History Main / PoliceBrutalityGambit

--->'''Aceveda:''' ''What did you do?!''\\

->''"So, er, if you're being interrogated by the police and they're recording the interview, make sure every so often you go -"'' [claps his hands together] ''"-Ow!"''

* On ''Series/TheInside'' a [[EnfantTerrible psychopathic little girl]] threw herself out of a treehouse and broke her arm, pointing the finger at Agent Locke who had just confronted her with evidence she was the [[MonsterOfTheWeek murderer of the week]].

* [[{{Inverted Trope}} Inverted]] in ''Series/{{Reno 911}}''. After giving up chasing a {{Burger Fool}} mascot who disrespected them, officer Jones and Garcia have a friendly conversation with him about the chase. It comes the reasons why he was able to get away was because his milkshake costume was so heavily padded; the mascot invited the two to beat up on him with nightsticks to prove his invulnerability, to no avail. The three depart on friendly terms and soon after the milkshake guy gets hit by a speeding vehicle due to not looking both ways. But since the entire chase was filmed, it was easy work for {{Internal Affairs}} to recut it to look like the Reno cops intentionally beat up and pushed the poor man into traffic.

---> '''Aceveda''': ''What did you do?!''\\
'''Mackey''': [[NotMeThisTime Nothing!]]

* In ''Series/TheXFiles'' the [[{{Mutants}} mutant]] serial killer [[MeaningfulName Tooms]] sneaks into Mulder's apartment and beats himself up with one of his shoes, causing Mulder to be warned to stay away from him. The fact that Mulder [[YouHaveToBelieveMe ranted that Tooms]] [[CassandraTruth was a killer mutant]] at his trial didn't help.
* A memorably funny instance on an episode of ''Series/WorldsDumbest'': a guy punches a cement wall, then starts screaming about how the police had broken his hand during the arrest. When informed that he's on camera, he curls up on his bunk and starts crying.

* ''Series/SpacePrecinct'': A sort of third-party variant comes up in one episode when Brogan and Haldane are off the street for the duration of an investigation into an officer-involved shooting. It should have been a routine inquiry, there were two witnesses ''and'' video evidence of the suspect opening fire... but suddenly those witnesses are claiming Brogan just shot the guy for no apparent reason other than he wasn't in the mood for a long pursuit, and that video evidence [[InconvenientlyVanishingExoneratingEvidence has suddenly gone missing]]... It turns out that Brogan was due to testify in the trial of a local mob boss, who had hired a woman from a race with PsychicPowers to dump evidence and interfere with the witnesses in the hope that this would discredit him as a witness for the prosecution.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* It doesn't work so well in RealLife. Most of the time it comes down to the police officer's word against the suspect's, and most judges will end up siding with the cop.
* This trope is one of the main reasons why most jurisdictions have fitted out police interrogation rooms and cells with video cameras; it's a lot harder to pull this kind of stunt when it's all being videotaped. Of course, it acts as a deterrent to any officer who does feel like getting a bit too physical with a suspect as well. Unfortunately, in [[PoliceBrutality dirty precincts]], such footage can "go missing", or be otherwise tampered with.
** Protecting against these accusations while exposing instances of ''actual'' PoliceBrutality are a big part of the push in the US for officers to wear body-cameras while on-duty.
* This trope is also discussed in ''Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets'', from which ''Series/HomicideLifeOnTheStreet'' took much of its inspiration. Whilst acknowledging that genuine police brutality does exist, the author notes that since most of the murders that the detectives face occur either between criminals or to people that the detective has no particular personal stake in, there's actually not a great deal of incentive for the cops to risk the case, their clear-up rates, and their careers to rough up some local criminal simply to get him to confess to killing another local criminal. Of course, the book did have an example of a case blowing up when one detective said that they had a phone book in the interview room to look up an address while the accused said they had beaten him with it.
* Music/MichaelJackson [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Jackson#Allegations_against_police claimed in an interview that he had been injured and mistreated]] when he was booked on child molestation charges in 2003. The police department in question released video and audio tape to discredit his claims, although Jackson's family still claimed that they were biased. The charges were investigated and eventually rejected the following year (this makes the "They Don't Care About Us" lyric "I'm a victim of police brutality" HarsherInHindsight...since he wasn't).
* A woman who was pulled over and arrested by a traffic cop in Palm Beach, Florida accused the cop of raping her. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgxwPU0W-Wg Luckily the police car's camera proved she was lying.]]
* One incident had a man in a jail cell beat himself up to try and frame the police for assaulting him. The cell, however, had a security camera that was quickly pulled out as evidence.
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** A random crook tries this, and Mac simply points out how easy it would be for them to prove that neither he nor Detective Flack could have injured him, so he hurt himself for nothing.

* This happened in an episode of ''Series/{{Life}}'' - a suspect slammed his head onto a table and then started claiming that Crews was a crazy cop who pulled a knife on him earlier (which he did, while attempting to apprehend the suspect) and now was terrorizing him. They did have to let him go - not because of the fake injury (they had tapes) but the pulled-a-knife-on-him thing, which was kind of against the rules.

