Dirty Cop / Live-Action TV

Dirty Cops in Live-Action TV.

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• 1-800-Missing takes this trope to its logical extreme in one episode: the entire department being investigated is corrupt.
• Accused (2023):
  • In "Robyn's Story" the bailiff taking Robyn to and from court lets in Jamie's brother when he's in the restroom, who then beats him up.
  • In "Naataani's Story" the FBI agent who handled Derrick is willing to coerce, frame and murder people.
  • In "Morgan's Story" Jason's brother is an NYPD detective. He reluctantly frames Morgan, Jason's ex-wife, for drug dealing so he'll get sole custory of their son. It gets exposed at the end, with him being arrested.
• Adam-12: Several episodes deal with corrupt fellow officers of Reed and Malloy, the most notable of the lot being the 1971 episode "Internal Affairs – Blackmail", in which one of Malloy's best friends is being investigated for blackmailing a witness.
• Against the Wall plays with this trope a lot. It is based around a protagonist in the Internal Affairs division always investigating cops or other law enforcement officials. Sometimes played straight, sometimes subverted.
• Andor: In "Kassa", two of Pre-Mor's security officers try to shake down Cassian after harassing him for their enrichment. After learning about this, their superior the Chief Inspector decides to cover up their deaths because it would make him look bad. Karn, his subordinate, goes against this and investigates.
• Andromeda: In "Lava and Rockets", Molly Noguchi and Dylan are stunned to learn that the police will accept a bribe in public. The reason is low taxes and a high crime rate.
• One episode of Angel had LAPD officers harassing and brutalizing local teens (mostly black). Gunn and Wesley try to catch it on video, but Wesley is shot, and the cop seems nigh invulnerable. Meanwhile, Angel and detective Kate Lockley discover that the officers in question are all dead, and have been raised as zombies by their precinct's police chief, who's practicing Black Magic.
• Arrowverse:
  • The Flash (2014): Part of the backstory of Ralph Dibny (a.k.a. Elongated Man) is this. When Ralph is first introduced, it's mentioned that Ralph was a member of the Central City Police Department until his ouster when Barry Allen testified in court to his discovery that Dibny had planted evidence at a crime scene and committed perjury in the ensuing trial.
  • Batwoman (2019): In "Armed and Dangerous", Tavaroff and his crew turn out to not just be trigger happy, they'll murder their boss for self-preservation. It's indicated The Crows is filled with agents of the same ilk.
• The A-Team:
  • The team faces off against a Similar Squad of cops who moonlight as assassins in "A Small and Deadly War".
  • In "Knights of the Road", the A-Team attempts to turn the cocaine dealers in to the local police, only to find when they march into the station that some of them are in on it as well.
• Babylon 5: After Sheridan ousts Nightwatch and has B5 declare independence, even with a large number of the local Narns taking over security, the station still has to hire additional security personnel. Unfortunately, without Earth's resources, the station can't do the full background checks they'd like. As a result, one of the new guards goes on Morden's payroll, helping smuggle the Shadow agent past customs. However, it doesn't pay off in the long run for the hapless guard as Morden kills the guy once he outlives his usefulness.
• Banshee:
  • The mayor hires an outsider to be sheriff because all the previous local sheriffs have been paid off by Proctor. Ironically, it's implied that Proctor may have turned the real Hood before he even got to Banshee.
  • Right after Lucas is sworn in as sheriff, he breaks into a pawn shop and steals a safe.
• Better Call Saul: While Breaking Bad hinted at Mike Ehrmantraut's past as a dirty cop, in this series we get the full story. The Philadelphia police were so universally corrupt that Mike went along with it to prevent his partners from thinking he wouldn't have their backs, since he knew if they thought he would turn on them they would kill him first. His son Matt never suspected such a thing, and when he became a cop himself he initially balked at the idea of ever being on the take. Mike convinced him that he had to take the money, so Matt did, but his partners killed him anyway because he took too long to say 'yes'. Mike himself would go on to become the chief enforcer in Gus Fring's drug operation.
• Beyond Evil:
  • Gi-hwan, Ju-won's father, is willing to close a murder case quickly, which would ensure the victim is never identified and the murderer never caught, to prevent the possibility of Ju-won becoming a suspect. He also killed Yu-yeon by driving recklessly and has kept quiet about it for years.
  • Sang-yeob suggests planting evidence, to Dong-sik's disgust.
• Big Sky:
  • State trooper Legarski turns out to be involved with sex trafficking, and murders Cody covering it up.
  • In Season 2, a deputy sheriff is working with a drug trafficking syndicate.
• B.J. and the Bear and Sheriff Lobo: The title character of the latter series, who in the former show tried to put truck driver B.J. McCay out of business by pinning various crimes on him. In his own series, Lobo always tried to manipulate various schemes to his advantage, although in the end he would always come up with a way to stop crime.
• Blue Bloods:
  • Danny Reagan is a borderline case. He's not the "plant evidence" or "kill unarmed criminals" type, but he has done illegal things that in real life would get him swiftly terminated from the NYPD, and has faced little comeuppance for his behavior. Examples include intentionally stopping a medical tube for an old man because he thought he had information, threatening to put a bullet in the back of a robber's head — when the said robber was cuffed and unarmed, and putting a suspect in the trunk of his car and driving like crazy to get said suspect to talk. And the list goes on.
  • Season 1 has the Blue Templar, a ring of crooked cops who were engaged in murder, narcotics trafficking, and money laundering. Their leader Sonny Malevski also killed Commissioner Frank Reagan's son Joe when he began to infiltrate them.
  • Frank loathes dirty cops as a whole, considering them a disgrace to good police in general and the NYPD as a whole, due to the damage they do to public trust, and of course what the Blue Templar did to Joe. What's notable is how low-key he is about it. He doesn't raise his voice and his expression barely changes even though it's abundantly clear how furious he is. When he confronted the ones responsible for Joe's death at the end of the first season, it's almost terrifying how calm he looks during the entire exchange. He only loses his cool for a moment when he knocks some things off the top of a cabinet, which is also one of the few times he raises his voice. He's not shouting either, he raises it the way people do when they want to make sure they're heard.
  • From season 1's "After Hours", there's Jimmy Burke, Frank's partner while stationed at the 27th Precinct who took a bullet for him. He was eventually promoted to Inspector and placed in command of the 15th Precinct. When he is up for a promotion to Deputy Chief as the Deputy Commander of Patrol Borough Manhattan South, Erin uncovers that Jimmy has been juking his precinct's COMPSTATS, misreporting felonies as misdemeanors to artificially lower the crime rates. After meeting with Jimmy, Frank allows him to retire rather than face demotion to Captain and reassignment to the 128th Precinct in Staten Island.
  • In the season 2 episode "Critical Condition", the leader of a botched bank robbery turned hostage situation is Billy Flood, an ex-cop from a special unit that Frank ran in the 1990s.
  • In "Thanksgiving", Sgt. Renzulli is revealed to be betting on horses on the side, and owes about $10,000 to his bookie. After hearing about it from Jamie, Frank bails Renzulli out but makes clear it's a one-time offer.
  • In "Framed", Danny is investigating a bookie who has his clients assaulted when they're late paying him. Right as Danny's about to get a warrant to raid the bookie's house in search of a black book that will reveal a list of all the clients who owe him money, he's pulled over and busted for drug possession. It's obvious to the entire Reagan family the drugs were planted. Furthermore, Jamie finds that a baker Danny stopped at right beforehand^note as he'd been reminded by Erin and by Linda repeatedly to do so seems to have been intimidated into lying about Danny's whereabouts. As the investigation turns out, an Internal Affairs captain that had previously investigated Danny for a friendly-fire incident was among those who would have been outed as owing money to the bookie when the black book turned up. He framed Danny to get him out of the way, even proceeding to steal Danny's off-duty pistol to kill the bookie.
