{{Arrow}}'', but especially in Season 2. As they seem to more interested in catching the vigilante than the people stealing supplies from the hospital. Then show they rather not let the public know a SerialKiller is on the loose and arrest Lance for getting involved.

* Oh so very much in ''Series/{{Arrow}}'', but especially in Season 2. As they seem to more interesting in catching the vigilante than the people stealing supplies from the hospital. Then show they rather not let the public know a SerialKiller is on the loose and arrest Lance for getting involved.

* Oh so very much in ''Series/{{Arrow}}'', but especially in Season 2. As they seem to more interesting in catching the vigilante than the people stealing supplies from the hospital. Then show they rather not let the public know a SerialKiller on the loose and arrest Lance for getting involved.

** In "The Gary Grill", two cops accuse Drake and Josh, high school students in California, of stealing a bunch of grills from ''New Jersey''. Fortunately, they do release them upon finding the real thieves.

* Partly justified in ''Series/TheFlash2014'', where the Central City Police Department is simply unequipped to handle all the different metahumans that seem to threaten the city every week. Partly averted in the episode, where Captain Cold (Leonard Snart) returns, now partnered with Heat Wave (Mick Rory). Both of them are normal humans, albeit with fancy guns. Cisco ends up equipping their riot shields to handle Leo's FreezeRay (it helps that Cisco invented the weapon in the first place), but they, apparently, can't handle Mick's flamethrower. The cops then retreat and form a perimeter, allowing the Flash to stop the criminals for them, although Eddie Thawne does intervene at one point to save the Flash. Deploy sharpshooters to take out dangerous criminals from a safe distance? Use tear gas or rubber bullets to disable them? Who needs that? Just let the Flash do it.