Episode Numbering

Many episodes online (YouTube, Usenet, private/public trackers, the scene) are misnumbered. Just because a file/video is titled e.g. “S01E01” doesn’t mean it’s actually S01E01!

This episode guide is the most complete and accurate one on the Internet, at least for seasons 1 through 37 (see this comparison).

Episode vs. production numbers

• Episode numbers: S01E01, S01E02, etc. Typically given in sequence of airing, but not always! The production company likes to overcomplicate things.
• Production numbers: CP-100, CP-201, CP-1935, etc, plus special-specific ones like BOC-002, S-1301, etc. Season 1 production numbers start from 0, while other seasons start from 1, meaning that CP-100 and CP-201 will be respectively the first episodes in seasons 1 and 2.

Episode and production numbers for season 2 are identical.

Objectively vs. subjectively incorrect episode numbers

Many files online have objectively incorrect episode numbers. People make mistakes. Examples:

• CP-1923 aired at 8PM on 2007-12-15 and CP-2022 aired at 8:30PM. Scene group 2HD released CP-1923 as “S20E14” and completely ignored CP-2022. As a result there’s no scene release of CP-2022.
• S19E14 was similarly missed by the scene.

When episodes are banned, platforms like Reelz don’t keep the original episode numbering because they don’t want gaps in their offerings. For example, they shortened season 13 from 40 to only 36 episodes and shortened season 16 from 41 to only 36 episodes.

The situation with many other files is more complicated. For example, episodes can air out of sequence:

• example: “Due to a change in schedule, episode 3129 will air at the end of the season. In replacement of episode 3129, episode 3130 will air on Monday, April 22nd at 10:00/9:00 pm central on the Paramount Network. We apologize for any confusion, due to in-house production processes, we decided to keep our episode numbers the same. This does not affect your regularly scheduled programming.”
• example: season 35

Scene groups will number episodes as they air. But TVDB, Wikipedia and others will respect the intended numbering from Cops.

The official Cops YouTube channel, as well as platforms like Reelz and Pluto usually order episodes by their production numbers, but they still use the S__E__ (like S20E01) notation instead of CP-____ (like CP-2001), which sometimes confuses even themselves – I have seen cases where the episode titles (like “Dog Eat Dog”, “Not Your Papi”) did not match the actual content because they were intended to be used with airing numbers, not production numbers.

Another issue: should long episodes like “20 Years Caught on Tape” could as one episode (S20E05/CP-2037) or two separate episodes (S20E05/CP-2037 and S20E06/CP-2038)? They have two intros and two outros and look like standard episodes.

What about the “Bryce Dion Tribute” episode which aired after S27E08? Should it count as S27E09, or S27E00, or something else (S00E__)?

After S36E05 you’d expect to see S36E06, but actually the next episodes (at least “officially”) are S36E34, S36E35, and S36E36, after which you return to S36E06.

But wait, it gets worse: guess which episode was released following S36E21? It’s actually S37E01 (new season), followed by S37E02, S37E03, S37E04, and S37E05, after which you return to season 36 with S36E22!

All of this could have been avoided had cops.com maintained an episode guide.

Objectively numbering episodes from the first 20 seasons

1. Play the file
2. Find the textual description for the first call. Example: 7:25 PM Hit and Run Accident
3. Search for that exact string in the guide here.
4. If there’s exactly one match, you have found the episode. If there are multiple matches, compare the city and officer name(s) to find the correct one
5. Use the production number to unambiguously refer to the episode.