• Bosch:
  • In season 2's adaptation of Trunk Music and The Drop, Deputy Chief Irvin Irving's son George is doing undercover work infiltrating a ring of corrupt cops. It turns out that the ring is run by Carl Nash, a dirty ex-cop who is a person of interest in Bosch's own investigation into the murder of Tony Allen, itself committed by two of the dirty cops (Nate Riley and Maureen O'Grady) on Nash's orders. George is eventually murdered when Nash finds the listening devices he wears on him at all times, and his death is staged to look like a robbery gone bad.
  • In season 4's adaptation of Angels Flight, Gabriella Lincoln, one of the IAD cops that Bosch has to take onto his task force in season four, is on the take, passing information through Bradley Walker to Howard Elias and getting a portion of the kickback in return.
  • Late in season 5, Ray Marcos and Daniel Arias, two vice detectives that Jerry Edgar has been talking to in relation to the murder of his informant Gary Wise, are actually in the pocket of Jamaican gangster Jacques Avril and set Gary up to be murdered. In the season 6 premiere, Marcos and Arias are assassinated on Avril's orders when they come under Internal Affairs scrutiny.
  • In the season 6 finale, a sheriff's deputy at the courthouse turns out to be a loyal member of the 308s, a group of radical sovereign citizens, and helps Heather Strout smuggle a bomb into the building.
  • Captain Dennis Cooper, the station captain at Hollywood Division beginning in season 5. Late in season 5, it's discovered he's responsible for juking stat numbers at Hollywood Division to make it seem like violent crime is down. In season 6, he pursues a petty sexual harassment complaint against Billets on Vega's behalf even though it's clear the original complaint had no merit and Vega and Billets had cleared the air. Then in season 7, when Billets is dealing with harassment by two sexist cops, he has a jewelry store owner he was fraternity brothers with give a pair of earrings to said sexist cops to plant in Billets' car in an attempt to frame her. Billets turns the tables on him: she calls in a favor with Vega, who gets the jewelry store owner in question to flip. The last we see of Cooper is him and the other two cops being escorted out of Hollywood Division by IA in handcuffs.
• Breaking Bad: The Mexican Federales aren't necessarily dirty or brutal, but gun down surrendering drug dealers as part of the major crackdowns orchestrated in response to the Cousins' attack on Hank (itself orchestrated by Gus).
• The Juárez police in The Bridge (US). It's such a way of life there that all Marco can muster up is frustration when someone he knows moonlights for a cartel.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: The Nine-Nine often face police officers less ethical than they are, but some push this into outright corruption:
  • Deputy Commissioner Podolski initially appears to be a downplayed example, as he transparently uses his position to ensure his delinquent son gets away with causing hundreds of dollars' worth of vandalism damage to police cars. However, it is later heavily implied that he is in fact in the pocket of a local Corrupt Bureaucrat with ties to drug smuggling and has links to the mob. He tries to destroy Jake's career when he investigates said bureaucrat.
  • Deputy Chief Madeline Wunch is a downplayed example. While she's not outright corrupt, she shamelessly abuses her position to make Holt's life miserable as part of their petty rivalry. She is also perfectly willing to organize a fake Internal Affairs investigation simply to get dirt on Holt. She makes it abundantly clear in the season two finale that she'll happily destroy Jake, Amy, Rosa, Charles and Terry's careers just to beat Holt.
  • Corrupt FBI Agent Bob Anderson. While posing as Holt's friend and a dedicated agent, he is in fact in the pocket of Jimmy "the Butcher" Figgis and is outright willing to commit murders for him.
  • Lieutenant Melanie Hawkins manages to make all the previously police examples look like upstanding officers of the law by comparison. Publicly known as one of the NYPD's best cops who chases the most dangerous criminals, she is secretly the mastermind behind New York's most notorious gang of bank robbers and in charge of a massive criminal conspiracy, purely to line her own pockets. She also happily uses Police Brutality to keep people in line, is addicted to cocaine, and successfully manages to frame Jake and Rosa for her crimes.
  • Season 8 inverts this by showing that it's the entire police institution that's crooked, and it's actually the heroes who are unusual by being good cops. Rosa and Jake work hard to get evidence of a cop's abuse of power, only to have that evidence deleted in front of their eyes by a captain who tells them that even if she wanted to, the very best thing she could do was to get the cop suspended with pay, since there's no way she could or would fire him. One of the major antagonists of the season, O'Sullivan, is head of the police union and blatantly admits that he is more concerned about making sure the cops in the union keep their job, rather than making sure they're that good cops. The season was written in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests.
• Brotherhood has Declan's partner Ralph after Michael helps him cover up an accidental shooting.
• Burden of Truth: Sam Mercer, the chief of police in Millwood. He takes bribes and is shown to be racist towards Indigenous Canadians. Owen exposing his corruption leads to him losing his job and going to jail for killing an Indigenous man, but he gets off with only eighteen months on reckless endangerment. Then it's found that he was running a blackmail scheme while a cop, and it continues when he's on parole.
• They usually don't actually show up, but the existence of these is sometimes part of the reason why the clients on Burn Notice can't just call the cops. In "Unpaid Debts", the heroes run afoul of a group of them, and in "Question and Answer", Sam pretends to be one.
• One is feeding information to the Big Bad in episode 1x06 of By Any Means. Helen takes a particular pleasure in arresting him.
• The Cape:
  • Vince is framed as one by the Big Bad in the pilot, resulting in a police chase and an explosion that causes everyone to think he does. After being trained by a criminal circus, he becomes the titular masked hero.
  • Chess has many corrupt cops on his payroll, including Marty (though it's hinted that he might have been coerced into this).
• Sgt. Hank Voight is introduced as a dirty cop on Chicago Fire, abusing his authority to try to intimidate firefighter Matt Casey into dropping a complaint against Voight's son. He goes to prison for it. When he returns in Chicago P.D., he has cut a deal with Internal Affairs to pretend to be a dirty cop to help make cases. That deal ends in season 2, but Voight and the rest of the Intelligence unit have little compunction about violating the rights of suspects and engaging in other legally dodgy behaviour, including Hank's murdering the man who murdered his son.
• City on a Hill:
  • When he was an FBI agent, Jackie abused his position for kickbacks from criminals, enjoying Hookers and Blow particularly.
  • In Season 3, it's revealed that several Boston Police detectives have become involved with drug dealing, to the point that one murders another because they're rivals.
• Class 09: Poet infiltrates a highly corrupt police department, going undercover among them and busts the group with the evidence that she gets.
• Claws: Det. Chip Lauderdale is the pocket of the Husser crime family.
• Cold Case has Roger Mulverny, who abused his wife and used his position to make sure her pleas for help were lost. When she tried to leave him for a kind man, he murdered his daughter in front of her, causing her to give up her other daughter for the child's own safety and go into hiding. Forty years later, her boyfriend (also a cop) tearfully confesses that he and some of his other cop friends took him behind an alley and beat him in a back alley in an attempt to get him to stay away from her. ("That's how we dealt with abusers back then. Off the books.") Clearly it didn't work. The investigating detective comments that the abuser was killed in a shoot-out with criminals shortly after the child's death, and the boyfriend (who spent all this time thinking both children and their mother had been murdered) all but admits he took advantage of the situation to kill him. The team's reaction when they hear this story? They sweep the original dirty cop's death under the rug without even a single thought. That's one straight example, then two extremely sympathetic examples within five minutes of each other.
