When the NBC procedural Chicago P.D. first contacted American Police Beat to request some copies of our publication to use as set dressing, we were both flattered and intrigued. A TV series so committed to realism that it would go the extra mile to include a genuine law enforcement magazine as a background detail in its police station scenes? After talking to some of the show’s creative team, we learned that’s only the tip of the iceberg. While many cop programs seem to exist purely in a Hollywood fantasyland, Chicago P.D. — which just finished airing its eighth season in May, with all seasons streaming for free on Peacock — prides itself on authenticity. 

“Our goal is to show the audience what it’s really like to be police officers in Chicago in 2021 (within reason, of course),” showrunner and executive producer Rick Eid tells us. “To do that, we need to make the show — and the issues and dilemmas police officers face — feel authentic. The more authority our show has, the more credibility we have with our audience. At the end of the day, that’s our currency — credibility.”

Filmed on location in its namesake city, Chicago P.D. strives to be accurate in its depiction of the local culture as well as the police world. Key to capturing both has been consulting producer Brian Luce, a retired Chicago Police Department veteran who’s served as the drama’s longtime technical advisor. “Brian is amazing. He’s a huge reason the show is so successful,” Eid says. “He has three very important jobs: he helps the writers with story ideas, he helps the directors choreograph action scenes and he helps actors look, move and talk like real cops.” For story ideas, Luce doesn’t just share colorful anecdotes drawn from his day-to-day experiences as a police officer; he also gives notes on every outline and script to make sure the plot and dialogue feel believable. “For example, the very first script I wrote, I kept referring to the ‘bad guy’ as a perp,” Eid explains. “Brian said, ‘In Chicago, we don’t call them perps, we call them offenders.’ It shows how thorough he is in reading the scripts, and how accurate we try to be with our dialogue.”

That accuracy extends to the overall look of the show. “Realism is the watchword when it comes to Chicago P.D. sets,” production designer Gregory Van Horn tells APB. “The design wants to keep the viewer engaged in the police story and not take them out of it.” The show’s main police station set is based on Chicago’s real-life Maxwell Street Station, which is used for the exterior shots. Since the actual building dates back to 1888, Van Horn and his team designed the interior sets to evoke that old-school architecture, including “tall windows and doors, wood-grained wainscoting and several layers of patina and aging, as if the building has undergone years of deferred maintenance,” he says. The crew works hard to create a lived-in look “because little in real life is pristine, a perfect 90 degrees or freshly painted,” Van Horn notes. “I drive the carpenters crazy when I ask for walls to be slightly crooked or make the set dressers throw file boxes around so they are dented. The painters might spend a full day adding rust stains and scuff marks to a room with a new paint job.”

The aging is particularly important in creating a feeling of gritty realism, one that many public servants who’ve spent years being asked to do more with less will no doubt recognize. And it’s not just the wear and tear — each item on set has a purpose, including the souvenirs scattered around the bullpen that add local flavor and provide clues to the characters’ personalities and backstories, from Chicago Cubs memorabilia to trophies taken from gang lairs and drug busts. Everything is researched down to the smallest detail with help from Luce, whom Van Horn calls “a fountain of information and stories. If he doesn’t have the answer, he knows someone who does.” 

While the station is a fixture on the show, we all know that plenty of police work doesn’t take place behind a desk. One of Chicago P.D.’s main challenges is its sheer volume of locations, averaging around eight per episode and sometimes involving as many as 15. “Many of those are picked for a specific purpose,” Van Horn says. “The most interesting usually involve a chase or shootout, and we will alter existing walls or doors to make the police work completely believable. We have great location managers who know the city inside-out and make my life much easier.” Sometimes real locations simply won’t work, such as a recent violent fight scene set in a motel bathroom, which would have been much too small to shoot in, requiring Van Horn’s team to build what they needed on the soundstage. But whether on location or on set, he adds, the effect should be the same: “I am happiest with the design when it works seamlessly with the fabric of our backdrop, the city of Chicago. When a viewer can’t figure out what is a set and what is a real location — which has happened a few times, even with our producers! — I find that very satisfying. I hear through Brian Luce when local cops really dig a set for being completely realistic. Those are the best compliments.”

Actor Amy Morton, who plays tough-as-nails Desk Sergeant Trudy Platt, agrees that being able to learn from a real-life police officer like Luce is “just invaluable, unbelievable. He was a cop and he loves cops and has a deep, deep love for the department. To talk to him about what it means to be a cop and his experiences … it’s all been really enlightening.” After working with Luce and the off-duty cops who have appeared as extras on Chicago P.D., the series regular says she’s gained a new awareness of law enforcement, especially the stress and frustrations that come with the job. “I look at cop shows very differently now and I look at their job very differently. You can’t work with cops and think about what they do as a black-and-white situation. There’s a lot of gray and a lot of nuance and a lot of circumstances that dictate what might happen. I think as a society, we’re incredibly quick to judge one way or the other. There’s so much in between that, and they’re human … I think all of us are very, very proud to be portraying police.”

With the profession under increasingly intense scrutiny, many cop shows have been feeling the heat from critics of police. Eid says the shifting environment hasn’t altered Chicago P.D.’s approach to accuracy, although as real-life law enforcement contends with the pressures of the push for reform, recent events will continue to shape the plots and characters when the show returns for its ninth season this fall. “The past year or so has obviously been quite tumultuous, but our goals for the show haven’t really changed. We still try to portray what it’s really like to be a police officer in Chicago in 2021 and reflect the changing social, cultural and political dynamics in our various storylines,” he explains. “Having said that, the show itself is different because the world the characters now inhabit is so different. So, as a result, the decisions they make and the way they act might be different than last year, or the year before.”

Ultimately, through its creative decisions, the show hopes to capture all the complexities of real life. “While I probably don’t have any real idea of what it’s like to be a police officer, I have a much more nuanced appreciation of what law enforcement has to go through on a day-to-day basis,” Van Horn says. “It’s an incredibly tough job and my deep respect goes out to all those in blue … I am proud that I am part of a team that can bring to life a TV drama that both civilians and cops respond to. We really could not do this without the police, who provide the inspiration for not only the stories and characters, but the locations and sets as well.”