The Closer – Still no apology

The selection process for Chief of Police is getting nastier and nastier as the weeks go on. Pope is becoming increasingly desperate, and this week it’s really starting to affect his relationship with Brenda and how he runs the department. After the Parole Board Commissioner is murdered while on the phone with Detective Gabriel, Chief Pope goes into a tizzy that does not end until well after the killer is caught.

Instead of letting Brenda do her thing, he somewhat inexplicably charges through her investigation like he’s Frankenstein’s monster, and the news media is a group of torch-wielding villagers. It’s so bad, in fact, that it seems to go a little beyond the scope of reason: Chief Pope looks downright bumbling; like he has absolutely no interrogation skills at all, and that doesn’t really fit with his character.

I understand the show’s desire to make Brenda look like the desirable candidate for Chief, but they took it just a bit too far into the realm of incompetence to make it truly believable. All they really needed to do was stick with the idea that he’s worried about his image; not that he can’t do the job.

Speaking of people not being able to do their jobs, this episode was absolutely maddening to me. I am not a law enforcement professional, and it took me two seconds to figure out at least three points of entry into the victim’s house. So spending an hour watching characters who were seasoned professionals act as though this is a locked-room mystery drove me completely bananas.

I promised on Twitter that I wouldn’t nerd out about this too hard, so I’ll keep this short:

It is well-known among both security professionals and criminals that electronic garage door openers give a giant false sense of security. With a little Googling, you can buy a machine that will crack the frequency of basically any garage door and open it up just as easily as if you had the actual opener– you don’t even need to break into someone’s car and steal their garage door opener to reprogram yours. Unless you’re Rube Goldberg. This is why it’s so important to secure the door leading from the garage into your house: most people don’t even lock this door, and it’s often the simplest and quickest point of entry for a criminal.

Beyond that, she appeared to have very basic deadbolt locks on both her front and back doors. I won’t even comment on the pointlessness of putting bars on all of your windows if you’re just going to have giant glass doors in the back of your house, because that’s pretty self-evident– so I’ll just focus on the locks.

Again, without going into too much detail or providing links, I have two words for you (words with which the LAPD is very familiar): bump key. A bump key is a frighteningly simple way to get into any standard deadbolt lock faster than you can often enter your own house with your own key. It doesn’t damage the lock, and it leaves no evidence of entry.

“But what about the chain on the front door?” you may be asking. Well, I’ll tell you. Since the LAPD broke into the front door and saw that the chain was busted, they assumed it had been locked at the time. The killer could have just as easily used the bump key to open the deadbolt, and then busted through the chain herself, when she found that it was in her way. A busted chain is a busted chain– there’s no real way to tell when it was broken in a situation as this.

Okay, so that was a lot longer than I meant it to be. My point is this: where the hell was Fritz in this episode? Right, guys?

Clacked by Kona Gallagher
on Aug 16, 2010 @ 22:51 EST5EDT