Let’s face it, everyone loves a good crime drama. They are entertaining, attention grabbers, and some will keep you on the edge of your seat. The sad truth is, they are hardly ever realistic. Solving a crime takes time….a very long time. There are a few things that every crime drama seems to have that is just not very realistic. The thing is, people that are not in the field of criminology wouldn’t be able to point them out. Other things seem a little obvious.

First off, there is no such thing as a science lab that every police department has at their disposal. When there is blood collected from a crime scene, (or other bodily fluids) the sample has to be sent to a lab and then it sits on a waiting list. Each sample is typically tested in the order that the lab received them. So it is usually months before the detectives get results back. A lot of the time, results come back inconclusive. The problem is that a lot of the time, the DNA is a match to the victim, or that the results are inconclusive because DNA is only in the system if someone has committed a crime and been processed into the system. So if a woman was murdered and her killer bled on the scene, chances are that won’t help finding him if it was his first crime.

Secondly, there are not super hackers at the disposal of the department. For example, in Criminal Minds there is a character that stays in Quantico and finds information on people in seconds, at the request of her boss. This is not the case. Majority of cases are investigated by local detectives. These guys normally don’t have this type of equipment and personnel at their disposal. The simple fact is, if they need to know more about someone, they go to them directly or a family member.

Lastly, real life investigating is not so cut and dry. It seems that on television shows, detectives can “read people”. Yes, detectives can pick up on social queues that someone may be lying, but it isn’t some kind of sixth sense. Detectives are people too, it takes time to dig into the details of a case in order to find out who is responsible. A lot of the process of investigating crimes will bring you back to square one. A lot of the leads you get are going to be dead ends, and a lot of the people you try to question will refuse to speak to police. Also, many detectives are working on multiple cases at a time. A typical day does not involve talking to three or four people involving the same case. Rather it is getting a meeting with maybe one person about one case.

Along with this and many more discrepancies, investigating a case takes a very long time to do. My friend’s father was a detective in Harrisburg for 20 plus years and he told me that most cases took a year to get a conviction, or even more. With all that being said, they are still good shows! Comment below on what your favorite crime show is and name some things that you think might not be realistic.