• Copper is set in 1864 New York and is full of Dirty Cops, including the hero and his friends. The police force of the time were notoriously corrupt and for the most part acted as just a glorified street gang. When the detectives foil a bank robbery, there is a definite pecking order as to who gets to steal what from the crime scene. The informant gets to grab a few coins, the detectives get to stuff their pockets with some bank notes, the sergeant gets a pocket watch belonging to one of the dead robbers and the captain gets to deliver the remaining money back to the bank and decide how much he will keep as payment for the 'protection' his cops provided.
• Corner Gas: Karren and too a greater extent Davis are a Downplayed example. After Lacey roped them into helping her move under the promise of feeding them afterwards, they insist she gives them pizza and beers at their restaurant. She mentions she doesn't have a license to serve alcohol, but they hand wave it, reminding her that they're the only cops in the town. Davis also screws around with his gun and at one point lends Hank his gun for no particularly good reason, he also tries to buy tickets off what he thinks is a scraper, but turns out to be another police officer under cover as a hooker, when he was younger he helped most of the main cast vandalize the town water tower by diverting traffic so that it could be done away from prying eyes. Karren at one point burns a crop circle into someone's field as a prank and is put into the slammer for a night as a result.
• Creepshow: "Okay I'll Bite" has Bunk, a prison guard who runs a drug ring that he forces the abused Elmer to cook for. He also framed Elmer for trying to kill another inmate, denying him parole so he's forced to keep doing this.
• Criminal Minds has a cop who has a hero homicide complex; he sets up a shooting so he can make himself a hero by being the first to respond. He attacks Garcia, fearing that she could find out about his murders.
  • The UnSub of another episode is a racist Texas cop who hunts and kills migrants along the border.
  • In one episode, the entire sheriff's department of a small town turn out to be on the payroll of the local gang boss (who is also the pastor). The sheriff himself is the exception, as he is an out-of-towner new to the job, and is quickly murdered by his own officers when it looks like he might rock the boat.
• Crossing Lines: One of the foremost sex traffickers in Europe is revealed as a police officer. He even guards a girl who escaped from his henchmen when she's being treated in the hospital.
• CSI:
  • Brass is originally an aversion of this, stating how he refuses to be a dirty cop. Later, however, he flirts with subverting it, ever since he covers up Ray Langston's unjustified killing of Nate Haskell by pocketing Ray's flex cuff at the scene.
  • Brass further expands on the subject in "Hollywood Brass" by stating that vice cops are essentially set up to become dirty and corrupt due to how their job requires them to drink, gamble, solicit prostitutes, and party on a regular basis.
• CSI: NY has done this repeatedly. Flack's mentor removed evidence that incriminated his son from a crime scene, Mac's first partner stole $200K from a perp back in the day and killed the guy's girlfriend to cover it up, Danny's old partner set up his current employer, a rich lawyer, to get robbed...
• Being a bad guy in Damages seems to entitle you to at least one (and usually more than one) corrupt cop/FBI agent on your payroll who is willing to surveil, harass, or murder anyone who bugs you too much.
• Dark Desire: Esteban, a police detective, turns out to be completely corrupt, framing people for money or his own ends.
• Dead Man's Gun: In "The Imposter", Deputy Floyd is a coward and extorting money from the local merchants.
• Deputy: In "10-8 Black & Blue" it turns out an LAPD detective with homicide is involved in murders, drug dealing and frames an innocent man on a murder charge. While talking with Hollister he says he'd slowly fallen further into corruption over time to get this far.
• The Deuce is about 1970s New York City. As such, police corruption is rampant. Just about all beat cops are in the pocket of the mob and collect protection money from businesses. A new captain in the 14th precinct, however, arrives with the intention of cleaning house.
• In Dexter, Quinn is a former dirty cop trying to clean up his act. He does succumb to temptation at one crime scene — and is spotted by Dexter, setting off a growing enmity between them. Eventually, his past comes back to haunt him in a big way when he's blackmailed several times by a criminal group he used to take money from.
• Downton Abbey: While imprisoned in Series 3, Bates discovers that Durrant, one of the prison guards, is part of a drug smuggling ring with Bates' cellmate Craig. In order to keep him silent, Durrant attempts to sabotage Anna's efforts to exonerate Bates.
• Dragnet has a few, including one Fallen Hero now on the take, who Friday makes to read himself his own Miranda rights.
• The Dukes of Hazzard:
  • Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, who invariably looks the other way as Boss Hogg engages in corrupt scheme after corrupt scheme, and then attempts to pin the blame on Bo and Luke Duke.
  • Boss Hogg is Roscoe's brother-in-law and the one who appointed him sheriff, probably because he knew he could keep Roscoe under his thumb.
  • In the first season, it's explained that Roscoe lost his pension in the county bond election and does Boss Hogg's bidding because he needs the extra money. That plot point is dropped later on.
• Equal: Police were paid by the Genovese crime family who owned some gay bars like Stonewall to only arrest a few people and let them remain open in exchange for bribes.
• Fargo:
  • Season 4: The Kansas City Police Department of 1950 are very dirty, often brutalizing members of Loy Cannon's black gang. The resident cops of this season, Detective Odis Weff and U.S. Marshal Richard "Deafy" Wickware, are not saints either. Weff is on the Fadda Family's payroll who stifles investigations into their activities, while Deafy is a bigoted Mormon who is very brutal towards criminals, if his story of his handling of Italian gangsters in Salt Lake City is true.
  • Season 5: The main villain of the season is Roy Tillman, the corrupt constitutional sheriff of Stark County, North Dakota. He regularly abuses his office in many ways, and at home is abusive to his wife. He's also Dot Lyon's ex-husband, who she escaped from ten years prior to the events of the season.
• Father Brown:
  • Sergeant Goodfellow is a legitimately nice and helpful guy, and the regular Inspector, be it Valentine, Sullivan, or Mallory, are increasing degrees of incompetent Jerkass but at least not corrupt, but any other cop who is named as a Character of the Day has a remarkably high likelihood of being one of these.
  • The episode "The Owl of Minerva" has Father Brown and Inspector Sullivan uncovering an entire Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy of these; Inspector Sullivan ends up Put on a Bus to go chasing them down all over England, although he makes a couple more appearances in later seasons when his mission takes him back to Kembleford.
• Averted in an episode of Father Ted in which Ted goes off on a rant about the good old days when the police would cover the Church for any wrongdoing.
• Firefly has the downright brutal Lieutenant Womack, who is a member of Allied Enforcement but likes to smuggle human organs on the side.
• In The Following Roderick, one of Joe Carroll's Co-Dragons is the sheriff of the small town where the Cult have their hideout.
• For Life: Officer Lindsley and Lieutenant Diaz. Together they make up a better reason for Lindsley stopping Andi Josiah, whom he then shot, and Diaz gets rid of video evidence (or so he thinks) that could contradict his story.
• Game of Thrones: The thoroughly corrupt Janos Slynt is the equivalent of King's Landing's police chief until his removal in "The Night Lands".
• Gang Related:
  • Ryan's secretly The Mole for Los Angelicos, a Latino gang, in the LAPD, feeding them information along with other crimes he commits. At the very least, he still has a conscience, and does go against Javier Acosta's orders on occasion. One notable instance is when he busts a human trafficking ring led by one of Javier's fishscale buyers.
  • Javier uses some prison guards under his payroll when they "arranged" for the murder of three Long Beach Lord gangsters by locking them up in the jail's yard near the end of "Sangre Por Sangre".
  • The Metas Cartel has prison guards strangle a witness who's going to testify against them in a federal case after learning what alias he's been held under in jail, making this look like he'd hung himself afterward.
  • Some of the Mexican Federal Police officers Sam meets up in Mexico turn out to be crooked cops working for the Metas. One of them was assassinated for refusing bribes.
