Welcome to Down These Mean Streets, bringing you the mother of all police

procedural's dragnet. Jack Webb's realistic depiction of police procedure

was revolutionary when it premiered on radio in 1949 and its influence can still be seen on TV and in movies today.

Dragnet grew out of Jack Webb's work in the 1948 film He Walked by Night.

Webb played a police forensic scientist in the movie and he worked closely with

Sergeant Marty Wynne, the film's Los Angeles Police Technical Advisor.

Webb was inspired by Wynne's accounts of police procedure, and he began to think that a radio show depicting authentic police work could be a hit.

He worked with Wynne and Wynne's Sergeant Vance Brasher and attended police academy courses to learn the ins and outs of official police procedure.

Webb secured the cooperation of the Los Angeles Police Department for the series

with the conditions that the department could approve the sponsor and that the LAPD would not

be depicted in an unflattering light.

Selling Dragonit to a network was a different story.

NBC initially passed on the show, but Webb's success in ABC's national run of Pat Novak for hire persuaded them to give the show a shot.

Webb would produce the series and star as Sergeant Joe Friday

with Radio veteran Barton Yarborough as his partner Sergeant Ben Romero.

The rest of the cast was carefully selected by Webb to deliver the naturalistic dialogue he was looking for.

As Webb put it, underplaying is still acting and he wanted

the characters in Dragnet to sound like real people having actual conversations.

Webb strove for this realism in every aspect of the production.

Actual police terminology was used and when Joe Friday walked up a flight of stairs at police headquarters,

listeners heard the exact number of steps that were in the

building. The show employed a team of five sound effects artists for each episode to keep the

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