The Copagandists | Ep 13: Jack Webb Pt 9

Realism and Reality in "Dragnet"

Back to Dragnet!

This time, we'll be discussing how the show achieved its much-vaunted sense of authenticity. Once we set out the behind the scenes processes, we'll turn to an analysis of the finished product, first by laying out some general trends across the show's 250+ episodes and then by zeroing in on two particular episodes. Finally, we'll end by comparing this fictional portrayal to the real LAPD as it operated in the 1950s.

Radio Realism

The radio show set the tone for all the Dragnet to follow. Although we've touched on some of this in previous episodes, I want to reiterate a few points here as a refresher. When Chief Horrall originally gave Webb the go-ahead, he'd stipulated a few rules of the game:

1. Only actual cases can be used and these must be presented factually. All cases must be adjudicated – that is, they must have been brought to trial and the defendants must have received judgment.

2. The Police Department must be presented as it actually operates, not in a more glamorous light.

3. Two specially appointed police advisers must clear all technical details.

4. All scripts must be passed by the City Attorney.¹

Once given the greenlight, Webb and company got to work. They spent a week touring the police headquarters, including visiting all the departments; they attended all police academy classes then offered; they absorbed explanations for the workings of all police equipment, “from the IBM machines employed in statistical work to the Thompson sub-machineguns which are used when extremely direct and positive action is demanded,” according a 1950 writeup of the show in True Detective Magazine.²

Producer William Rousseau emphasized at the time how much effort had gone into dialoging with the LAPD: “[Our team has] spent many hours conversing with and observing police detectives. They’ve discarded any previously conceived notions about how [police] should speak and act. [Instead, they] present the police detective as a hard-working, highly trained specialist, who captures law-breakers by working with the team rather than through individual flashes of genius.”³

Probably the most important thing Webb lifted from these experiences with the actual police was their language, their jargon. The collection of this jargon began early in the research process. While doing ride-alongs with Wynn, asking how they frisked suspects, kicked in doors, etc, Webb asked the officer, “Talk like a cop.” Wynn, according to a Time article, bristled at this, responding that cops, “don’t talk any different than you do.” Webb tried to be more specific: “Well, what would you do if you had a suspect?” Wynn replied, “Why, I’d go down to R&R and pull the package...” Webb grew animated, “That’s what I mean!” And they were off to the races.⁴

Once the scripts were completed, they were brought to life via techniques that augmented the authenticity even further. Dialogue was delivered staccato-style, without flash or melodrama. Sounds were recorded both in the studio and on location and then mixed in such a way as to convey a lived-in space.

Inside the recording booth, Webb and his team worked for realistic sounds. Recalled a member of the recording crew:

One of the key things was that we should stand back and not be speaking right into the microphone. [Webb] would have [engineer] Raoul Murphy throw the pot [master volume control] all the way open, so that we’d pick up sounds out on the street. Not loud, but you’d pick up sirens and that sort of thing. Jack wanted that. He said, ‘When you’re in a room with somebody, it isn’t all silent. You hear all kinds of background noises.’ He wanted that ambiance.’”⁵

Out in the wide world, the sound technicians made use of newly available tape recorders, forgoing reliance on stock sound effects already available at NBC. As one paper reported: “...all the sound effects on NBC’s new thriller series ‘Dragnet’ are special ones. The NBC production crew, headed by staff director Carl Fruener took a trek down to LA Police GHQ and tape recorded all the effects they need...”⁶

TV Realism, the Early Seasons

By the time Webb became interested in porting Dragnet over to television, William Parker had become chief of the LAPD. Parker had been wary of Dragnet when the show began. First, because the officers that worked as technical advisors on the show were being paid both by Webb and by the LAPD; to Parker, this gave the appearance of impropriety - and it irked him that cops were receiving a salary without doing any actual police work. More importantly, he worried about the relative independence that had been granted to Webb by the former chief.⁷

When Webb asked about making a Dragnet TV show, therefore, Parker insisted on a few changes to their arrangement. First, he wanted to ensure that LAPD officers who advised the show would only be able to do so on their own time, not while on duty. Next, he wanted to amend where the technical advisors came from; going forward, police advisers would now have to come directly from whatever department happened to be depicted in a particular episode. Finally, Parker insisted on exercising increased control. Whereas the radio show had been reviewed by the city attorney, now scripts would have to be submitted to the LAPD Public Information Division as well, who would give their permission to Webb in writing.⁸

A TV Guide article from April 1953 gives us a sense not only of how Webb tried to achieve authenticity in these early TV years but how he wanted these efforts framed to the press and public.