• This is the setup and first season of Gotham. Practically everyone in the force is corrupt, including the Captain of Homicide Squad, since they all are under Falcone's payroll. Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya are relatively straight but bend the rules and are fairly Jerkass and condescending to the people around them. Bullock is too cynical to care anymore. Jim Gordon is the only cop who is decent and wants to destroy the corruption of the police and the city from within. Midway through the final season, Allen and Montoya have simply vanished, Harvey's worn off on Jim almost as much as the other way round, and for any other officer, being noted for your honesty (and courage) has earned you the special GCPD bright neon reflective Red Shirt uniform.
• Gotham Knights (2023):
  • Detective Ford was paid to kill Turner along with the other kids implicated in Bruce Wayne's murder. After they attempt to escape, he nearly does before they're rescued by Robin. In the fourth episode, it turns out he also prevented Bruce Wayne's lawyer from telling the authorities that the changes Bruce recently made to his will did not cut Turner out of it, which would have invalidated Turner's supposed motivation for having Bruce killed.
  • In "Daddy Issues" Lincoln waltzing into the interrogation room while the Commissioner is "on her lunch break" has Stephanie realizing she's in the Court's pocket.
• Grimm: Captain Renard who secretly has connections with the Wesen world, and is secretly Wesen himself. This is due to him being a member of a secret royal family who control the Wesen world, but Renard is a white sheep among them, as he is secretly working in a resistance against them. Later, the entire North Precinct works for Black Claw, a group trying to create a world run by Wesen, something that had been tried before by Hitler.
• Hand of God: There's a group of these who perform criminal acts (ranging from burglary to murder and rape) for money.
• The Heart, She Holler: Being a Black Comedy set in the Deep South with literally one police officer, this is a given for The Sheriff. He constantly cheats on his wife with the town prostitute, because his wife has Barbie Doll Anatomy, and later sends her to jail for a murder she had nothing to do with. He only lets her go because being confined to his workplace gives her much more opportunity to nag him than when she lived at home.
• Himmelsdalen:
  • Some of the "hosts" (guards/orderlies) are in bed with Carol, a ruthless crime boss among the patients, who cover up his dealings.
  • Jack covered up Siri's escape to save his job, including later destroying evidence that showed Helena is not her.
• Hightown:
  • In Season 1 some of the prison guards are shown as working for Frankie, who they're supposedly guarding, while he's in jail, permitting him to use a cell phone and have sex with his girlfriend while they keep watch.
  • In Season 3 Ray covers up Renee killing Jorge and helps her sell drugs for money, because he cares about her now more than his job as a cop. He then helps Renee find a witness against her who can then get bribed to disappear. Then he graduates to murdering Frankie as he's a threat for Renee.
  • Also in Season 3, Jackie discovers that Detective Tom Dolan has been helping a pimp, and murdered a drug dealer who'd stolen from him. Both she and Ray are disgusted because of his crimes, since it makes them all look bad. Then it turns out half the force is in bed with the pimp, whom they protect with payment by having sex with the women he runs for free.
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • The Arson Unit, of which Kellerman is the only cop NOT on the take. Kellerman spends almost the entirety of Season 5 bitching about how he's not dirty and then at the end of the season he goes and shoots Luther Mahoney, unjustifiably. And then he coerces his partners into covering it up.
  • There are also at least two other storylines involving police brutality and murder of suspects by police.
• In The Hour, it turns out that Commander Stern was the one who actually beat up Kiki, and one of many authority figures to be blackmailed by Cilenti into doing his dirty business.
• Hustle sometimes features Dirty Cops who think that they can manipulate the crew for their own ends. This always ends badly for them. D.I. Fisk in "Curiosity Caught the Kat" is a typical example.
• The I-Land: "Bonnie and Clyde" turn out to be prison guards who gladly accept money in return for killing or torturing prisoners.
• The Indian Detective: The Mumbai Police's Deputy Commissioner is corrupt and in league with Chandekar's gang. It turns out that Todd is too.
• In Justice (2006):
  • One case involves a former cop convicted of killing a fellow officer who'd accused him of corruption. It's revealed not only was he innocent of that, but wasn't even corrupt to begin with. He had testified against dirty prison guards while incarcerated too.
  • Other episodes however play this straight, with cops willing to frame people who they believe are guilty, or simply so their valuable informant (who had committed murder) is protected.
• In the Dark:
  • Dean turns out to be one, having accepted bribes from Nia in return for tips on police efforts against her, and killed Tyson so that this wouldn't come out.
  • The county jail is shown to have many guards taking bribes from the main gang leader in there for drug trafficking.
• At least two in JAG; Royal Ulster Constabulary Inspector Vincent Hutchinson in "Trinity" who arranged the kidnapping of the infant child of an American naval officer and an IRA member, only to put the blame entirely on the IRA; and DC Detective Frank Coster in "The Stalker", who did not only stalk Mac, but killed her former boyfriend Dalton Lowne and kidnapped her.
• Justified has Doyle Bennett who is a corrupt cop, but only in matters concerning his family.
  • Season 1 features a corrupt sheriff who works for a Miami drug cartel. He struck a deal with them so that he could get revenge on a child killer. He is actually a fairly effective sheriff since he is able to crack down on illegal drug manufacture and sales in the county. The drug cartel is not interested in selling drugs in the county and helped him get rid of the local meth manufacturers who were their competition in other areas. Things go bad for him when the cartel asks him to help them kill Raylan.
  • Season 3 has an election for sheriff in which both candidates are in the pockets of criminals. The incumbent hardly hesitates before accepting a Briefcase Full of Money from Quarles. When Boyd Crowder realizes that the sheriff works for Quarles he recruits his own candidate to run for the position. Subverted in the end because Boyd's candidate pays back Boyd by warning him about an arrest warrant and then states that their deal is done, and he is not doing more favours for Boyd.
  • Season 4 has the Marshals searching for Drew Thompson, a fugitive from the FBI and the Detroit Mob who 30 years before faked his death. Raylan quickly discovers that the FBI agents assigned to the case are working for the Detroit Mob and as a result the US Marshal Office gets full jurisdiction on the case. The local sheriff is tentatively in Boyd Crowder's pocket but he is reluctant to help Boyd in the search for Drew and tries to show Raylan that he is not actually corrupt. The sheriff turns out to actually be Drew Thompson.
  • Season 5 features Smug Snake sheriff Mooney who has been the corrupt deputy for most of the other corrupt sheriffs and police chiefs on the show. He is finally promoted to acting sheriff and goes after Boyd on behalf of the Clover Hillers, a group of corrupt hicks. Boyd then forces him to turn against his employers and has him murdered.
• Kamen Rider Ryuki: Masashi Sudo/Kamen Rider Scissors uses his job as a law enforcer to cover up his crimes while making sure to Leave No Witnesses. He once worked with Tomoyuki Kaga until the latter demanded a bigger profit, prompting Sudo to murder him while hiding his body in an antique store.
• L.A.'s Finest: More than one corrupt law enforcement officer is featured, including some in bed with drug traffickers (such as Warren). Syd and Nancy break the rules or commit crimes at times too, although never for personal gain.
• Law & Order occasionally brings up cops on the take.
  • It's initially implied that Fontana is dirty, as he wears very nice clothes and flashes a big roll far too often for a simple detective. However, it's eventually revealed that Fontana is living off an inheritance and not dirty at all, thus ultimately subverting the trope.
  • Back when he was "on the sauce", Briscoe was implied to be dirty (or at least surrounded by a lot of other dirty cops). By the time he joins the 27th Precinct, after he had cleaned himself up and kicked his alcohol problem, he only pretends to be a dirty cop in order to get his informants to trust him. In one episode an old partner of his turns out to be an inside man and hitter for a drug dealer, and when found out tries to bring Briscoe down with him.
  • Played straight by Profaci, who had been a very minor character from the first eight seasons who provided evidence or exposition to the main detectives. It was discovered in the Exiled TV movie that he worked for the mob.
