Follow TV Tropes

Following

Cowboy Cop / Real Life

Go To

Note that in real life, police do have the ability to forgo certain normally required steps during law enforcement operations if absolutely necessary - the doctrines of "exigent circumstances", "hot pursuit" and imminent threats to people’s safety apply here - if an armed person drags a hostage inside their house and shuts the door while threatening to kill them, police officers don’t need to wait for a warrant to break the door down, apprehend or kill the suspect and rescue the hostage. These kind of scenarios are not a case of police being CowboyCops as the officers involved are still operating within prescribed legal limits covering these types of circumstances - they may have to justify their actions which may also be subject to independent scrutiny by the courts and other agencies.

Having said this, the cases below are when cops went far beyond permitted behaviour:

  • Most infamously, suspicions of "cowboy" antics by police proved fatal for the prosecution in the murder trial against OJ Simpson. Evidence was introduced of LAPD officer Mark Fuhrman being a hard-nosed racist who talked of routinely committing and covering up police brutality against African-Americans. Even though Fuhrman claimed that he was only playing a character for dramatic purposes, his proven use of racist language and innuendo allowed Simpson's defense lawyers to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury on an otherwise strong case.
  • The "Rodney King" video likewise presented an image in the minds of America, of (white) "cowboy cops" beating a helpless (black) citizen; even though defense lawyers successfully argued that the police were going strictly "by the book" in properly subduing King as a criminal suspect. Their acquittal resulted in the famous L.A. Riots and sparked the officers' eventual conviction on Civil Rights charges.
  • Speaking of the LAPD, they've had several Chiefs who were known for their fiery and heavy-handed approach to law enforcement:
    • James E. Davis was the Chief of the LAPD from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. Under him, the department became known for having a very rough and cowboyish style when it came to dealing with crime, resulting in accusations of police brutality and corruption. Davis himself wasn’t shy from controversy, especially when it came to dealing with unions, communists, and migrants, as well as his stated admiration of Adolf Hitler’s policies against the Jews.note 
    • In the 1950s and '60s, William Parker transformed the LAPD into a more professional police force. But it came at the expense of the relationships with L.A.'s African-American and Latino communities, who accused the department of racism and police brutality, which Parker vehemently denied.
    • Beginning in 1978 under Daryl Gates, the LAPD became more militarized, with new creations like SWAT, anti-gang teams like CRASH, and anti-drug programs like DARE. Despite this, the department's relationship with the African-American and Latino communities continued to erode and Gates’s extreme and very controversial approach to policing played a heavy factor in the L.A. Riots taking place.
  • The NYPD has also been under the microscope for several heavy-handed tactics in the last 25 years.
    • The Stop and Frisk and Broken Windows laws that were instituted by Police Commissioner William Bratton in the mid-1990s. While it may have contributed to a major drop in crime in New York City, many critics have accused the polices of unfairly targeting people of color, mainly African Americans and Latinos.
    • After the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has taken major steps in bolstering its anti-terrorist unit and providing state-of-the-art surveillance to monitor potential terrorist attacks around the city, which has been praised by other government officials like the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Army. The department even has anti-terrorist units in 15 different cities around the world.
    • Despite these achievements many have criticized the department for overstepping its boundaries as a local police force and that many members of the unit have used their position to spy on Muslims at their stores, restaurants, mosques, websites, and public gatherings. Even the FBI called that type of surveillance very unhealthy.
  • The London Metropolitan Police have been accused of slipping into this territory recently. Among other things, they've tried to engineer the dismissal of a government official, and have reportedly dropped off gang members in territory controlled by rival gangs after questioning, which is sometimes tantamount to a death sentence. They've also been accused of using excessive force against peaceful protests — partially good old-fashioned police brutality, and partially the controversial "kettling" technique. Not to mention the standard racist and anti-Islamic behaviour when dealing with minority suspects, and infiltrating any political group that criticises them or campaigns for internal investigations into their behavior.
  • Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona (which includes Phoenix) from 1993 until 2017, is what happens when a Cowboy Cop becomes Da Chief. During his tenure as sheriff, he promoted himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff" and took a very hard line on crime (especially illegal immigration, often to the detriment of other law enforcement), and his mediagenic nature saw him making, by his count, two hundred TV appearances a month. A sampling of his greatest hits:
    • His handling of the prison system included making prisoners wear pink underwear, banning Playboy, bringing back chain gangs (albeit volunteer-only), setting up an in-house radio station called "KJOE" to play classical music, opera, Frank Sinatra, and patriotic music, and being called out twice by the federal courts for violating Constitutional provisions against cruel and unusual punishment, including charges of feeding moldy, spoiled food to prisoners and denying medical care. The most notorious bit, though, was his creation of a tent city to house surplus inmates outside in the Arizona heat that he himself compared to a concentration camp. He justified it by claiming that American soldiers in Iraq wearing body armor lived in the same conditions, which they didn't, and that it was only for those who had already been convicted. Furthermore, he operated a county jail, not a penitentiary or state prison, meaning many of the people sent to him were not convicted of a crime yet.
    • His greatest notoriety came from his hardline stance against illegal immigration, at the expense of other crimes. His routine targeting of Hispanics with racial profiling eventually brought the attention of the Department of Justice, and in 2017, after repeatedly refusing to comply with orders to end racial profiling, he was found guilty of contempt of court (though President Donald Trump pardoned him soon after). When he wasn't going after immigrants, he was launching politically motivated probes into his opponents. Meanwhile, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office reportedly cleared as many as three-quarters of all cases without arrest or proper investigation, with sexual assault in particular treated as a low priority.
    • The requisite property destruction was also there. He once brought a full SWAT team complete with a tank to break up a cockfight. Why such a show of force? He swears it had nothing to do with the fact that Steven Seagal was filming an episode of his TV show with them.
    • He also devoted his energy to endorsing the "birther" conspiracy theory claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the US and was therefore ineligible to be President, and devoted MCSO resources to an ultimately fruitless "investigation" that he nevertheless kept pushing for years.
    • Phoenix voters eventually got sick of his antics and threw him out in 2016 by a thirteen-point margin. He hoped to run for sheriff again in 2020 but was eliminated in the August primaries.
  • Christopher Dorner was a strange subversion of the usual order. While he hated the LAPD's structure and regulations and was described as a loose cannon by superiors, his conflict with them was for completely different reasons than usual — he thought that the LAPD was covering up out-of-control police brutality and racism, and felt that his attempts to expose this were the reason he got fired. It ultimately ended in him Going Postal, killing four people before barricading himself in a cabin at Big Bear Lake, where he died after an extended siege.
  • Overly problematic Cowboy Cops will often become what are known as "gypsy cops", so called because they drift from police department to police department, being rehired almost after they're released, due to the difficulty/unwillingness to get records about the cop at their previous employer, difficulty for small communities especially to get quality officers, and a lack of any oversight board to strip bad police of their badge permanently.

Top