Not only are they playing new episodes of The First 48, they’re in a new city. Thursday’s episode (August 4) was in Mobile, Ala. Since I’ve seen every episode, I don’t think they’ve ever been in Mobile, or I would have remembered the fact that Mobile is the city with the oldest Mardi Gras.

Mobile, is a very intriguing city, with talented and interesting homicide detectives (and they all seem to have a sense of humor). Their motto, or at least the one on their coffee cups is “Homicide, our day begins when your’s ends.”

The one that really had me laughing was the one that was spoken three minutes into the show by Det. Julius Nettles, “if we’re not eating as a unit, we’re not eating.”

The other interesting thing I noticed about Mobile, and it could just have been the case they were working, or this particular murder victim, but when the detectives were looking for witnesses, I never once heard, “I didn’t see anything,” or I don’t know nothing,” I didn’t hear nothing.” Mobile citizens were calling the police to give them information.

With the information from the community and armed with what they find on Facebook – yes, Facebook, they track one of the killers down in the first 16 hours.

What follows is nothing short of hysterical. Just when they’re going to call it a day, a tip comes in about where their suspect is and they find him hiding at his grandmother’s house. They finally convince her to come to the door, she continually denies that he’s even in the house, yet he can be seen through the windows. They get her out of the house, they go in and get him. Now they stay at the house while they wait for a search warrant, and poor grandma has to sit in her front yard while all this goes on.

Once the criminal is in the interrogation room it starts at “I didn’t kill anyone,” to “It was just a robbery,” and when they get sick of hearing that, Det. Nettles shames the guy into crying. But the guy’s only crying because he knows he’s caught and he doesn’t know what to do or say to get out of it. What a wimpy, cry baby little twerp. Hardly worth time and trouble. When he finally calms down and says he want to talk, he says “Zebbie killed him.”

They hit the streets to find Zebbie, but they don’t. So, it’s finally time to eat. Back at the station, they hear from a relative of Zebbie’s, and get him in custody.

This episode ends with Zebbie also going into custody for the murder.

A different city with homicide detectives who get the job done. Three out of every four homicides in Mobile get solved. Higher than the national average.

Recently I heard that the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, may be considering a run for President in the near future. I wonder if he’ll use Facebook crime statistics as a part of his platform.