  • After ADA Alexandra Borgia is kidnapped and murdered, the cops find a deposit of $8,000 in her bank account and realize that her killers were trying to make it look as though she was on the take.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent:
  • One episode features a non-fiscal example with a cop who closed a high-profile rape case^note inspired by the infamous Central Park Five case by dragging a false confession out of four teens. Years later, he kills the real culprit's mother when her investigations threaten to reopen the case.
  • Another episode centers around a crew of dirty officers from the NYPD's School Safety Division who fraudulently collected money from the department's pension fund, then killed a city auditor and his family when he began investigating them.
• Law & Order: Organized Crime:
  • Detective 2nd Grade Diego Morales is Richard's mole in the OCCB, giving him more than 2 million dollars to ensure the wellbeing of his sister. Ayanna is forced to shoot him as he tried to aim his sidearm at her.
  • In Season 2, it's discovered a whole police gang is operating from the 37th precinct, run by an old friend of Stabler's. They not only give tipoffs for the Marcy Killers, a major Black gang in the city, but steal drug money from crime scenes widely. Stabler goes undercover to join them and take the gang down. They even all have tattoos like regular gang members. It's called the Brotherhood. This trope is more zig-zagged though, in that their leader Frank Donnelly and his ring don't target more obvious innocents in their illegal gains (only other gangs), and Donnelly does still think that the best part of the job is protecting people at the end of the day.
  • Stabler finds out his father, a cop like him, was also dirty over time.
• In one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Stabler goes undercover as a corrupt customs official (so kind of a cop) to get in good with a smuggler in the illegal wildlife trade.
• Leverage has surprisingly few for a show about Robin Hood-like thieves. Virtually all of the targets are Corrupt Corporate Executives with a dirty cop not appearing at all until well into the second season. Hardison also impersonates a dirty cop during "The Boys Night Out Job" convincing Mexican drug dealers that he can help them.
• Life on Mars (2006) has a number of episodes which revolve around Gene Hunt and his superiors' relationships with local gangsters or corruption in general. Ashes to Ashes (2008) Series 2 was a complete arc about the fight between Hunt and various corrupt Met officers such as Mac, which doesn't end with Mac's death partway through the series.
• Line of Duty is about an Internal Affairs unit, so naturally these abound. Corruption within the British police force is portrayed as common on both a petty and an organized scale and present within its highest ranks. A recurring theme is officers refusing to admit to themselves that they are dirty cops, no matter how blatantly corrupt their actions are, and being motivated by a desire to prove otherwise. This extends all the way to someone who initially joined the police at the behest of a criminal organization for the purpose of covering for them.
• Longmire: Malachi Strand is the former Chief of the Cheyenne Tribal Police who was little more than a gangster with a badge, demanding money from crime victims to do his job and then taking money from the criminals to let them off. Longmire finally arrested him for extortion before the series began, and describes him as one of the worst criminals he ever had to deal with. He gets paroled in the third season and becomes a long-running villain for the rest of the show.
• Dyson and Hale from Lost Girl are a twist on this concept, as they are not so much corrupt as they have different loyalties than they should as police officers: they're big on the whole "protect and serve" thing, but their main job is to cover up Fae (particularly Light Fae) involvement in human crimes. There's a second level to this as well, as Dyson is actually more loyal to Trick (the former Blood King, but in practice nothing more than the owner of a Fae waypoint) than he is to the Ash, the leader of the Light Fae, and both he and Hale are more than willing to turning a blind eye to Bo breaking Fae law (as much as Fae law actually applies to Bo in the first place). Hale is also willing to ignore Kenzi's occasional brushes with human law (as well as spring her when she's incorrectly suspected of a crime), although he does stop short of actually helping her to receive stolen property.
• The Magician: In "Lady in a Trap", the local sheriff is part of the conspiracy to steal a rare book.
• M.A.N.T.I.S. has this in both the original TV movie, with the bigoted Ocean City Police Chief Stark forming a task force that violates civil rights and Antoine Pike, who is in league with Stark, and in the series with Port Columbia Police Chief Grant being in the pocket of Corrupt Corporate Executive Solomon Box and Paul Warren, who was the one who shot Miles Hawkins in a botched assassination attempt under orders of Grant and Box.
• Played for Laughs on Married... with Children. Officer Dan and his coppers are all a bunch of trigger-happy perverts who take bribes, sleep with prostitutes, let violent criminals off with a warning despite being Obviously Evil, and get free donuts. Being a Sadist Show, this is all played for comedy.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil: Wilson Fisk cements a lot of his power through buying off cops and FBI agents and using them to do his dirty work for him.
    • In season 1, practically half of the cops of the NYPD's 15th Precinct are in Fisk's pocket. Not only does Fisk use them to kill off associates who have become liabilities as well as his enemies (and ensure no NYPD investigations are opened into his activities), but they're so dirty that they're willing to actively murder fellow officers who aren't on the take or who have become liabilities themselves. In a touch of irony, it is one of these corrupt cops, Detective Carl Hoffman, guilt-ridden over Fisk forcing him to kill his partner and best friend Detective Christian Blake, who is responsible for giving up information that allows the FBI to apprehend Fisk and all of his top associates.
    • Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter is an FBI SWAT sniper on the detail that is assigned to protect Fisk after he makes a deal with Ray Nadeem to become an informant for them. After Dex saves Fisk from an assassination attempt, Fisk takes the mentally unstable agent under his wing, and slowly corrupts him into becoming a dangerous assassin who looks at Fisk like a father figure, and dresses up in a Daredevil suit procured by Melvin Potter to commit crimes that tarnish Matt Murdock's reputation as well as kill people who pose a threat to Fisk, including Jasper Evans and Nadeem himself.
    • Dex is just the notable standout in season 3. Because as Ray Nadeem finds out the hard way, almost every other FBI agent on the protection detail tasked with protecting Fisk while he's under house arrest in the Presidential Hotel is working for him, thanks to long-term emotional manipulation and actual blackmail.
    • Tammy Hattley, the SAC to whom Dex and Nadeem answer to. Fisk killed one of her kids in a staged "hit and run" and threatened her daughter. She's been under Fisk's control for so long that not even her close colleagues know she used to have two kids. She and Felix Manning blackmail Nadeem into joining the conspiracy by killing OPR Agent Winn and making an audio recording painting Ray as the shooter, which will be released if he doesn't cooperate.^*After Dex kills Nadeem on Vanessa's orders, he's ultimately framed for it posthumously
    • By design, Fisk has made it so that Ray Nadeem is the only agent on the detail who's not dirty. But even then, he's not entirely squeaky clean. His pride and desire to get a promotion to get a pay raise and get out of debt (thanks to a financial situation that Fisk orchestrated) lead him to blindly believe Fisk's "allegations" that Matt worked for him without bothering to think it suspicious that a member of the law firm that took Fisk down would secretly be working for him, and not take Karen seriously when she points out Fisk is using him as a pawn in a vendetta. His pride also keeps him from realizing Fisk is playing them all, and by the time he finds out about Dex's treachery, it's too late to back out. He ends up becoming a reluctant accomplice after Hattley blackmails him, though this only lasts for a short time. Being forced to be Dex's driver when Fisk sends Dex to Matt's church to kill Karen to avenge her murder of James Wesley, a hit during which Father Lantom gets killed taking a baton meant for Karen, ends up being the breaking point that leads to Nadeem finally growing a spine and making an effort to break with Fisk (with Matt and Foggy's help). It doesn't work, and he gets killed by Dex on Vanessa's orders, though not here before making a video confession naming all of the various crimes Fisk ordered FBI agents to commit for him.
