Cop and detective stories

What is your favorite Cop or detactive Movie you've seen anons?

I think The first Dirty Harry movie and The Great Mouse Detective are my two favorites at the moment.

TGMD was something I watched as a kid that really blew me away in how it took the relatively mundane setting of a city, and transformed it into this vast and incredible land just by doing something as simple as changing the size scale of the characters.
Also it was fun following Basil and Dawson on their adventure as well as Ratigan in his gleefully villainous scheme.

Dirty Harry on the other hand had a valence of cowboy cop action, hard work, bad choices, and heroic and vile behavior that made for a very interesting story. Again like TGMD not terribly realistic, but it painted a world, this time a stylized 1970's San Fansico, and told an interesting story in it.

I supppse they aren't anime but that have a lot of inspiration for players and/or GMs.

So anons. What cop and detective movies (or short series) do you like.

I feel like you should have put in at least a bit more effort to make this Veeky Forums related.

So; when running games revolving around detectives I tend to take inspiration mostly from older novels, like Sherlock Holmes. Iirc there's a difference between British and American detective stories whereby the British ones are more likely to be based around solving a puzzle in a contained environment and American ones are more likely to involve the ability to navigate one's environment. Not a black and white distinction obviously but I find the British style works better for mystery. RPGs

>American ones are more likely to involve the ability to navigate one's environment

how do you mean?

Knowledge of contacts, people's relationships, important places, all the sorts of things that get collectively referred to as being 'streetwise'. Compare to someone like Sherlock who had a healthy amount of that but most of his actual solves relied on academic knowledge.

>I find the British style works better for mystery RPG.

How does that work? Wouldn't such a method leave you stranded with little else to do or to go after one to 2 failed perception or investigation or charisma checks?

use a GUMSHOE system, no chance of missing an essential clue due to bad luck, only missing extra information due to poor problem solving

La Isla Minima/The Tiny Island, Rodriguez, 2014 (cannot recommend this highly enough--the mystery, the characters, the mood, the cinematography are all outstanding)
True Detective season 1, Fukunaga, 2014 (do not waste one minute of your life on season two, instead see--)
L.A. Confidential, Hanson, 1997 (read Ellroy's novel first and be impressed by the difficulty and quality of the adaptation)
The Long Goodbye, Altman, 1973 (very 1970s LA)
The French Connection, Friedkin, 1971 (very 1970s NYC)
The Maltese Falcon, Huston, 1941

I also really like Endeavor, the prequel to Inspector Morse, but I have seen only the first two seasons.

Cop/PI-adjacent is the excellent Three Days of the Condor (Pollack, 1975.)

Use Gumshoe of course, or Unknown Armies with the supernatural stripped out and Gumshoe's clue-finding stuck on.

BLOWOUT is is the best John Travolta film ever made and one of the better detective stories but Travolta isn't a cop and is the sound guy for a horror studio who stumbles upon a political assassination and coverup.

How long is the novel?

>use a GUMSHOE system, no chance of missing an essential clue due to bad luck, only missing extra information due to poor problem solving

tell me more.

I've always loved the 70s cop films made in Italy, of which a great many starred the guy in the pic (Maurizio Merli) who gets sick of corruption/terrorists/other criminals and has to break out the arse kicking shoes and the Beretta.

An entire crew of Maurizio Merlis could be done with, say, Cyberpunk 2020. But instead of the chrome, big guns and a flying panda car you get a an awesome moustache, a trench coat and a tiny Alfa Romeo.

The Sweeney is my favourite cop show.

Watching a ton of The Sweeney and following it up with Inspector Morse really makes you wish they'd just made it like the hardest bastard in the Flying Squad got tired of banging criminals' heads off the sides of a Transit van, changed his name by deed poll and quietly arranged a transfer to the Thames Valley force to mellow out.

Alternatively it makes you wish Morse would at some bust in on some criminal and go "get yer trousers on, yer nicked!"

It's still my head canon that Morse is just an elderly Regan who decided to 'retire' to Oxford.

FIDA Cinematografica presenta
Interesting. I don't know much about non USA cop shows and movies so I appreciate this information.

Stay the fuck away from the remake film of the Sweeney.

Four series and two films, plus a film length pilot. Fourth series is pretty rubbish with about three good episodes.

It's fantastic though; amazingly atmospheric with a real sense of time and place; Regan is definitely on of the best depictions of a bastard on the right side.One of things that I realised after finishing the series is that there's barely any mention of drugs in the series; then again, I suppose that's down to the Flying Squad focusing on violent crime rather than drug trafficking and such, but nowdays it seems like every police film or series is just focused on narcotics enforcement.

>ctrl-f
>no Blade Runner

Blade Runner isn't a good cop/detective movie though

This. Deckard is a pretty shit detective.

Nero Wolfe has to be my all time favourite detective show.

Nothing like the master mind who never leaves his desk and gets an ex-military officer to do the legwork.

For TV shows, I like Kojak and Miami Vice best.

>nowdays it seems like every police film or series is just focused on narcotics enforcement

The times have changed. Instead of some blag crew with a sawn off shotgun robbing a jewelry shop or a payroll van, it's drug dealers with Uzis and the wood chipper. And with an ARV or even harder coppers on every corner the Flying Squad armed bastards angle is not so cutting edge any more.

I'd fucking pay for a series set in the seventies like Life on Mars but without the time travel/coma/purgatory bullshit. Just a new Regan and his lot thumping bad guys' heads into the side of a van or holding them off a bridge by the ankles for information.

Incidentally, GURPS Cops could be a great splatbook for someone planning a campaign set around the station house. You could do an actiony campaign like The Sweeney or The Professionals or those Italian cop films with the cinematic rules. If you want something like Morse or Rebus or even The Bill, you can do it with the more realistic rules. A campaign set in some place like Midsomer with the murder rate of Guatemala, centred around a DI and his minions who always get called up, could be fantastic if your players are into the investigative sort of play.

In the GUMSHOE engine, there are essentially three levels of clues:
>Core Clues, these cannot be missed, they are something obvious which the party get immediately just for being present in the scene, these don't give much information other than guiding the PCs between scenes
>Secondary Clues, these are obtained by performing an action and having the appropriate Investigation Skill, for instance, if a player says he's going to dust an object for fingerprints and has the Forensics skill, then if there's a clue to find he gets it, no roll needed
>Minor Clues, for each rank you have in an Investigative Skill you get a point in that skill which can be spent per mystery to get additional information whenever that skill is used to gain a secondary clue, unlike the other two these aren't prepped, just give the players some small helpful details
Put together it means that the players move through scenes guided by the Core Clues picking up the other two kinds as they go, it's also recommended you prep 'floating' secondary clues which can be dropped in like random encounters if the party gets stuck. So bad luck can never result in the party having an unsolvable mystery, only their poor problem-solving skills

semi-related, what good cop systems are there ?
The french seem to like their cyberpunk cops, with things like C.O.P.S or Berlin XVIII.

>la isla minima
my nigga !
The drone shoots were awesome

New World of Darkness mortals might be good for cops. I remember thinking about running a short campaign with it back in 2013. Either a night patrol that went wrong or fending off an assault on a police station.

Training Day. Alternatively, Turner and Hooch.