I watched a season of Chicago PD, and noticed that they had a convenient "plot accelerator."
Whenever they got to a point, where the detectives and CSI would be painstakingly going through the evidence, sifting out clues, they'd throw the suspect into "the cage," and beat a confession out of them.
It is an accurate depiction of how Chicago police operated, unfortunately. In fact, one Chicago detective who tortured suspects went on to work as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay[2]. It's terrible that the series would glamorize that behavior.
1. https://chicagoreader.com/news/the-police-torture-scandals-a...
I’d like to see more:
Main character tortures a low-level grunt
Gets false confession
Goes off on wild goose chase based on that confession
Bad guys get away with their plot as a result
“Yes, you were torturing me, I’d obviously have said anything to get you to stop.”
I feel like I’ve seen this sequence once or twice, but I can’t remember what it was in. It actually seems like something that is more likely to be put in a comedy, where the protagonist can be shown to be stupid occasionally. Maybe Brooklyn 99, or Barry, or something like that?
Every police show aggressively pushes the "civil rights bad" angle. Maybe once a season they will graciously consider "maybe civil rights good?" for part of an episode before concluding "no, civil rights bad."