  • Luke Cage:
    • Misty Knight's partner Rafael Scarfe is in the Stokes gang's pocket, and sabotages investigations that are a threat to Cottonmouth. In season 1, he murders the last survivor of a three-man crew that robbed a gun deal of Cottonmouth's, Wilfredo "Chico" Diaz, when Chico tries to turn state's evidence on Cottonmouth, and then uses Chico's information to sell Luke out to Cottonmouth. Later, when informed that Internal Affairs has him under investigation, Lt. Perez tasks Scarfe with getting Cottonmouth's guns out of evidence, with the help of a property sergeant who's been bribed to falsify papers saying the guns have been destroyed. But being under investigation, Scarfe decides to blackmail Cottonmouth, demanding $100,000 in funds that he knows Cottonmouth doesn't have. This prompts Cottonmouth to attack him, get hold of his gun, and shoot him with it. Scarfe manages to last a full day before dying, but not before spilling the truth to Luke and Claire about everything he knows. Sadly, his death means that none of his information is usable in putting Cottonmouth away, which combined with the police department brass not being happy with another police corruption scandal on their hands just a year after the one with Wilson Fisk, means Cottonmouth walks.
    • Just because Scarfe dies halfway through season 1 doesn't mean he no longer stops causing problems for the cast. Season 2 has a subplot where Misty has to deal with the fallout from Scarfe's corruption. Some of it is in the form of ostracization from her colleagues (who are also mocking her amputated right arm). On top of that, a bunch of cases she worked on with Scarfe were found to be tainted. It turns out that as a patrol officer, he destroyed evidence that would've implicated Cottonmouth in the murder of his uncle Pete on Mama Mabel's orders, which proves problematic when Misty finds that the gun from that murder was also used by Shades to kill Candace and by Mariah to kill Bushmaster's uncle. It also turns out that he planted a gun to ensure the arrest of a domestic abuser and dice game runner named Dontrell "Cockroach" Hamilton, a conviction Cockroach has just gotten overturned on appeal prior to the beginning of the season.
    • In the second season, Captain Thomas Ridenhour is a downplayed case of this. He's not corrupt, but a desk jockey in over his head. Ridenhour is using Comanche as a confidential informant to gather information about Mariah Dillard (and overseeing this investigation where he has a big conflict of interest, as he was a high school sweetheart of Mariah's). On top of that, Comanche is not very good at covering his tracks. Such so that they both end up being killed when a suspicious Shades follows Comanche to a meeting and catches them talking.
  • The Punisher:
    • Carson Wolf, Special Agent in Charge for the Department of Homeland Security's New York field office, participated in covering up David Lieberman's faked "death". He also was one of the plotters involved in the death of Frank Castle's family, and burying the story in both cases.
    • In season 2, Officer O'Rourke tries to collect the bounty on Frank Castle's head offered by John Pilgrim, to avenge a cousin of his in the Kitchen Irish who was killed by Frank in Daredevil season 2. He also tries to choke Amy Bendix to death when she tries to save Frank from him.
  • Jessica Jones: Season 3 has Carl Nussbaumer, who murders teenaged drug dealers whose deaths won't be minded by the criminal justice system because they'll be chalked up to gang violence, and steals their money and product to resell. He gets blackmailed by Eric Gelden and, later, accidentally killed by Trish Walker.
  • Agent Carter: In the season 2 premiere "The Lady in the Lake", we have LAPD Detective Andrew Henry, who's been paid off by Chadwick to dump the body of a woman Chadwick was having an affair with, as well as another cop paid off by Chadwick to kill Henry before he can talk.
  • WandaVision: SWORD Director Tyler Hayward is illegally experimenting on Vision with the intent of reviving him against his will and in violation of the Sokovia Accords, and intends to frame Wanda Maximoff for his crimes.
• In Mayor of Kingstown, everyone is dirty one way or the other.
  • The McLuskies have an entire shift of prison guards in their pocket to make sure messages and contraband can flow freely to and from inmates and their gangs outside.
  • The Kingstown Police Department works with the McLuskies to sweep certain crimes under the rug while lethally dealing with those who upset the balance within the town.
  • Mike also says that there is plenty of corruption within the FBI and that he's committed numerous crimes in front of agents without fear of arrest.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • DI Mark Gudgeon and his NIS underlings in "Painted in Blood". They are planning to to swipe the missing £5 million from the bank robbery, and Gudgeon is the one who actually committed the murders.
  • Sgt. Trevor Gibson in the episode "Sleeper Under the Hill". He is involved in the murders and does his best to throw Barnaby and Jones off the trail. He ultimately falls victim to his partner in crime.
  • The episode "The Debt of Lies" involves several people who would fall somewhere under this trope in their backstory (from fairly light misdemeanours to outright theft of a significant quantity of money), but have since retired (or in one case, starts the episode at their retirement party). It also features a subversion in someone who is dirty, and was a cop, but wasn't dirty as a cop.
• Monk has a couple of incidents with corrupt cops:
  • "Mr. Monk Gets Fired" has Monk lose his PI license thanks to the new commissioner having a personal vendetta against Monk ever since a cop friend of his was put in jail for corruption
  • In "Mr. Monk and the Captain's Marriage", a corrupt police sergeant named Ryan Sharkey, Jr. kills a smalltime drug dealer scheduled to testify against the racketeer that Sharkey works for. However, during the fight leading up to the murder, one of Sharkey's teeth is knocked out, also causing him to leave some of his blood at the crime scene. Due to a homeless guy witnessing the murder and flagging down a passing patrol car, Sharkey is forced to flee, change into his uniform, and then return to the scene. Once there, he covers up the evidence he'd left behind by provoking Captain Stottlemeyer into punching him.
  • In "Mr. Monk Is on the Run", Parts 1 and 2, Sheriff John Rollins is in the pocket of Dale "The Whale" Biederbeck, and was responsible for framing Monk for a murder.
  • The Expanded Universe novel Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop likes this trope, as there are three: First is Paul Braddock, a former SFPD detective Monk, Natalie and Stottlemeyer encounter at a convention. Monk and Natalie later learn from Stottlemeyer that Braddock had a long history of physically beating up people, to the point that Stottlemeyer threatened to turn him over to Internal Affairs. Unsurprisingly, when Braddock turns up dead, Stottlemeyer gets blamed for it and is wrongly arrested, since they had an altercation hours before the murder at a wake (making Stottlemeyer the second "dirty" cop). The third is Nick Slade, Braddock's real killer, who turns out to have taken out a hit on an entrepreneur years beforehand.
  • The novel Mr. Monk on Patrol sees Monk and Natalie get brought to Summit, New Jersey to help police chief Randy Disher, who has become acting mayor after most of the town government got indicted for corruption. Their first day on patrol, Monk and Natalie find themselves dealing with serial burglars, who as it turns out are two of Randy's own cops.
• It tends to be forgotten now that the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch about London Gangsters the Piranha Brothers was intended to be biting satire on the way the Krays and the Richardsons got away with it for so long. The two family crime syndicates in London were busted not so much by police action as by investigative reporting forcing the Met to do something. Not only the incompetence but the corruption of the Metropolitan Police is mercilessly exposed.
  "So why didn't you go to the police?"
  "I would have done. Except for the fact the bloke holding the tactical nuclear device was the Chief Constable for our area!"
• One appears in Mr Selfridge as a secondary villain; his job isn't to protect nightclubs from the underworld but instead to get them involved with it.
• Murder in the First: Season two reveals an entire group of these called "the Union" that runs drugs, loan sharking, money laundering and prostitution rackets.
• These have been seen in NCIS, although usually as a one-off. In a flashback we find out that Tony left the Baltimore police department when he found out that his partner was dirty.
• In Murdoch Mysteries, Section House One is full of them, up to and including Chief Constable Davis. In fact, most times that Murdoch is working with police beyond Section House Four, he has to deal with at least one.