* ''Series/{{Millennium}}''. A CreepyChild does this to discredit Frank Black.

* In ''[[Literature/HerculePoirot Hercule Poirot's Christmas]]'', Magdalene Lee goes into hysterics and rushes away as she and her husband George are being interrogated, and George (who's in Parliament) promises to raise questions of police brutality in the House and slams the door. She returns later alone to admit [[spoiler:she was calling her lover on the night of the murder and therefore wanted to get George away]].

Officer O'Troper is in an interrogation room with Professor Evil, he's started getting somewhere. They found his fingerprints all over the DeathRay and they have a receipt for a [[{{Phlebotinum}} fluxoid charger]] from Radio Shack paid for with [[ForeignMoneyIsProofOfGuilt foreign money]] out of Professor Evil's account. It's an open and shut- HEY! Why's the professor clawing at his own face? Prof. Evil then proceeds to cry PoliceBrutality and they're forced to release him, and he then finds an AmbulanceChaser and proceeds to unleash a FrivolousLawsuit on poor old [[ButtMonkey O'Troper]]. A {{subtrope}} of WoundedGazelleGambit which occurs in {{Police Procedural}}s. Basically a suspect injures himself and accuses the police of PoliceBrutality in order to try and get the charges dropped. Alternately, the suspect may incite the officer into hitting him.

In reality, this rarely works; real-life interrogations are generally filmed, while police cars normally have audio and video recorders running at all times. And both judges and juries are in general more disposed to believe the word of a cop when it comes down to a he-said, she-said situation (which can be unfortunate when [[DirtyCop the cop really is corrupt]]).

* One recent incident had a man in a jail cell beat himself up to try and frame the police for assaulting him. The cell, however, had a security camera that was quickly pulled out as evidence.

** An accidental version occurs a few episodes later when a teenager collapses while alone with Flack. It turns out that [[spoiler: he was responsible for framing the Victim Of The Week as being a pedophile and took an overdose of pills, which caused him to collapse]]. Flack is cleared in the following episode.

* ''WesternAnimation/StarWarsRebels'': In [[Recap/StarWarsRebelsS3E15ThroughImperialEyes "Through Imperial Eyes"]], [[spoiler:Ezra]] makes it look like [[spoiler:Agent Kallus]] was beating him to get a confession. Unlike most examples, however, this is because the person supposedly using PoliceBrutality is actually the ReverseMole, and they're trying to avoid getting him caught. [[TheEmpire The government in question]] couldn't care less about their officers committing police brutality, and would even encourage it (said ReverseMole is implied to have willingly beat up prisoners in the past when he was still loyal, hence why the characters are trying to keep this image up).

* In one chapter of ''Manga/CatsEye'' a perp does his worse to piss off the police officers interrogating him and trying to save him from whatever Cat's Eye would do him for stealing their target for a heist, and upon getting punched by a fed-up officer he starts claiming police brutality. [[LaserGuidedKarma It bites him back in the ass]] when Hitomi disguises herself as Asatani and uses the situation to trick the police to leave alone her with the perp, who nearly gets an heart attack.

* This trope is also discussed in ''Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets'', from which ''Series/HomicideLifeOnTheStreet'' took much of its inspiration. Whilst acknowledging that genuine police brutality does exist, the author notes that since most of the murders that the detectives face occur either between criminals or to people that the detective has no particular personal stake in, there's actually not a great deal of incentive for the cops to risk the case, their clear-up rates and their careers to rough up some local criminal simply to get him to confess to killing another local criminal. Of course the book did have an example of a case blowing up when one detective said that they had a phone book in the interview room to look up an address while the accused said they had beaten him with it.

* One recent incident had a man in a jail cell beat himself up to try and frame the police for assaulting him. The cell, however, had a security camera which was quickly pulled out as evidence.

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* Doesn't work so well in RealLife. Most of the time it comes down to the police officer's word against the suspect's, and most judges will end up siding with the cop.
* This trope is one of the main reasons why most jurisdictions have fitted out police interrogation rooms and cells with video cameras; it's a lot harder to pull this kind of stunt when it's all being videotaped. Of course, it acts as a deterrent to any officer who does feel like getting a bit too physical with a suspect as well.
** Unfortunately, in [[PoliceBrutality dirty precincts]], such footage can "go missing", or be otherwise tampered with.
* This trope is also discussed in ''Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets'', from which ''Series/HomicideLifeOnTheStreet'' took much of its inspiration. Whilst acknowledging that genuine police brutality does exist, the author notes that since most of the murders that the detectives face occur either between criminals or to people that the detective has no particular personal stake in, there's actually not a great deal of incentive for the cops to risk the case, their clear-up rates and their careers to rough up some local criminal simply to get him to confess to killing another local criminal.
** Of course the book did have an example of a case blowing up when one detective said that they had a phone book in the interview room to look up an address while the accused said they had beaten him with it.

In reality, this rarely works; real-life interrogations are sometimes filmed, while police cars normally have audio and video recorders running at all times. And both judges and juries are in general more disposed to believe the word of a cop when it comes down to a he-said, she-said situation (which can be unfortunate when [[DirtyCop the cop really is corrupt]]).