Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Bad cops, bad cops
Bad cops, bad cops
Springfield cops are on the take
What do you expect for the money we make?
Whether in a car or on a horse
We don't mind using excessive force"

—The Simpsons

Some cops are useless. Some cops are dirty. And some cops are an amazing combination of the two, with a healthy dose of Lawful Stupid to go with it. Police suffering from Bad Cop Incompetent Cop are corrupt, useless, unnecessarily violent, or just complete douchebags on a power trip.

Unlike just one Dirty Cop, or a small group of them, Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop describes an entire precinct (or world!) where police are monolithically terrible. Maybe they're all corrupt. Maybe just a few are corrupt, but the rest are so incompetent that they completely ignore the swath of abuse, violence, and destruction the corrupt cops leave. Maybe they're all just completely insane.

Perhaps understandably, their jurisdiction usually ends up being a Vice City or Wretched Hive. Depending on where you live, this may even be Truth in Television.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Bleach Soul reapers are less afterlife policemen and more afterlife bullies and aloof nobles who ignore virtually everyone in the afterlife who don't have their powers.
- It doesn't help that their mere presence can be detrimental to people's health if they're powerful enough. Between that and the rampant dickery it's a wonder they ever get anything done.
- This cannot be stated enough. It gets to the point where they willingly ignore the enemy to fight each other.
- Strangely, the areas of the Soul Society outside of the Seireitei are more or less forgotten about after a certain point by the story itself. Most of the higher ranking Soul Reapers (Captains and Lieutenants) are pretty likable, the worst of which tend to be sort of Lawful Stupid or hold the Conflict Ball often. The worst of which would probably be Central 46, who basically run the place. During the series, they're shown making some truly baffling decisions that lead to serious conflict.
Dominion Tank Police has an entire police force filled with lunatic Cowboy Cop types who see nothing wrong with destroying private property in pursuit of evildoers.
The police in Black Lagoon is ineffectual, utterly corrupt and unwilling to take even the slightest step towards keeping order in Roanapur... And most of the cast like it that way. At one point the police join in on a manhunt against someone who's got a bounty on their heads by one of the city's mafia leaders, much to her disgust.
The duo of John "Sleepy" Estes and Eddie Daizaburo in Mad Bull 34. Sleepy is an unscrupulous Cowboy Cop who seems to have "kill all suspects" hard-coded into his brain, while Eddie is a meek, cowardly milquetoast.

Comic Books

Batman: Year One Gotham PD is almost entirely corrupt, with SWAT teams having no problem in leveling city blocks if they can get away with it.
- There is also Harvey Bullock, who manages to unite both evil AND incompetent (for a corrupt cop whose task is to hinder detective work, this can be an effective combination indeed). (That is before he eventually turns over a new leaf, upgrading into a good and on/off incompetent copper.)
Gotham Central takes the already-established corruption of the Gotham City Police Department (see above) and places an entire series within its ranks. It deals with the Major Crimes Unit, the portion of the department that is tasked with dealing with "freaks" (supervillains) and other major crimes, and is the only consistently honest branch in the entire department. Each member of the MCU is handpicked by the commissioner of police (originally Commissioner Gordon, and then Commissioner Akins once Gordon retires) to insure a modicum of integrity, and throughout the series they are forced to butt heads (often violently) with other departments who disagree on what constitutes "proper" policework. Even when they themselves are honest they cannot get much accomplished since everybody else is working against them, and they are often forced to accept when police corruption lets a guilty man go free since "it's Gotham."
Commissaris Bullebas in Tom Poes.

