I am not a cop.

Really.

I've just been playing one on television so long that people get a little confused sometimes. It's understandable. I've been at this game for a bunch of years, looking at corpses and bruised runaways all over New York and Baltimore, trying to ask the right questions, trying to find the right bad guy. Or girl, if that's the case.

Of course, when I'm through studying the corpse, somebody yells "Cut," and the body gets up and joins the rest of us on the way to the catering tent for a lunch break.

But it isn't just the general public that gets my role and my life mixed up. Sometimes when I leave the set after a long week's shoot, I'll hit the street and hope to catch a cab. A lot of times, a patrol car will pull over instead and offer to take me where I want to go.

"Mr. Belzer, or should I say 'Detective'?" the cop will say. "Need a lift?"

And hey, I'm not too proud to take the guys up on it, especially when it's raining and cabs are hard to find. Sometimes I even do ride-alongs with the NYPD and sit around precinct houses to soak up the atmosphere, learn the vernacular, and get the moves right.

So, as a consequence, between the cops who consult on the series, the cops I talk with in my everyday life, and the people I work with who act like cops, I sometimes feel like I've slipped into some kind of law enforcement twilight zone -- a place where the role I play and the person I am threaten to overlap. Poor old Rod Serling would be proud of me, though. I think I remember an episode like that from when I was a kid. I loved that show.

But I digress. Now, where was I? Oh, the twilight zone of law enforcement, where make-believe and reality overlap.

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