Police Brutality: Difference between revisions

 

{{quote|'''Billy Tripley:''' Look, this is police brutality!

 

When the police [[Bad Cop, Incompetent Cop|aren't incompetent]], then they're sadistic bullies.

 

{{examples}}

* Hibari Ginza in ''[[Speed Grapher]]'' likes to "self-defense" suspects (it's her catchphrase and she actually uses it as a verb). This means that if she arrests you and you aren't cooperative, she's likely to shoot off at least one of your extremities.

 

* ''[[Sam and Max]]'', in all their incarnations, do this a ''lot''. And if they weren't freelance police, they'd probably compensate with just plain ol' 'brutality' instead. Since they're both prime [[Heroic Sociopath]]s, all of it is, of course, [[Played for Laughs]].

* The Basin City Police Department in [[Sin City]]. When Cardinal Roark or some other [[Big Bad]] wants somebody gone and the evidence removed, they send in an out-and-out ''death squad''. And these aren't even the worst in the world... the ones working for Stalin were worse.

** The cops get back at Spider by beating the shit out of him outside his apartment. Of course, Spider being who he is, he just laughs off the brutal beating and threatens to bite their testicles off if they come near him again.

 

* ''[[Changeling (film)|Changeling]]'' has this. A mother loses her son and asks the police to get him back. They come back with the ''wrong kid'' and have her sent to the loonie bin to keep their credibility. [[Freakier Than Fiction|It was a true story.]]

* In ''[[A Clockwork Orange (film)|A Clockwork Orange]]'', the cops beat up Alex to the point where he's a quivering, bloody mess in a corner and offer to hold him down to let a visitor take a few swings at him. After he gets freed, he quickly encounters his old gang members Georgie and Dim, who have been hired as cops. [[Hilarity Ensues]].

** Of specific note is that V only meets Evey because he has to intervene to save her from a police gang rape.

 

* Standard operating procedure in [[Judge Dee]]'s 7th c. China.

* In ''[[A Clockwork Orange (novel)|A Clockwork Orange]]'', Dim and Billy Boy abandon their juvenile acts of mayhem and destruction to beat on criminals for a paycheck.

* Stephen King's ''Under the Dome''. The Chester's Mill 'police' hired by the town's tyrannical second selectman beat, shoot, {{spoiler|rape}}, and kill whoever they want to without any real fear of retribution.

* Occurs in ''[[Wise Blood]]'', in two plot-crucial moments. First, an officer pulls Hazel Motes over for driving without a license, then destroys Hazel's car by pushing it over an embankment. Second, two police officers find Hazel lying in a ditch, barely conscious. When they tell him that his landlady wants him to return, he says he doesn't want to, so they club him the rest of the way into unconsciousness and load him into their car. {{spoiler|Hazel dies on the way back to his apartment.}}

 

* ''[[Adam-12]]'': Several episodes have addressed the subject, with one-shot officers in the role of the rouge officers and series' heroes officers Pete Malloy and Jim Reed eventually washing them out.

** While Malloy was almost always able to keep his cool even with the most smug of villians, he blows it in the 1974 episode "X-Force" and is suspended without pay for four days after a suspect he had arrested complains that he was injured. Malloy had arrested a suspected child molester (the crook had raped a 6-year-old girl who lived in the neighborhood), and when the pedophile made a snide remark about how the little girl "got what she wanted," Malloy shoves him against a wall, twists his arm and puts the handcuffs on too tight. (Reed—who ironically was taught by Malloy about keeping his cool in the early seasons—shows up to calm his veteran partner down, and eventually has to make a statement backing the complainant.)

* There's a [[Running Gag]] in ''[[Arrested Development (TV series)|Arrested Development]]'' wherein George Sr. or his twin brother (or one of them disguised as/mistaken for the other) gets tackled by the police and then one officer clubs them on the head. There was also an instance in which George Sr. was captured by Mexican police who were in a vengeful mood on account of a defective product George had knowingly marketed in the country. He fakes his death and has it reported that the police beat him to death- this actually is what probably would have happened had he not satisfied the officers with a legal argument (read: paid them a large bribe).