Film

Leon / The Professional: All cops seen are violent, corrupt psychos, or jackbooted thugs.
- Only Stansfield and his gang (Malky shows some conscience but is still crooked cop) and they are pretty competent if completely crooked. Other cops are simply following their orders (i.e. they do what you would expect from a cop told to chase dangerous murderer).
The Fifth Element: All cops seen are idiots or corrupt, and so disorganized that they get in the way of pretty much everyone.
- They also wear bulky armor that is completely useless.
The Transporter: All cops seen just... don't give a crap.
- Except Frank's French friend, who may well be too busy cooking to fight any crime.
  - Worst example. The Big Bad's Dragon stands in the middle of a street in broad daylight, shooting off twin uzis at Frank's car. A single cop car shows up to an event you would believe would receive several cops and at least one SWAT team. They get out of their car and tell the Dragon to drop her guns. She slowly turns, casually replaces the empty clips with fresh ones, and proceeds to mow both cops down. They don't even fire a single shot off. Hell, I've seen video of people who ACT like they're carrying guns and threatening cops get blown away. This bitch should have been dropped before she finished her turn.
It seems that Dect. Jim Lipton's main task in Dead Silence is to harass the main character Jamie with every possible ways he can come up to. He claims the protagonists main clue as an evidence, almost stalks Jamie when trying to prove that he killed his wife, tries to arrest him with no reason and when Jamies refuses the arrest, Lipton ends up chasing him - an unarmed man - with a shotgun and probably wouldn't have hesitated to shoot him either. Not to mention, he is Lawful Stupid to the core, refusing to accept the facts around him. Of course, he is useful with his shotgun when it comes up with destroying Shaw's dolls, but I bet we all were happy to see him die
Luc Besson film Taken All cops seen are either terrible at preventing anything bad from happening, or are actively supporting human trafficking.
- Well, it's Luc Besson. For the matter, Taxi isn't much better on that respect. The Fifth Element has already been mentioned.
  - As has The Professional for that matter.
  - Also, The Transporter. I'm sensing a pattern here...
Lakeview Terrace: The racist cop harasses his neighbors, an inter-racial couple. The rest of the police force ignores it.
- The police force itself (and even the racist officer in question) aren't entirely corrupt, though. They're presumably just turning a blind eye on this particular case of abuse.
There are elements of this in Batman Begins, as well, as Gordon is apparently the only police officer who isn't corrupt or complicit. (Gotham PD is getting better by the start of The Dark Knight.)
Flass: [after accepting a bribe] Don't suppose you want a taste? I just keep offering, thinking maybe someday you'll get wise.
Jim Gordon: There's nothing wise in what you do, Flass.
Flass: Well, Jimbo, you don't take the taste... makes us guys nervous.
Jim Gordon: I'm no rat! In a town this bent, who's there to rat to anyway?
The cops in Sin City are definitely like this.
- Except for Hartigan, and look what that got him...
- Mort seemed to be a decent cop until he met Ava Lord.
The London precinct in Hot Fuzz actually transfers their one good cop so he doesn't make them look bad. They try to get him back in the end because without him the numbers are terrible.
- It wasn't so much a matter of them being incompetent, as him being super-competent.
- The cops in Sandford village however definitely qualify for this trope.
  - At least until they Take a Level in Badass
Last Action Hero has this appear near the end, in the real world. The Big Bad realizes he can literally get away with murder because the cops don't immediately arrive on the crime scene like they do in his native movie world.
In the French film La Haine, the police are both racist and more interested in harassing people from the banlieues than cleaning the banlieues up.
Sheriff Winston Hoyt from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, who’s eventually revealed to be Charlie Hewitt Jr., a member of Leatherface's depraved cannibal family. Most other cops who have appeared throughout the series are usually depicted as dumb and incompetent, or are just faceless victims.
Titular Axe Crazy aside, pretty much every prominently appearing officer in the Maniac Cop series seem to be corrupt, dishonest or just incompetent. Even Jack, the protagonist from the first film, regularly cheated on his wife and didn't seem all that fazed when informed of her murder.
The Main Force Patrol in Mad Max seem to be a good example of this. For example, they are more concerned with getting back the police interceptor that the Nightrider stole than taking him into custody.
- What makes sense in postapocalyptic setting as working interceptor may help greatly in chasing subsequent criminals.
All the bad guys in Kiss of the Dragon are examples of this trope. They even manage to assassinate a liaison from the Chinese government! If that police department had any semblance of an internal affairs department, they should have been all fired, provided they survived the inevitable war with China.
In Harold & Kumar go to White Castle, the duo meet a town full of cops who are all racist, incompetent bullies.
In A Clockwork Orange, George and Dim are as violent and vicious as cops as they were in their respective gangs. Also, the only scene in which they're shown (as cops) has them being concerned with revenge, as Alex was known to tolchock both of them repeatedly.
In Bollywood films, the Indian police are either this or Invincible Hero types. No grey area. Ever.
The cops shown in Crash are all racist - even the ones who aren't.
The Element of Crime. Let's just say that with cops like this, you don't need mafia.
The New York City Police Department in Taxi (featuring Queen Latifah) is portrayed mostly as competent. The incompetent part is the character out of it, Detective Washburn. Not only is the guy incompetent (the first time we see him he ruins a drug bust and gets his partner shot) he's also a terrible driver, and bumbles along from one mistake to the other until the end, where he assumes the Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass position.
The cops in Fritz The Cat are violent and stupid.
In Recess: School\'s Out, the policemen were... well, let's just say that they didn't take a kid, a group of kids, or even a teacher at a school seriously when they tried to report strange activities going on at the same school, and even outright mocked them.
The entire police force in Rio are incompetent for failing to stop Dom and Brian in the finale chase in the film Fast Five. Only Hobbs come close to apprehend Dom in the film.
The NOPD is this in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Terrence McDonagh is a flagrantly Dirty Cop, his partner is a Rabid Cop, the guy running the evidence room is letting McDonagh steal seized drugs for his personal use, and all the other cops are completely oblivious to his behavior, no matter how erratic and blatant it gets. At the end of the film, the protagonist is promoted to captain for Framing the Guilty Party.
All the cops in Super Troopers, with the grand exception Ursula, fit this trope. The Highway cops cover incompetent, usually too busy goofing off, and playing games to do their jobs right. The Locals fills out bad. Beside total assheads, they're running protection for a drug running ring.

