If you go to the movies or watch TV, the sort of incident that has detective Tim Langley's career on the line seems almost like standard police procedure.
A cop threatening or beating a suspect has become a Hollywood cliche.Nick Nolte pounding a confession out of Eddie Murphy in "48 Hours." Mel Gibson telling a suspect, "You have the right to remain silent" - then punching him out in "Lethal Weapon."
Even Kevin Costner, as FBI agent Eliot Ness, tossing mobster Frank Nitti off the top of a building in "The Untouchables."
And it's more of the same on television. The detectives on "New York Undercover" have never worried much about suspects getting hurt. The cops in "High Incident" have been known to cross the line. Suspects on "Homicide: Life on the Street" have been threatened, coerced and roughed up on numerous occasions.
Perhaps most notably, TV's highest-rated cop show - "NYPD Blue" - has made intimidation into almost an art form. Detectives Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) and Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) will stop at almost nothing - including a recent episode in which Sipowicz literally beat the crud out of a suspect in an interrogation room to obtain a confession.
"I've never seen an Andy Sipo-wicz type of interview . . . " Langley said. "People get this per-cep-tion that it's commonplace in law enforcement and it's not - nor should it be tolerated in law enforcement."
On the other hand, "NYPD Blue" creator/executive pro-ducer/writer David Milch defends his scripts.
"The process of securing confessions and so on entails the requirement of physical intimidation," Milch said, adding "we try to be accurate" in how police work is portrayed.
Milch, who works closely with former New York detective Bill Clark - whose real-life career is the basis for many "NYPD Blue" scripts - admits his stories sometimes stretch the truth. But not by much.
"I think that our characters in (suspect) interviews are able to cross the line that they would never have been able to cross 10 or 15 years ago in realistically portraying the extent to which physical intimidation is used," Milch said.
"The fact is that a cop isn't doing his job if he gives a suspect his Miranda (rights) until he absolutely, positively has to. Because once the guy gets Mirandaed, then he lawyers up and that's the end of the case."
Milch said that the worst police offenders suffer the consequences of their excesses on his show.
"We show cops crossing the line emphatically, but they tend not to be recurring characters or they lose their jobs," he said, pointing to one character "who got fired in the first year because he was sleeping with a prostitute and she ended up killing herself."
And, again, Milch maintains that what goes on in "NYPD Blue" is grounded in reality.
"Once we've generated that kind of atmosphere of realism we can do all of those things," he said. "So we can show cops bending the rules - and maybe breaking them a little bit in terms of interviews."
That realism - even 20 years ago - was a little too much for at least one Salt Lake Valley officer.
After watching the popular 1970s cop show "Starsky and Hutch," Salt Lake County Chief Deputy Ken Miles said his 5-year-old son startled him one day with a question about his job.
Miles said he came home from work one day when the impressionable young boy sat on his father's lap. The child then asked, "How many people did you shoot today, Dad?"
"That was a while ago," Miles said. "TV still portrays law enforcement as being enabled to do much more than what is legal to do, and that's a problem. The people behind these shows don't realize it when they portray cops violating civil rights."
Miles said that happens every time "NYPD Blue" detectives throw a suspect into an interrogation cage and then leave.
"You can't detain them like that if you haven't booked them," Miles said. "The amount of force used on TV to persuade interrogations is also not realistic. That is absolutely not what happens, at least not here in the West."
He said most interviews conducted at the sheriff's office "are videotaped, and at a minimum audio-taped, so that could never happen."
So why the sensationalism?
"I guess they've got to keep it going, keep those ratings up," Miles said. "But when you see an officer-involved shooting on the shows, the officer goes back to work for the rest of the day like nothing happened. That doesn't happen in real life. They have to go through the mechanisms we have set up and get clearance from the sheriff to go back to work."
Deseret News staff writer Mark L. Reece contributed to this report.