OK everyone, best and most realistic Police TV show ever?

Car 54 where are you ? Andy Griffith show / Mayberry, and In The Heat of the Night, all come to mind. But Dragnet, and The FBI were probably the best detective shows. Hill Street Blues the best police show of more recent times. For any police show to be realistic in the viewers mind they would need to understand the area and crimes the show portrays. Some people have no idea what big city police go through. Small town police have different issues to deal with most of the time. Todays world is not a good place for most police to work in. People used to respect the law and now many have no respect for anything, including themselves.

1

COPS and a close second is an old show called Police Story from back in the '70s I believe.

Homicide: Life on the Street: gritty police show set in Baltimore.

The Shield: Great filming techniques; great characters, both vilians and heros are equally sinister; you really want Mackey to get away with everyhthing he does.

NYPD Blue: a little too soap oera-ish; but the Sipowitz character (Dennis Franz) was awesome.

Those are my three favorites, but I always liked Ironside, Adam12 and Dragnet, too.

NYPD Blue is probably one of the most accurate in a lot of ways. None are truly acurate, since they need more drama and storyline than a real police officer encounters on a day to day basis.

most of the answers here are from US police officers-i remember a tv program here in the UK called the sweeney (cockney rhyming slang for the flying squad-a division of londons metropolitan police dealing with serious crime-from sweeney todd the demon barber of fleet street)-now THAT was an awesome program.

The DaVinci Inquest

Law & Order (original)

Cops

Barney Miller, it not only was very funny but showed what goes on on an average day of police life.

Law and order the original does an OK job.

The shield, except a bit too much action and corruption but close enough