The article characterizes Webb as having “come to represent for the American public the ideal of the regular police detective…and with real police methods, as contrasted with fictional melodrama.” The article continues that Webb, “places every television scene as if it were a real police case.”⁹

It summarized the script-accuracy process as it had solidified by that point:

1. Webb and fellow writer John Robinson reviewed case histories furnished from police files;

2. They agreed on a case and prepare a script;

3. The script was submitted to the LAPD for “technical corrections,” and then the City Attorney’s office for “legal implications”;

4. Finally, “A policeman from the appropriate detail – robbery, homicide, forgery, etc. – stands by during the filming to check on authenticity.”¹⁰

The result of this process, TV Guide assures us, is a show in which, “…there is no dramatic license taken with the cases. Each is related factually, but in such a manner that even the criminal would not recognize his own case.” One detects a degree of marketing hyperbole here, but it’s certainly true that the little details of the show had startling accuracy, especially given the low production budgets and crunched timeframe allowed for filming.¹¹

Dragnet’s updated production process, a Parkerized version of the original radio SOP, would hold for several seasons. Then Webb hit a snag.

TV Realism, The Later Seasons

Eventually Webb exhausted his original crop of LAPD-approved stories. This prompted Webb and his associates to approach the LAPD for new material. With the approval of chief Parker, LA cops were encouraged to write about their on-duty experiences and submit their writings to the LAPD Information Division. There they were overseen by a publicity officer, which until 1956 was Gene Roddenberry.¹²

Roddenberry had had a long relationship with the police. His father had been a cop and his brother then worked as one; he also had a number of friends on the force. He himself joined the LAPD in 1949. He thrived within the LAPD because it gave him ample opportunity to hone his writing and speaking skills. He entered its Information Division and rose to the rank of sergeant. The LAPD kept him plenty busy. He wrote for the department's official magazine, The Beat; he gave public speeches advocating for traffic safety; and he even wrote speeches for chief Parker.¹³

Liberal Roddenberry, whatever his political differences with the far more right-wing Parker, believed in Parker and his LAPD. Indeed, he thought of the police as the bedrock of civilization. After the 1965 Watts Uprising, which caused the downfall of Parker's sterling public reputation, Roddenberry defended his old boss, writing to the mayor of LA:

[Parker and I] differed strongly and still differ strongly on certain philosophical concepts and issues. And yet, I assure you personally, and would welcome the opportunity to say it more publicly, that despite differences in social and political beliefs I could never find, nor do I believe any reasoning liberal could find, any disagreement or argument with William H. Parker on basic issues of morality, decency, and tolerance. It would be difficult for me to name a man I respect more as a fine professional and outstanding human being.¹⁴

As for Dragnet, Roddenberry threw himself into the chance to work on something related to Hollywood and television. Per Gene Roddenberry's official biographer: "Webb's production company, Mark VII Limited, paid $100 for a story, usually five or six paragraphs on a single sheet of paper. They always bought more stories than they shot, as many turned out to be too complicated to convert to the show's stylized and inexpensive format."¹⁵

Roddenberry would collect these cop stories, edit them into usable form, and then submit them to Webb. For his efforts the other cops paid him half of the $100 they received from Webb. This process served the show for the remainder of its run.

LAPD TV

The result of all this authenticity, as revealed by an analysis of IMDB plot summaries, is a Los Angeles crimescape primarily constituted of the following infractions:

This makes up about 60% of episodes. The remainder is mostly a smattering of gangs, alcohol, social services, assault/harassment, and juvenile delinquency. Crimes that we would consider big ticket items today, like terrorism, vice, arson, and rape, together constitute only 4.5% of episodes. Another major news item, police misconduct, makes up a mere 2.5% (7 episodes out of 276).

Of course, practically all of these investigations are cleared by the police - with a suspect in custody and on their way to stand trial. Sometimes the courts failed to convict - but that wasn't the LAPD's problem. They did their job.

