The drama is real in this 'NYPD'

Tonight on ABC, a homicide squad will scour the streets of New York looking for suspects after a young woman is stabbed in an apartment building. Meanwhile, a man will shoot himself on the tracks in a subway station, leaving police perplexed.

Sound like an episode of "NYPD Blue"?

Actually, it's real-life footage of the New York City Police Department in action.

In an unprecedented move, the department granted ABC News permission to film amid its notoriously closed ranks for a whopping 16 months, beginning in August 2002. The result is the documentary "NYPD 24/7," which was created by the same producers who two years ago made "Boston 24/7," the six-part series that chronicled the lives of 19 area residents, including Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

"We wanted to give the country a better appreciation of what our job is like," said Paul Browne, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for public information. "Since 9/11, it has become a much more complicated mission to protect the city of New York . . . and at the same time do the day-in and day-out conventional policing."

Browne, who has seen a few hours of the seven-hour series, said he believes the documentary will leave a favorable impression.

"NYPD 24/7" will air for seven consecutive Tuesdays at 10 p.m. (locally, it airs on WCVB-TV, Channel 5). Viewers can expect to see officers hard at work as they investigate the grotesque (a man boiled to death inside a manhole) as well as perform the heroic (save a suicidal man on a bridge).

But the series isn't just a public-relations vehicle for a department that, over the years, has been accused of corruption, brutality, and hostility directed at certain ethnic groups.

At least one episode captures the anger of a West Indian community in Brooklyn, which claims that racial and class prejudice compromised the search for a college student, who is eventually discovered raped, tortured, and murdered.

Terrence Wrong, executive producer of the series, said he focused on New York because as a native of the city he has always been curious how the 36,000-person department functions. "By and large, the force is made up of blue-collar men and women who live by and large not in the city they police but in the suburbs. They come into work every day and patrol and get enmeshed in the community, but how much a part of the community are they really?" Wrong said.

"In Manhattan, they are treated by some as lowly civil servants. In some of the outlying boroughs, with some of the most notoriously rough precincts, they are treated like an occupying army," he said. "I wanted to see how the NYPD dealt with this. I was really interested in the sociology. "

To be sure, Wrong and his team of six to eight filmmakers weren't received eagerly, even though they used digital cameras and no special lighting, with the aim of being as unobtrusive as possible. Deputy commissioner Browne said there was "reluctance and a healthy skepticism" among the ranks when it came to participating and having "everything you do and say recorded at all times. What the public sees in an episode is just one hour, but for some detectives and police officers involved, the cameras were at their side or in their face all the time. That can be a little unnerving."

Wrong, who met about 5,000 officers during the project, said it took three months to persuade detectives in homicide to cooperate. "I went to the most remote corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx," he said. "I didn't want gorgeous want-to-be actors, but real people with a sense of humor and moxie."

Wrong also needed interesting investigations to film. But of the 50 to 60 cases the team started to record, only three or four were usable; the rest simply required too little sleuthing to keep viewers interested.

Actor Dennis Franz, who portrays detective Andy Sipowicz on ABC's "NYPD Blue," is the narrator of the series. Wrong said the choice was not part of a corporate strategy. "Viewers have been inundated with so much police drama and reality television that to come to them with such a rare thing as a real documentary series" could be confusing, he said. "I thought about putting on the bottom of the screen `This is real' but that seemed dumb. So then I said, `Why not get a guy who the public identifies as a New York City detective and get him to say `I'm only fiction. What you are going to see tonight is real.' "

Wrong, who also produced the "Hopkins 24/7" series in 2000 about John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, said he has no immediate plans to continue the "24/7" series. "We've covered medicine, politics, and police," he said. "It's a very rare thing to be given this kind of time on a network for this kind of programming. . . . It's been an exhausting haul."

Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com