• NCIS: Los Angeles: There is a group of dirty cops who act as an escort service for drug dealers and other criminals. It turns out that they drew the line at helping terrorists.
• Nirvana in Fire: The Xuanjing Bureau is supposed to be completely neutral in party politics and loyal only to the emperor, but Xia Jiang uses the faction disputes to protect his own personal power.
• NUMB3RS: Blaine Cleary in the season four episode "Power" pulls over women to drug and rape them.
• Detective Harry Denby of NYPD Blue is investigating Det. Kirkendall's ex-husband for involvement in drug running. He later turns out to be working with the criminals he is supposed to be investigating. After he is suspended from the police department and waiting for indictment, he tries to take over the whole operation for himself.
• Sheriff Graham from Once Upon a Time has a good heart, and ultimately is a good cop most of the time, but he's completely under Regina's thumb and will plant or tamper with evidence for her.
• DCI Roy Slater ("Slater the Slag") Del's Archenemy from the Only Fools and Horses episodes "May the Force Be with You", the 1985 Christmas special "To Hull and Back", and "The Class of '62". The second episode of Rock & Chips, "Five Gold Rings", shows us that after leaving school, Slater immediately joined the police force and started abusing his position to go after Del.
  Del: Now listen here, Slater, I know a lot of coppers and they're all good blokes. I mean, I don't like 'em, but they play a fair game. And then there's you...
• Perry Mason (2020): Ennis and Holcomb are blatantly dirty. They tamper with evidence or even engage in regular crimes. It's made clear most of the LAPD qualify, with honest cops such as Drake an exception.
• Person of Interest:
  • Fusco starts as a dirty cop working for the first Person of Interest. Reese gets just enough blackmail to force Fusco to work for him as a Friend on the Force, where he provides information and surveillance. Despite his growing desire to be a good cop, Reese has him play a dirty cop to infiltrate HR, a powerful group of NYPD corrupt cops.
  • HR is an extremely corrupt group of NYPD cops who provide protection to the organized crime outfits running crime in the city. They have no problem acting as killers-for-hire and will kill other NYPD police officers who get in their way. They have prosecutors and judges on the payroll and at one point help a bunch of young Russian gangsters join the police force so that they have loyal foot soldiers for the future.
  • One POI is on the run from her abusing husband, a corrupt US Marshal who uses his authority to track her down when she leaves him.
• Pizza: Murray the Cop is constantly trying to make Pauly Falzone's life hell by finding the pettiest excuses to detain his cars, like "lacking an anti-hoon emission filter". In The Movie, he puts up police signs that normally say "Now Targeting: Speeding", except his signs say "Now Targeting: Lebanese" and "Now Targeting: Habib". On the subject of Habib, when he tries having a civilized conversation with Murray in "Cracker Pizza", Murray says to him, "Fuck off out of my face, halal breath, or I'll come down on you like September 11!" He also has a Hair-Trigger Temper, and resorts to shouting "Today's me FUCKIN' BIRTHDAY! I DON'T NEED THIS SHIT!" in reaction to Habib and Rocky calling him out for threatening to persecute them.
• The Plot Against America: Cops are openly racist and even assassinate some local mobsters who are trying to protect a Jewish neighborhood during riots. They also stand by without intervening as Walter Winchell, a Jewish candidate for US President, is assaulted by antisemitic protesters and then assassinated.
• In Powers, Deena's father was one before he retired, having stolen a large amount of money during an investigation.
• In the Season Six finale of Psych, it turns out that all of Henry's old friends from the force were paid for guarding a drug lab back in the day.
• The 1992 TV series Renegade has Donald "Dutch" Dixon, a lieutenant who frames the main character for the murder of another cop. Dixon also heads a squad of equally crooked cops.
• The Rizzoli & Isles episode "What Doesn't Kill You" revolves around the hunt for dirty cops in the Boston Police Department. Suspicion falls heavily on Jane for a time. The chief dirty cop turns out to be the head of Internal Affairs.
• The Rookie (2018): There are several examples throughout the series.
  • Armstrong is revealed to have been working for the mob, even killing a fellow officer and framing Nolan for his crimes.
  • La Fiera has cops on the payroll in Guatemala to do her bidding.
• The Shadow Line is full of them:
  • DS Delaney, Jonah Gabriel's deceased partner. Because of the association, Gabriel himself is also teased as being one for a while.
  • Sergeant Foley, who will sell information to virtually anyone so long as they can pay.
  • And finally, Patterson, Commander Khokar, Commander Penney and Lia Honey are all involved in some way with Counterpoint, making Gabriel about the only clean cop in the series.
• The Shield: Different cops on a spectrum, with almost nobody completely clean:
  • The Strike Team can be seen as the poster boys for this trope, with the added twist of half the team (Curtis Lemansky and Ronnie Gardock) being good cops who fell in with the wrong crowd and largely stayed in the shallow part of the corruption pool, and the other half (Vic Mackey and Shane Vendrell) killed fellow police officers in order to cover their own asses when they were in danger of being exposed. They also sell drugs they get from buy-busts, use torture to interrogate suspects and protect drug dealers they can control, all in the name of "keeping the peace". David Aceveda's description of Vic isn't the page quote for nothing.
  • Captain Aceveda, although initially disgusted by Vic's tactics, sometimes tolerates them as he sees their effectiveness at keeping crime under control. He becomes more and more compromised as he cuts various corners to advance his political career.
  • Claudette looks down on the Strike Team as well, but when she is temporarily put in charge of the Barn she reluctantly tolerates their behavior once she realizes she can't get the same results with squeaky clean cops.
  • Dutch is probably the cleanest of the main characters but even he succumbs to temptation, planting evidence in the house of a suspect that he knows, but can't prove, is guilty (although he has a change of heart and returns to remove the evidence before it's discovered).
  • Kavanaugh, an internal affairs lieutenant, is assigned to investigate the Strike Team. He becomes obsessed with bringing down Vic, finally resorting to arranging for a false testimony and planting evidence in an attempt to bring him down.
• Sons of Anarchy: Chief Wayne Unser is a sympathetic version of this. He helps out the local criminal motorcycle club and in return SAMCRO provides protection for his trucking business. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, he does it because he believes the Sons are better for the town of Charming than the other gangs who would take their place if they were to disappear.
• In the Stargate Atlantis penultimate episode "Vegas", Detective John Sheppard barely manages to keep his job by scraping by on his quarterly performance reviews, has illegal gambling debts and quits the force to skip town after stealing money from a crime scene. Rodney McKay is extremely disappointed in him, since he met another version of him that was honest and determined and a member of the Earth's defense against alien threats. He turns around before it is too late, and dies stopping the villain.
• Crops up so often in Starsky & Hutch that it sometimes seems like the titular characters spend just as much time fighting off their fellow cops as they do civilian criminals. In fact, it sometimes takes quite a while for a crook to realize that they're not being coy when they insist that they can't be bought, which doesn't cast a very good light on the BCPD.
• The villain of the Switch (1975) pilot is a police lieutenant who steals money so he can spend it on gambling and prostitutes.
• Tehran: A couple of Iranian cops are bribed to let a car's passengers go without searching them.
• Tidelands (Netflix): Paul Murdoch, a local cop, is aiding the area's drug ring and also involved with Lamar, the second in command within the L'Attente syndicate. His mentor Durborrow was also a corrupt sergeant who did this too. Murdoch killed him and framed Cal for it.
• Timecop:
  • In "The Heist", an old-timer cop assists the protagonist on a visit to the 70s to catch a criminal before he can steal several precious diamonds. The thing is he likes his old time better than the present, so he ends up stealing the stones himself.