Within the confines of all these murders, thefts, and disappearances, I'll focus on two episodes in particular that I think are illustrative of Dragnet's police: S1E12 "The Big Phone Call" and S2E8 "The Big Cop."

"The Big Phone Call" revolves around the robbery of a jewelry store that occurred nine months earlier. $20K worth of gems had been stolen. Friday's narration indicates that the cops have been at work on the case for months by the start of the episode. Now they've finally got a suspect to bring in for questioning.

After a back-and-forth with this suspect, the cops reveal that they'd actually been surveilling his jewelry store for a while. They've compiled daily reports of his comings and goings, who he's communicated with, everything he's done. The police have a precise command of information and can call up even the smallest details - a gun's serial number, the specific date and time of a robbery, how stolen goods were fenced - at the drop of a hat.

When the extent of this surveillance becomes apparent to the suspect, he exclaims that he thought wiretaps were illegal; the police respond with a little uhm, actually: they didn't use wiretaps, they installed dictographs in his office. Totally different!

Indeed, the police command of information is inextricably tied to their access to technology; at one point, the camera gazes upon the suspect, whose face has been completely surrounded by the tape recording of his deeds.

Early in the interrogation the suspect is relatively composed, quipping to the police, "You insist I’m a thief; I’m going to insist you prove it." He also threatens to sue the department. This does not rattle Friday, who responds simply, "We're not threatening you; we're giving you the facts." Friday knows these are empty threats. He knows that the police are in control of this situation. And we the audience know it too.

The break comes when the suspect reaches out for help. He is allowed to make a phone call. Instead of calling a lawyer he tries to reach his wife. When she does not answer, his will to resist evaporates. He starts to sputter about her boundless desire for more, more, more. Always wanted him to provide more for her. His confession soon pours out of him.

He is convicted of 1^st degree robbery, 5 years to life.

The major theme here is one of inevitability. Thanks to the months-long diligence of the police, they already know this man is guilty. As Friday barks before the episode is six minutes in:

You're a thief. You know it as well as we do...We just finished five months of leg work proving it...you engineered that hold up. We know who you got to do it; we know how it was carried out; we know how you plan on disposing of the diamonds; we know who your fence was; we know what the split was; we know what you did with part of the money; we know how much you got left.

The confession, therefore, isn't about proving guilt. That's been established. This episode is really about ritual: the ceremony of watching the police as they heap evidence upon a guilty person, weighing him down until he finally relents. It's a modern day version of the old Common Law practice of peine forte et dure ("hard and forceful punishment"), the crushing of a defendant who refused to plea.

***

S2E8 “The Big Cop” provides an excellent example of Webb’s handling of a very sensitive topic: police corruption. Regrettably, I have not been able to locate either the radio or the TV version of this episode, only a transcript of the radio episode.¹⁶ My analysis, therefore, will not be able to make use either of sound queues or camerawork, just the written dialogue and descriptions of the sound effects.

Friday's hunting an experienced gang of thieves. They've seized some $60,000 in merchandise and the department is feeling the pressure to catch them.

The announcer hints that something is amiss right from the start: "You're a detective sergeant...you're assigned to Burglary Detail. A well-organized gang launches a campaign of burglaries in your city. They hit stores, warehouses. You set trap after trap for them but they seem to know every move you make. Your job....get 'em. [emphasis mine]"¹⁷

Friday and his partner get a lead from an informant but it goes nowhere. Thirty days later and still no progress. Informants turn up nothing; surveillance of stores and warehouses catch zilch; and extra night patrols fail as well. Friday narrates, "It seemed the faster we moved on the gang, the farther away they got."¹⁸

The chief of detectives bears down on Friday for progress. Then comes a break: patrol finds an abandoned truck with crates from one of the warehouses that'd been hit. They run the vehicle registration and get a name; from there they get his rap sheet, address, and relatives. They can't find the truck's owner but they track down his brother and have a chat at his place of work: a rodeo. From the brother they get the name of another associate with a history of burglary and grand theft auto.

Then another burglary. But this time, patrol says they spotted a man near the scene right before it happened. He flashed a police ID and claimed to be on special assignment. Friday and his partner discover that this cop works out of Hollywood Division. No good reason for him to be near the warehouse that night...