* ''[[Babylon 5]]'': [[Da Chief|Micheal Garibaldi]] tries to put a random [[Jerkass]]'s head through a tabletop when he refuses to stop talking trash about Marsies during a period of violence on Mars. It no doubt didn't help that Garibaldi's ex-lover lived on Mars, and he had been unable to find out if she had been harmed in the fighting.

* In regular ''[[CSI]]'', there was a variation on the trope. One of the CSIs slugged a perp, but everyone was ticked off at the guy in general, and Brass calmly said something about not seeing it that way, that the perp attacked the CSI first.

* Stella Bonasera has gotten called out for using excessive force a couple of times on ''[[CSI: NY]]''

* Vic Mackey and his Strike Team from ''[[The Shield]]''.

** The show was inspired by the [[wikipedia:Rampart Scandal|horrific scandal at the LAPD's Rampart Division]], which included some rather eye-popping allegations: A bank robbery planned by a police officer, multiple suspects killed with weapons planted on them for justification, actually joining the "Bloods" street gang, stealing drugs from the evidence locker for hip-hop producer Suge Knight, and murdering Notorious B.I.G.

** In another episode, Sledge pitches the benefits of being a cop on the basis that he gets paid to legally beat up and kill people.

* Parodied on ''[[Whose Line Is It Anyway?]]'' a couple of times:

'''Cop:''' Oh. Sorry, John. I thought you was a nigger. Now, Sir, carry on.}}

 

* The song "Bad Boys" by reggae group Inner Circle if often thought to talk about cops, and when you look at the big picture about this song, its message is "When you're caught by the cops, you're pretty much dead".

* Subject of many a Gangsta Rap [[Protest Song]], most notably N.W.A.'s "Fuck Tha Police" and Ice-T/Body Count's "Cop Killer".

* "Out to Get Me" from Guns N' Roses depict actions from the cruel LAPD.

* The song "Police Truck" by the Dead Kennedys is about a group of cops taking out a van for a night of drinking, beating drunks, and gang-raping a prostitute.

 

* In ''Misspent Youth'' by Robert Bohl, The Authority (the group-created villain) is often The State, and is filled with images of riot cops and police brutality.

* Fittingly for a cyberpunk game, the setting of ''[[Shadowrun]]'' pretty much assumes police brutality as the norm. The ''least'' brutal police organization (Lone Star Security Services, basically a law enforcement PMC that held the municipal police service contract for several major cities) is still infamous for rules of engagement that basically top out at '*BANG BANG BANG* "Halt or we fire!"' and a well-practiced ability to 'tune up' recalcitrant suspects in interrogation rooms without leaving any incriminating marks. But at least 'municipal contract' cops like Lone Star and Knight Errant have to ''pretend'' to obey things like civil rights legislation and Miranda warnings. If you get caught by megacorporate security forces... well, since megacorps get to write as well as enforce the laws on megacorporate territory, they can do ''anything they feel like'' to you. Some standouts include Shiawase (where they'll use you in the brainwashing labs if you have useful skills, or as testing fodder in the medical labs if you don't), Aztechnology (where the savage beating is just to tenderize you for the upcoming ritual blood sacrifice), and Mitsuhama Computer Technologies (which essentially has no SOP for dealing with prisoners ''because they almost never take any'').

** A Shadowrun 4e supplement mentions offhandedly that a gang of heavily-armed shadowrunners once tried to hijack some cargo at an MCT loading dock at a relatively expensive but not in any way unique wholesale merchandise warehouse. The after-action report read 'we're not sure if the auto-targeting miniguns or the bound elemental spirits got to them first, but one of the remains could only be identified by the serial number on her muscle augmentation implant'.

 

* In ''The Time of Your Life'', Blick, a bully with a badge, tends to beat up anybody who gets angry with him for intimidating other people.

 

* Agent Robert Nightingale in ''[[Alan Wake]]'', who at first tries to arrest Alan for the disappearance of Carl Stucky (whom Alan is forced to kill in self-defense). Nightingale is trigger-happy (twice shooting at Alan while a civilian is standing right next to him), a drunkard, and repeatedly blames Alan for various things that he has no control over, such as during the chase where he's ranting about how it's Alan's fault that the Dark Presence is attacking the police searching the woods for him. This behavior made him a stark contrast with Sarah Breaker, the Bright Falls' sheriff who repeatedly calls Nightingale out on his actions and even helps Alan throughout the story.

