The COPS Drinking Game

I stand by the fact that drinking games are sports in their own right, and feel that I should introduce this one, my favorite during my college years. Since I felt like whipping up a post and I have already commented on the news from Victoria and I absolutely refuse to waste an entire post on the All Star break or David Beckham, there was no time like the present. (Additionally, this destroys any credibility on the whole Steve Finley thing).

How did this game start, you may ask? Well, first off, COPS may be one of the funniest shows on television, whether it tries to be or not, and when you watch the show cheering for certain things to happen, well, the show just gets better. Considering that most of the time the segments on COPS involve a drug arrest or domestic abuse, I'm pretty sure this makes me a bad person. On the plus side, I have a new found respect for the police.

There are 4 simple rules, with an addendum that my roommate Shawn and I added after the game became popular outside of the apartment. The rules are as follows.

Drink for every:

1. Cop with a moustache. It's alarming how much the stereotype fits. There is even a cop in California who definitely could have used a razor for her upper lip. We took a sip every time she came on.

2. Guy without a shirt on. My favorite. You know something awesome is going to happen if some topless drunk comes out, screaming about how he didn't do anything wrong while waving around his 40 of Colt 45. Bonus you can actually see the bag of dope in his shorts (usually cutoffs and denim).

3. Bleep/blur. This is always the one that does us in. First off, license plates are always blurred, so that's an easy drink, but then, if you get a said shirtless guy, you will likely see any number of the following: a blurred buttcrack, the blurred faces of his embarrassed children, a tirade in which he drops 14 f-bombs on how the police are out to get him or something, or on those domestic disturbance calls, he screams epithets at whoever called the police on him. The drunker the person, the drunker you end up.

4. Non-scientific drug reference by the police. "Where's the dope? Where's the dope? Where's the dope?" That's 3 swigs right there. This is especially popular in the larger cities, where vice squads know all the street names for various drugs. Curiously, an officer in Honolulu nearly led to my getting alcohol poisoning after introducing us to "batu" which is Hawaiian slang for crystal meth. He couldn't call it meth for the entire 10 minute segment, and must have mentioned it 200 times.

The addendum: If there is are guests, there is to be an additional rule provided by the guests. The most popular is to drink everytime the minorities are actually the majority on camera. Another memorable rule was to chug during every chase (we couldn't make it to the bars that night). Other good suggestions: Every squad car on camera, every set of handcuffs produced, everytime you think a cop is being a jerk, but turns out to be right, mullets.

Of course, the game has it's horrifying times when there is a truly awful crime, but they are surprisingly rare. Additionally, there are the assorted boring clips where you get like, 2 drinks. On those nights, it's still ok, because it's Saturday night, and now all your friends are in the same place. If it's a bad pair of episodes, you can still go to the bar. Of course, there are no bad episodes of COPS.