After a commercial break for Fatima cigarettes, Friday narrates to the audience:

There are at least two criminals for whom a police department will spend any amount of effort to apprehend. One is the armed thug who shoots down a police officer. Obviously the man is dangerous because if he wouldn't hesitate to shoot an armed officer he wouldn't hesitate to shoot an unarmed citizen. The second type is the police officer who betrays his trust as a public servant to work hand-in-hand with the criminal. He is equally dangerous because of the harm and the disgrace and the contempt for law he can inflict while hiding behind his uniform...Besides bringing shame to the rest of the department, the bad cop violates the most obvious standards of conduct: he becomes the very person he has sworn to hunt down and apprehend - a common criminal. [Emphasis mine].¹⁹

Friday and his partner visit the cop's home and speak to his wife. She thinks he's been working an extra job on the weekends, in addition to his full police schedule. She allows the detectives to search her husband's things. They find fur coats that don't belong to the wife - and love letters from another woman!

The cop returns home, gets into a fight with the detectives, but is eventually hauled in for questioning. This cop pleads for special treatment, but Friday declares that he'll be, "questioned in the same room and in the same way any suspect's questioned." The cop then changes tactics, tries to weasel out of the jam by bargaining: immunity in exchange for everything he knows about the gang of thieves.

At this chief of detectives Thad Brown (a real cop) climaxes the episode with a speech delivered to his corrupt compatriot:

You’re a bad cop, Mister. You’ll be all over the front pages tonight and tomorrow morning…. They’re not gonna read about four thousand five hundred other cops, the guys who walked their beats last night, the guys who risked their lives, who did their jobs the way they were trained and the way they’re hired to do. They’re not gonna read about millions of man-hours turned in by thousands of honest cops, here and all over the country. People ain’t gonna read about cops who worked 40 honest years… The people who read it in the papers, they’re gonna overlook the fact that we got you, that we washed our own laundry and we cleared this thing up. They’re gonna overlook all the good; they’ll overlook every last good cop in the country. But they’ll remember you. Because you’re a bad cop. [emphasis mine]²⁰

Both the cop and the rest of the gang are successfully convicted of Second Degree Burglary. The cop served the full sentence, 15 years, then died a year later of cancer.

The theme of honor dominates this episode, for police corruption above all else is framed as a blight on the prestige, the image, the honor, and thus the effectiveness of every police officer. This is truly a cop's version of events, for society at large is only the victim because corruption hampers the ability of good cops to protect it.

A Dissenting Voice

A few paragraphs ago I quoted from Gene Roddenberry’s official biographer. Did you catch what he said about the making of Dragnet? Webb purchased more stories than he ended up shooting because real cases were sometimes "too complicated" to boil down to a half hour show.

This hints at an unreality lurking in the margins of Dragnet's scripts. How simplified were these real cases, anyhow?

Writer Ken Kolb, who penned a dozen teleplays towards the end of Dragnet's original run, elaborated on the problem of simplification at some length. Given how much praise the show has received over the years for its accuracy and authenticity, it is worth quoting Kolb’s heterodox representation of the show’s relationship to facts at length:

The whole thing devolved into creating a credible villain and then letting Jack filet him alive in the final scene. You wanted to get viewers to empathize with the victim, to detest the criminal, then watch as they melt down in front of your very eyes. An intelligence officer from the L.A.P.D. would come out once a week and offer us interesting things he’d pulled from the files, things he thought might make a good episode. So we worked from these suggestions. They were based on actual files, so we were careful not to mention names, to alter it enough that nobody could sue for libel. You also have to keep in mind that there isn’t much that comes out of the police files that fits neatly into a half hour. So to a large extent we invented, using real cases as the basis of each story. The hard part was to provide Friday and Smith with credible police work, to answer the question, How did they figure this out? In Los Angeles, most crimes are solved by the cops paying informers for what they know. I would say that 85 percent of the cases that I saw from the police files, they paid somebody to tell them who did it, then they’d go and arrest them, but that doesn’t make for good television.²¹

In case you glazed over that brick wall of text, Kolb essentially claimed that the writers' objectives were to get the audience to:

1. Empathize with the victim;

2. Detest the criminal;

3. Witness the ultimate triumph of the police.

Although scripts were based on real cases, writers had to invent "to a large extent" because the contents of a police file didn't fit neatly into a 30-minute yarn. Critically, Kolb characterized the hardest part of the job as finding "credible police work" for Friday and friends to do. Real police work was mostly about snitches and stool pigeons - but that didn't make for very good entertainment...

