Hard to say for certain as I've not seen the show but most real people, even police, aren't used to fighting. "Real" fights are nothing like what we see on most US shows.

As for the gun thing, assuming Scottish Police follow similar rules to English ones, you need special firearms trained officers to use guns - you can't just grab one off the rack and go. This may explain why relatively few people get accidentally shot by the police in this country!

@M. LeMarchand said:

Hard to say for certain as I've not seen the show but most real people, even police, aren't used to fighting. "Real" fights are nothing like what we see on most US shows.

As for the gun thing, assuming Scottish Police follow similar rules to English ones, you need special firearms trained officers to use guns - you can't just grab one off the rack and go. This may explain why relatively few people get accidentally shot by the police in this country!

Granted, and thankfully, most people rarely, if ever, are engaged in real life physical fights. In fact, most people never take self-defense training, and again, thankfully, normally don't ever have the need for it. The overwhelming majority of people are decent, peaceful, individuals who obey the law. Violent criminals make up a small percentage of the population. And most of the time they don't interact with the decent, law-abiding citizens. For example, gang members are more apt to violently attack other gang members than people outside their social circles.

And I agree that even law enforcement officers don't regularly engage in physical fights. And also, as you indicated, we're not usually exposed to reality when watching television (or movies for that matter). [In the US, even the news is far too often agenda driven fiction. A couple of years ago a black police officer in Charlotte NC (about 90 miles from where I live) encountered a felon who drew a handgun and pointed it at the officer. The officer, in accordance with department policy and the law, shot the felon, who later died. The news reported this as a possible case of a racist police officer shooting a black man. Clearly that was not the case and any reporter should have known better than to suggest this was a case of racism. The false reporting of the incident resulted in rioting, more death, and ruined lives. That was a tragedy which should never have happened.]

I like this show a lot actually. I guess it might not seem that way since my comment concerned the (relatively minor) issue I wrote about. My criticism has to do with agenda driven television, but not with the police forces in Scotland or the U.K.
[I am aware there are legal and policy differences regarding firearms usage between US and UK law enforcement forces. There are differences between departments in various parts of the US also. But that isn't the issue that prompted me to write, and I am not bothered by those differences.]

I am not familiar with specific training procedures for law enforcement officers in Scotland. But generally speaking, police forces in every country are trained to go out and deal with that small minority of the population which is prone to violence. And a big part of that training involves using non-lethal grappling and the application of pain induced submission holds which allow officers to quickly subdue violent individuals. And normally they do so without causing any lasting injury to the individual. [Of course, this isn't what the news reports.] While I am not privy to the training procedures and methods used by police forces in Scotland, I am sure they are well trained and capable to protect the public from violent criminals.

But the writers chose, for whatever reasons, to portray DI Jimmy Perez as though unprepared or untrained, unable to deal with violent offenders. To me, that is a slap in the face of the police forces of Scotland, and those of Shetland. I am certain they are trained to deal with that small, violent, minority, and that they have contingencies in place, whatever the policy differences may be, to both subdue violent offenders in hand to hand conflicts, and to appropriately respond to reports of gunfire. So my issue is not with the police in Scotland, but with the way the writers have chosen to depict them.

Perhaps the writers were trying to emphasize the cerebral side of detective work here. But I think they could do that without making Perez appear to be inept or poorly trained to deal with physical violence when confronted with it.

But I don't really want to pillory them over this. For the most part I love this show.

Series 3 Episode 3 must have filled that void for you.

Regarding the scenes at the beach, I watched the episode in question earlier tonight, and Jimmy's dealing with the guy didn't bother me (disappoint in Jimmy) at all as the guy being chased at pretty much all times had the general advantage by being literally the "upper man" in the equation; at most points, and I think actually probably all, during the chase, either Jimmy was chasing the guy uphill through beach dunes, and/or Jimmy had gotten knocked down and punched/kicked, therefore was already at a general disadvantage, in a lower and submissive position. Too, the guy being chased was much younger, and I would think easily is more fit and agile (not to mention, being a drugs-running criminal, in a serious predicament he knows he has to get away with - thus has the frenzied-desperation adrenaline factor to his personal advantage).

There's also the fact that the element of surprise was much at play; Jimmy was initially attacked (or at least pushed and knocked down) while he'd been calmly going about his search of the beach in the dark.

Everything about the chase and fight scenes felt fully credible, to me. I didn't, in the least, find anything about Jimmy's representation (or representation of law enforcement) to be wimpy, weak, or whatever else that's negative or unflattering. I think Jimmy came off portrayed strongly.

Keep in mind that, from a strictly storytelling and dramatic standpoint, if the young man had been captured and hauled in at that point in the episode, we'd have been out of one-quarter or so of the episode of interesting criminal investigation and detective work that added further dimension and detailing to the story.