* One of the patients in ''Amateur Surgeon'' is a police officer ''named'' Officer Brutality... though, apart from his name, not a whole lot implies that he's particularly tough on criminals. After all, he did go to back alley surgeon Alan Probe for treatment.

* ''[[Devil Survivor]]'' takes this to [[Nightmare Fuel]] levels. {{spoiler|At the end of Day 4, when some of the more-maligned cops get their own demon-summoning COMPs, they decide that since Tokyo is locked down and isolated, that they're gonna disregard law and order (or rather, what little of it remains due to, again, Tokyo being cut off from the rest of Japan) and '''murder''' some civilians. After seeing one civilian die at their hands, the cops then turn their attention to you and you're forced to fight them.}}

* In ''[[Fable]]'', the guards around town beat you if you don't have enough money for a fine... and attacking in self-defense raises more charges against you. Kind of justified in a medieval setting, but still excessive.

* All of the [[Grand Theft Auto (series)|Grand Theft Auto]] games contain this; police will often shoot you for hitting their car. You're often guilty of much more, so perhaps they're justified. However, you can usually run over three or four pedestrians before they'll take any notice. Corrupt police officers are obviously abundant in the [[Crapsack World]] and will often hire the player for hits. Particularly notable is ''[[Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas|San Andreas]]'', where Frank Tenpenny is a corrupt CRASH officer and the final mission takes place during what are basically the GTA world's version of the Rodney King riots.

* Occurs in ''Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure'', wherein the city has enacted draconian measures to prevent graffiti, including assaulting graffiti artists with deadly force. One early level forces you to sneak away from a scene while two officers beat a graffiti artist to death while discussing how they'll decide he "resisted arrest."

* Stryker of [[Mortal Kombat]] shows police brutality in his x-ray move, fatalities, and some parts of his fighting style. Though to be fair, Mortal Kombat is brutal. He's even fond of shouting it!

* In one level of [[Super Scribblenauts]], Maxwell takes on the role of a police officer, and is eventually tasked with dispersing a peaceful hippie crowd without killing anyone.And "killing" is the center word.Sure, he can just type "megaphone" and make them disperse...or throw tear gas and flashbangs at them.Or sic a guard dog.Being a game where you can use any word, the [[Video Game Cruelty Potential]] is pretty much unlimited.

 

* The Pun Police skit in ''[[The KAMics]]'' is about the officers who attacks people for making puns.

* The Podunkton police force in ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' like to [http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/060925 indulge in this] (continued [http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/060927 here]). Their chief officer is actually a former mafia enforcer. "[http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/061002 What's with this town?]"

 

* Pepper Spray Cop: an incident of Police Brutality during an Occupy protest at UC Davis underwent [[Memetic Mutation]].

* [[The Nostalgia Critic]] has learned that the police are evil, though it isn't clearly explained why.

 

* ''[[Family Guy]]'' mocks this to hell and back. In one episode, Peter finds out that he has black ancestors, and everybody starts treating him differently. When a cop pulls him over for speeding, Peter is perfectly polite, and the cop doesn't act unusually until he remembers that particular little tidbit.

{{quote|'''Officer:''' Are you that white guy who's actually a black guy?

{{quote|'''Chief Wiggum''': Set your nightsticks on "whomp."

'''Eddie''': Uh, mine's stuck on "twirl."}}

* ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'': In "Party Pooper Pants", the titular character get wrongfully arrested by officers John and Nancy O'Malley, just because [[Disproportionate Retribution|he didn't invite them to a party he was throwing]].

** Humorously parodied in "Doing Time", where officers Nancy and Malley appear to be beating a suspect, when in reality they were fixing a parking meter.

 

* As mentioned before, police in the Soviet Union, especially the Stalin administration.

{{quote|"In America, you break the law. [[In Soviet Russia, Trope Mocks You|In Soviet Russia, the law breaks you!]]"}}

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Help Help This Index Is Being Repressed]]

[[Category:Useful Notes/The United States]]

[[Category:Truth in Television]]

[[Category:Crime and Punishment Tropes]]