Parker's LAPD

Having detailed the authenticity of the show and how that played out on the macro and micro level, let us turn for a moment to consider the real LAPD of the 1950s. A few statistics give us a sense of the department's true nature.

According to the LAPD's 1959 Annual Report, the department cleared 37.1% of its cases.²² The breakdown is as follows:

This is substantially less than the nearly perfect clearance rate presented on Dragnet. Moreover, we should remember that just because a crime has been cleared by the police, that doesn't mean that the right person was taken into custody or that anyone was ultimately found guilty and sentenced for the crime. Ergo, even the LAPD's impressive 96.3% clearance rate for homicide doesn't actually tell us anything about either the quality of their investigations or the strength of their cases. It only tells us that they almost always found someone to put in prison.

Although this report does not break down the percentage of time officers spent on various duties, it does provide a breakdown of the LAPD's budget.²³ Expenses for 1959 break down as follows:

Dragnet only focused on the actions of LAPD detectives, which accounted for a mere 14.5% of the department's budget. At the very least then, and without even touching on whether Dragnet's detectives spent their time like their real counterparts, we can at least see that the show presented audiences with an extremely narrow slice of police life. Whatever Webb's claims to avoid melodrama, he could not avoid drama - and the easiest source of that was certainly not in the Records and Identification department!

Finally, Dragnet's cops are supposed to be depicting chief Parker's reformed department of professional crime fighters. Gone (supposedly) are the days of graft, corruption, and poor discipline. The show does present aspects of Parker's reforms accurately: the military hierarchy, the structure of the various divisions, the interplay between administrative, investigative, and patrol staff.

One thing that Dragnet completely elides, however, is Parker's aggressive police tactics.

Partly because Parker had fewer cops per capita than other comparable cities, he pushed his cops to act quickly and boldly to make up for their fewer numbers. This could have pretty gruesome consequences. A few examples that never made it into Webb's show:

• In January 1951 the narcotics squad forced a suspect to swallow an emetic in order to recover evidence they asserted he had swallowed. They pleaded with the judge that they had done so only for fear of the man’s safety.

• In 1952 police arrested jazz singer Jimmy Witherspoon on suspicion of drunk driving, refused to give him a sobriety test, and then physically assaulted him.

• In 1956 officer Jack Tugwell (you can’t make these names up, I swear) shot Patrick Baner in the back. The officer claimed it happened during a fight; Baner and other witnesses said otherwise.

  

  Officer Tugwell, whose daddy was also an LAPD cop…

  

  The fine print here reads: “Patrick Baner shows investigating team his position when shot"."

In point of fact, this wasn’t the first time that officer Tugwell had perhaps used force unreasonably. Only a year earlier, he’d fired upon a vehicle while off duty.

Parker suspended the officer pending an investigation. A review board of fellow cops castigated Tugwell for lying on his police report, but despite the inconsistencies of his story, and his history of abusing the authority vested in an officer of the peace, he was still found to be a fit enforcer of LA law.

After more than one hundred days of suspension, mostly for lying on his police report, Tugwell returned to work, only to voluntarily resign in November of 1956 before the publication of a psychiatric evaluation completed upon his reinstatement. Baner later sued Tugwell for damages, saying that the department had known Tugwell to be, “reckless, neurotic, erratic, unreliable, brutal, excitable and trigger happy” even before the shooting occurred.²⁴ He settled for an undisclosed amount in November 1959.²⁵

Throughout this period, Parker's cops also enforced de facto segregation, despite the fact that this was illegal under California law. Minorities were a favorite target - and rarely depicted on Dragnet in any capacity.²⁶

Conclusion

This analysis of Dragnet's authenticity, including the comparison of the show to the real world, is not meant to imply that cop shows need to be 100% accurate. Dragnet was entertainment; no reasonable person should be surprised at poetic license or artistic liberty in the service of drama. But Dragnet was advertised not just as entertainment but as an educational tool. It wasn't just drama but authentic drama pulled from real case files. It was popularly understood to be informing the public about what really happened within the universe of the LAPD.

