Just the Facts

Just the Facts

“He had done this hundreds of times while working on hundreds of cases. The grizzled, veteran, police detective sergeant checked his notepad for details, and then he turned to the eyewitness to confirm the facts. His job was to confirm the facts. “Just the facts,” as the fictional radio detective Sergeant Joe Friday did every week on the show, Dragnet.”

The police dectective believes that there are facts. Discoverable, evidence-based facts. Hard facts, as the detective sergeant would say. Facts. Not fictions. 

Facts are as real as bullets, burglaries, bullies, and bastards.

Facts are discovered. Uncovered. Revealed. They are not made up. Not mere possibilities. Not speculation.

Put all the facts together and you have a whole picture. You know what happened. You know what really occurred. You have the facts.

Yet finding the facts is more obtuse than it seems. In truth, it may not even be possible. Determining which purported events occurred and which did not may ultimately prove fruitless.

The Dragnet radio theme music is available on the Internet Archive in its Dragnet 1950s Radio Show collection. The audio used here is from: Episode # 33, originally broadcast on NBC Radio on March 18, 1950.