"Look around. No matter where you are, at any second... it could happen to you. Because desperate criminals use desperate measures, no matter who gets in the way. For the next sixty minutes, you'll get a close up view of what officers see every day. You'll ride shotgun in the most terrifying chases on the road. You'll feel the heat of the most explosive acts of criminal insanity ever captured on tape. Much of this footage has never been viewed by the public. Police and news agencies send us their most shocking videos so that you can know what they know: not to let your guard down, even for an instant, could mean disaster. So crank up your TV, and don't turn away, because real life happens in the blink of an eye."
— Introduction (season 4)
World's Wildest Police Videos is a series, broadcast on Fox from 1998 to 2001, with a revival in 2012 by Spike TV, showcasing videos of police work in various parts of the world. Video footage of car chases, subsequent arrests, robberies, riots, hostage situations, and various other crimes appear on the show. The series is hosted by former LAPD officer John Bunnell, who occasionally relates his own experiences in law enforcement to the viewer while discussing the clips.
World's Wildest Police Tropes:
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Usually averted but played straight with officer Michelle Jeter, who finds herself on the receiving end of a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from a fleeing suspect. Apart from being fitted with a metal plate to replace the damaged parts of her skull, her injuries heal pretty well and within five months of the incident she looks as good as new. Lampshaded by Jeter herself in the interview, who notes that a lot of her colleagues at the time of the recording expected her to be covered in stitches a la Frankenstein's Monster and were instead surprised by how clean she appeared.
- Drives Like Crazy: Unsurprisingly given the nature of the series, a lot of criminals involved in vehicular pursuits drive pretty recklessly, with some being worse than others.
- Drunk Driver: A frequent occurrence in the series is officers having to deal with intoxicated drivers causing chaos on the road.
- Football Hooligans: Season 2 Episode 2 features footage of the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster
, where fans of Liverpool F.C. clashed with fans of Italian team Juventus, eventually cornering them against a stadium wall which subsequently collapsed under the Juventus fans' weight, with the local Belgian police quickly being overpowered and unable to stop the chaos. - Get into Jail Free: One of the videos has a guy who was already in jail, but was going to be released soon. He suddenly jumps up and decks an officer that was casually walking by and was carted back to his cell on new charges. Apparently, his gang thought he was a snitch, and he was afraid that they would kill him on the outside.
- I Did What I Had to Do: On the rare occasion where lethal force is employed, Sheriff Bunnell makes it very clear it is only to be used as a last resort, when all other options have failed. This is demonstrated in a clip where a group of officers are facing down an Ax-Crazy gunman who most certainly would have killed them all along with nearby civilians had they not intervened.
- The Mentally Disturbed: Quite a number of clips involve police facing suspects with severe mental illness. In one such video, a man in Seattle suffering from paranoid schizophrenia begins threatening nearby passersby with a samurai sword, believing himself to be possessed by demons, with the sword being his method of slaying said demons. Using various non-lethal weapons including a high-powered water cannon, the police are eventually able to subdue the man and he is subsequently taken to a nearby mental hospital, where Sheriff Bunnell notes he will be able to face his inner demons with a doctor instead of a sword.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: A routine traffic stop quickly turns into one of these for officer Michelle Jeter, with the suspect subjecting her to a brutal beating before fleeing the scene. The beating is so severe, in fact, that it can't be shown on screen, and it is only thanks to the intervention of a nearby driver that her superiors are able to send an ambulance, thus allowing her to survive her ordeal. The man is later caught and charged for her assault.
- Shout-Out: After being fitted a a metal plate in her skull following a nasty beating by a suspect, officer Michelle Jeter notes in her interview that her co-workers now call her "RoboCop" as a result.
- Slasher Smile: An Ax-Crazy gunman gives one of these to the camera before going down in a hail of bullets from police.
- Stupid Crooks: Quite a few of the criminals featured in the clips aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. As Sherriff Bunnell puts it in Season 4 Episode 7, "Some criminals out there are so bold, and their getaways so ridiculous, it makes you think that somewhere deep inside, they just want to get caught." In the clip that follows said quote, a car thief not only steals the most easily visible vehicle in town, but also then drives into a narrow winding road with no turn-offs and steep cliffs on both sides, where he eventually loses his focus on the road before finally wiping out and getting arrested.
- Would Hurt a Child: Some of the most intense situations officers must face involve criminals who are willing to put children in harm's way. In Season 5 Episode 12, a drugged-up man in the Philippines takes an 11 year old girl hostage at knifepoint. After several failed attempts to resolve the situation peacefully, police are forced to take drastic measures and shoot the man from behind, with the man subsequently dying from his wounds while the girl escapes relatively unharmed.
