Real Cop Drama With Officer Glad

This is yet another post asking for information from other internet users about a TV series that aired a while back. If you have some helpful information, please feel free to comment and/or message me personally.

I'm pretty much positive that remember the title as "Real Cop Drama", but I could be wrong. The opening is a montage of real-life crime footage from CCTV and dash cams, set to an instrumental version of "I Fought The Law". Each clip stops abruptly before someone is shot, hit by a vehicle, etc.

I'm definitely sure that the host of the show was called "Officer Glad". Of course, probably not even his actual surname. He was a slightly dumpy, older cop. White hair, a few wrinkles, and the typical "dead fish" frowny-face you see on old dudes who have had enough bullshit in life. Boston accent.

I saw about five episodes of this series back in the mid-2000s when I was still young and living with my parents. We had Eagle as a cable provider, but they didn't keep up on the bill so we just got whatever happened to be de-scrambled or relatively watchable through the fuzz. It was on channel 5, but of course with no working box I'm sure that wouldn't have been the intended location.

I'm not sure if any of this sounds familiar to anyone reading this, yet. The show would always open with Officer Glad stepping out of the shadows on a green screen "street corner" location, and his opening catch phrase was "Scofflaws won't sleep soundly, tonight." followed by "I'm Officer Glad" and a short description of the night's theme.

Not sure what the original air time was, or even the original air dates. Since it would be about three or four AM when I'd tune in, I can't imagine I was seeing anything other than repeats. I was in high school at the time and had a lot of anxiety about upcoming school days.

Production value was nearly non-existent outside of the shoddy green screen and opening montage. After a brief intro for each following vignette, uncut raw footage from various Police-related incidents would play.

The show was exploitative to the nth degree. Vehicular homicides from traffic cameras, grainy security footage of deadly convenience store robberies… nothing appeared to be off limits for the show. Unlike the opening sequence, these clips showed the blood and gore without a shadow of shame.

One that haunted me for years to come, which I just purposefully don't think about now, involved a young woman trapped under a city bus that had run up on the sidewalk. All you could see from the haphazard, shaky camera footage was her head and arm sticking out next to one of the tires.

She looked around with a pallid expression of shock as he arm slowly, absently felt along the concrete. Her mouth moved but nothing came out. When the camera adjusted slightly, looked under the bus itself, I could see that the rest of her body was elsewhere. Her attempts at calling or feeling for help were just the random motor functions of severed body parts.

The thing that bothered me the most was her body, though. The summer dress, the single red high-heeled shoe. In that fleeting moment of horror, the imagery also told a story about her. I couldn't stop wondering where she was going that day, who she was going to meet, and what would have happened in her life if that horrible moment hadn't occurred.

I'm off-topic. Really, I just want to find out if anyone has some information on this show. I want this to be fake. I want to find out that the whole thing was staged with very good practical effects. If I can go through the rest of days with the knowledge I was very expertly trolled by a shitty exploitation show, I'll be able to sleep a little better.

I do think there's a good chance the show was staged, and if you do know the series, you'll probably agree once I talk about the evidence.

The majority of footage centered on traffic stops, which were interspersed with the horrific random accident clips. Of course, these segments were just as bloody.

The stops followed a sort of pattern. Dash cam footage of a vehicle breaking a traffic law like failing to signal, running a stop sign, or driving erratically.

After the officer pulled the driver over, a disagreement would ensue. The driver would insist they hadn't done anything wrong, or they'd say that their infraction was hardly worth the trouble of ruining their day. A couple got really agitated and demanded lawyers or constitutional citations on the spot.

In each clip, the argument was loud, but brief. The minute a gun was drawn on the driver, they'd instantly clam up.

The theme would swell up again. "I Fought The Law". The audio would drop except for that instrumental piece as the officer would fire several shots into the vehicle and strut away as if they'd completed a job well done.

There were some runners. Two or three drivers managed to get out and run, only to be shot in the back until they were face-down on the pavement. Then, a single bullet to the back of the head at close range.

A passenger jumped out at one point and darted into the woods nearby. The officer calmly returned to the patrol car, retrieved a spot light and shotgun, then just as calmly followed after. One of the few actual edits to these clips occurred when the cop returned alone with an additional handful of empty shells.

One of the cars had a "Baby On Board" sign, but it was impossible to see what happened to the supposed child. I convinced myself it wasn't there that day.

The reason that I think this is fake, that I PRAY it's fake, is the common thread in all of the videos.

Every time someone gets pulled over and killed, it's by Officer Glad. The doughy, hard-nosed old man with the white hair and tired expression.

I want to believe this was just a very strange prank show, or a spin-off I don't understand because of the lack of context. The gore porn is bad enough, and it's what still disturbs me the most, but if Office Glad is actually a real person and not a character… it makes everything so much worse.

Those few episodes of that show scared me straight. As I mentioned, I was still young at the time and it had a lasting effect on how I view the law and the people who enforce it. I've been as straight an arrow as you can imagine from that point forward - and make no mistake, I was no saint before then.

It does little to comfort me, though, to know that people were executed for the most minor infractions. Things they didn't even know they were doing, or had no control over.

I'm not a "scofflaw", but I still can't sleep soundly at night.

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