  • In "Stalker", one of Hollywood actress Rita Lake's murderous stalkers turns out to be a cop.
• Too Old to Die Young:
  • Larry, LA Sheriff Deputy, is introduced pondering whether to murder his mistress. During a traffic stop, he strongly implies that he'll plant drugs in a woman's car if she doesn't provide sexual favors, but ultimately settles on extorting money from her. He's later believed to have murdered some gangsters while working as a Professional Killer.
  • Larry's partner Martin has no problem taking half of the money Larry extorts from a civilian. He also works as a Professional Killer for Caribbean gangsters. He later becomes a Vigilante Man and kills people who have committed horrible crimes.
  • The local police force in Mexico is completely corrupt and on the take from the cartel.
• Total Recall 2070: Hume investigates a former mentor of his who has made a name for himself by quickly closing a large number of cases after seeing him shoot a suspect. It transpires that he's begun working as a hit man for a group of people who issue orders through VR.
• The Tunnel: In both Season 2 and 3, there are dirty French cops aiding the bad guys.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", Cassandra Fishbein threatens to call the cops if the mob boss Nino Lancaster and his henchmen Gus and Bork don't leave her hairdressing salon. Nino advises against it as most of them work for him.
• In Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.cops., Poole and Miller's attempts to investigate the murder of Biggie Smalls are hampered by the fact that several of their key witnesses are cops who also happen to be under investigation by Internal Affairs for moonlighting at Death Row Security, meaning that Poole and Miller aren't even allowed to talk to them.
• Utopia Falls: Phydra, head of the Authority, took payoffs from Moore for years and looked the other way about criminal operations that he ran in the Reform Sector... until she decides that these endanger the state, having him arrested for them.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: Several episodes had corrupt cops, mainly in background roles, but some were the focus of an episode.
  • Season 4's "The Brotherhood": A small-town police department is run by a police chief frustrated about the crime rate and the perception that criminals get off on technicalities, so they kill the suspects after they are freed by the court. At one point, the crooked officers turn things up another notch when they throw a lighted cocktail into a prison bus, killing several prisoners and the guards and badly burning the driver. The main focus of the episode was on a Marine Corps recruit named Ernesto Lopez, the son of a close friend of Walker's, who had been accused of rape only for DNA evidence to exonerate him; Walker is unable to get to Ernesto before the overzealous cops do, and Walker is prepared to have warrants out for their arrest, but they weren't willing to go down without a fight. The chief eventually turns his gun on himself when he learns Walker is coming for him after the other two are killed during the confrontation.
  • Season 9's "Deadly Situation": When rookie officer Glenn Cooper, who is the descendant of Walker's role model, the legendary Texas Ranger Hayes Cooper and a distant cousin of Walker's, suspects a trio of dirty cops for stealing drug evidence, said cops frame him and kill his partner, thanks to the fourth party involved, their lieutenant, tipping them off after Glenn gave him copies of the evidence, and Walker and Alex have to prove that those cops framed him.
• Watchmen (2019): Will Reeves discovered the hard way that a lot of his fellow officers in 1930s' New York City were paid off by gangsters, one of whom he arrested for blatantly throwing a Molotov cocktail into a Jewish delicatessen (likely for not paying protection money). They warn him off with a mock hanging, inspiring Will to become the masked vigilante Hooded Justice because he can't enforce the laws equally otherwise. Worse, one is part of a plot to hypnotize black New Yorkers into attacking each other.
• Wedding Season: Metts, one of the two cops chasing Katie, killed the Delaneys on order of the criminal organization the Block and intends to make sure Katie takes the fall.
• Weeds has a number of dirty cops and Nancy even ends up married to a dirty DEA agent.
• We Own This City is based on the real life corruption in the Baltimore Police Gun Trace Task Force, set in the wake of the 2015 Freddie Gray Uprising in the city that was sparked bya death from Police Brutality. In a scene showing a jury selection, the prosecutor laments that trust in the police in the city is so low that they have trouble finding jurors who won't outright state they don't trust a Baltimore police officer to tell the truth in court.
• When They See Us: The detectives who investigated the case all ignore glaring holes in the case and also question the underage boys without attorneys or their parents present (which they lie about). The prison guard in Rikers also has deals with inmates. If they don't do something for him, other prisoners are sent to beat them up. A guard in Wende, instead of helping Korey when he's being attacked, threatens him with a baton. It turns out he set up the attack as well.
• Wild Bill: Bill's superior Keith Metcalfe, the police and crime commissioner, turns out to not only be in bed with Russian crime boss Oleg Kraznov, but also stands to make a huge amount on a corrupt land deal while cutting many jobs from the Boston police, despite this hurting both them and the local community. When he learns about this, Bill swears to take them both down.
• The Wire shows corruption in the Baltimore Police Department at every level.
  • The top brass are devious, biased, prejudiced and so full of personal vendettas that it prevents them from doing any actual police work.
  • The top brass, under pressure from City Hall to decrease crime by any means necessary, begin juking the stats, putting quantity of arrests over quality. Valchek is the most blatant about admitting to his fellow Majors that he'll resort to juking.
  • When Judge Phelan and Jimmy McNulty set in motion the creation of the MCU, Bill Rawls makes it his top priority to screw McNulty over. The Deputy Ops himself is reluctant to do any meaningful police work either. The whole thing is so disorganized that the only time they do have to act selflessly (after the shooting of Kima Greggs), the amount of personnel that swarms to the scene just clutter everything until Rawls tells everyone unnecessary to get lost.
  • Cedric Daniels has some skeletons in his closet, and openly implies that corruption runs rampant in the Eastern District.
  • Herc and Carver start the show as this. They're briefly suspected by Daniels of stealing evidence money when they seize drug money from Wee-Bey and some of it goes missing. Then they actually steal money during a raid on a stash house in the wake of Kima's shooting. After spending season 3 working under Major Colvin in the Western District, Carver greatly cleans up his act and matures into a much better cop. Herc doesn't mature, loses his job due to politics, and ends up becoming a private investigator for Maurice Levy.
  • Eddie Walker is a Western District patrolman and is incredibly relentless in the use of Police Brutality against the hoodrats.
  • Dwight Tilghman is a prison guard who routinely brutalizes Wee-Bey Brice because Wee-Bey killed a cousin of his. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell find out that Tilghman runs a side business of smuggling heroin into the prison. Stringer arranges for Tilghman's supplier to give him a tainted batch, and when several inmates are killed by the deadly drugs, an investigation is launched with the warden realizing that they'll need to promise reduced sentences to get potential cooperators willing to implicate the culprits. Avon comes forward and "accuses" Tilghman of the crime. Tilghman gets arrested when drugs are found in his car that corroborate Avon's "story", and Avon's first parole hearing is moved up as per the deal negotiated by Maurice Levy with the prison officials.
• The White Bulls of Witchblade are a whole organization of these.
• Your Honor:
  • The New Orleans Police Department is depicted this way in general, with Michael's opening scene showing him confronting a cop committing perjury against a black defendant and Kofi being manhandled by patrolmen while driving Adam's car. In Season 2 it's revealed that Michael's wife was killed for attempting to investigate serious corruption in the force-cops who worked as hitmen.
  • Lt. Cusack is the Baxters' principal contact in the force. They apparently have a few more who perform a bogus traffic stop.
  • Charlie has his own cop on the force whom he's promised to make chief of police upon his ascension to the office of mayor. He's the one who connects Michael with the Destiny gang.
• Power Rangers Time Force has a Monster of the Week named Steelix who is one of these.
• Power Rangers S.P.D. has the A-Squad, the initial team of rangers who go missing at the start of the series, but return at the end, where they are revealed to be working for Emperor Grumm. Other examples include Giganis, Sky's old friend, and Ichthior, Cruger's old rival.

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