As summarized by the show’s most recent and detailed scholar, Claudia Calhoun:

Dragnet contributed in significant ways to the context in which audiences interacted with the criminal justice system. It even sometimes became a means through which the criminal justice system articulated its expectations of its citizens. Because of Dragnet’s commitment to its form of storytelling, if you believed its claims, simply listening or watching the show was an education in the real work of the police. At its height, then, up to forty million Americans took part in thirty minutes of civic education on a weekly basis, learning from Dragnet how the criminal justice system worked.²⁷

Comparing the imperfections of real life to the thin slice of policing depicted on the show, therefore, can tell us a lot about what the show's creators and backers were trying to communicate to the US public. It is to that subject that we will turn next time.

1. Joe Beck, “Dragnet,” True Detective Magazine, March 25, 1950, 72

2. Joe Beck, “Dragnet,” True Detective Magazine, March 25, 1950, 72

3. Joe Beck, “Dragnet,” True Detective Magazine, March 25, 1950, 72

4. “Jack, Be Nimble!,” Time, March 15, 1954, Vol. LXIII No. 11, https://time.com/archive/6794861/jack-be-nimble/

5. Michael Hayde, My Name’s Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb, Nashville, TN: Cumberland House Publishing, 2001, 35-36

6. Channing Hadlock, “Radio Wave,” The Southwest Wave, June 26, 1949

7. Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve : the LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams, New York: Pocket Books, 1994, 123

8. Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve : the LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams, New York: Pocket Books, 1994, 125

9. “Jack Webb’s Dragnet,” TV Guide April 10, 1953, 5

10. “Jack Webb’s Dragnet,” TV Guide April 10, 1953, 6

11. “Jack Webb’s Dragnet,” TV Guide April 10, 1953, 7

12. Roger Sabin, Ronald Wilson, Linda Speidel, Brian Faucette and Ben Bethell, Cop Shows: A Critical History of Police Dramas on Television, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015, 18-19

13. David Alexander, Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry, New York: ROC Books, 1994, 115-116, 124-125

14. David Alexander, Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry, New York: ROC Books, 1994, 115-116, 126 fn17

15. David Alexander, Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry, New York: ROC Books, 1994, 132

16. Some collections of Dragnet's radio episodes purport to include this episode, but all the ones I've found have simply mislabeled the episode "The Big Set-Up." The transcript can be found here: "Transcript for 'The Big Cop'," Generic Radio Workshop Script Library, accessed 6/7/2025, https://www.genericradio.com/show/FLFLA5YYGKZ

17. "Transcript for 'The Big Cop'," Generic Radio Workshop Script Library, accessed 6/7/2025, https://www.genericradio.com/show/FLFLA5YYGKZ

18. "Transcript for 'The Big Cop'," Generic Radio Workshop Script Library, accessed 6/7/2025, https://www.genericradio.com/show/FLFLA5YYGKZ

19. "Transcript for 'The Big Cop'," Generic Radio Workshop Script Library, accessed 6/7/2025, https://www.genericradio.com/show/FLFLA5YYGKZ

20. "Transcript for 'The Big Cop'," Generic Radio Workshop Script Library, accessed 6/7/2025, https://www.genericradio.com/show/FLFLA5YYGKZ

21. Douglas Snauffer, Crime Television, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006, 25

22. Los Angeles Police Department 1959 Annual Report, https://www.lapdhistory.net/annual-reports, 12

23. Los Angeles Police Department 1959 Annual Report, https://www.lapdhistory.net/annual-reports, 33

24. “Shot in Back by Police, Man Sues for $200,000,” LA Times, November 22, 1956

25. “Shot-in-Back ‘56 Police Case Suit Settled,” LA Times, November 6, 1959

26. Alisa Sarah Kramer, William H. Parker and the Thin Blue Line: Politics, Public Relations and Policing in Postwar Los Angeles, Washington DC: American University PhD Disseration, 2007, 109-110

27. Claudia Calhoun, Only the Names Have Been Changed: Dragnet, the Police Procedural, and Postwar Culture, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2022, 93