Literature

All indication in Discworld is that the Ankh-Morpork watch used to be incompetent at best, brutal at worst, but since Guards! Guards!, things have gotten a lot better very quickly.
- It's often mentioned that Ankh-Morpork trained watchmen are now in demand across the continent, and this is starting to cause problems for genre-savvy criminals used to the corrupt ones.
- The Day Watch in Men at Arms are a classic example of the trope; the Night Watch at its lowest just failed to improve things, but Captain "Mayonnaise" Quirke's mob manage to make things significantly worse.
The Grapes of Wrath fulfills the "bad" part, if not necessarily "incompetent." The book attempts to justify it in that they're paid per arrest, with no penalty for arresting the wrong person, and with the economy as it is, they desperately need the money.
The two police organizations of The Hollows novels exemplify this troupe. Inderlander Security (IS) which is charged with policing the supernatural population is run by vampires who use it to cover their own criminal activity more than actual police work. Their human counterpoint the FIB is well meaning but lacks the manpower, training and resources to be effective.
As is often Truth in Television, the militsiya of the small Russian provincial town where Night Watcher takes place is utterly and unabashedly corrupt. This includes the General, who is (of necessity a political powermonger) with General Ripper tendencies, and both of the protagonistic cops in the Night Team, one of whom is a Sociopathic Hero Cowboy Cop, while the other is a homophobic Dumb Muscle that once raped a sleeping female vampire for kicks. Those three, at least, are actually better than they sound, but still.
Similar to the above example, much of the militsaya we see in Gorky Park similarly seem to fit this trope. Except for the protagonist, which only seems to get him in trouble.
Not only are Hawk and Fisher the only City Guards of Haven to have never taken bribes, they are also so freaking darn competent that the rest of the Guard looks exactly like this trope in comparison.
The cops in the Dirk Gently books claim, deadpan, to be an example of this trope. At one point, a detective asks Dirk to go outside and beat himself up, as all the police are too busy to properly brutalize him. In reality, they're not only pretty decent at their jobs, the same detective is a better Reasonable Authority Figure than Dirk, frankly, even deserves.
- There is one glaring exception to said aversion in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, however.
  - Well it not like they could write "Died from violating a contract with a devil" on the paperwork now could they?

Live Action TV

Adam-12: While Officer Edward Wells (Gary Crosby, in a recurring role) is by all accounts a very good officer, his jerky behavior and tendency to shoot first-ask questions later lead to major problems for both himself and his fellow officers. He also tends to believe his way of handling a given situation is the only way, which more often than not is wrong but leads to bad consequences.
- Several episodes dealt with other officers who, in one way or another, are ill-suited, bad or otherwise incompetent:
  - A 1972 episode, "Badge Heavy," focuses on police brutality, with Quinn Redeker (best known as the screen-writer for the 1978 Academy Award winning The Deer Hunter) cast in the role of the rouge cop. Reed eventually helps wash the cop out, but the final downfall happens only after the bad cop smugly explains his "tough" attitude on criminals in the locker room.
  - The 1973 episode "Training Division," Wells was actually saddled with a "know-it-all" rookie officer, whose arrogance and insistence that he knows how to handle a given situation is not only bad but proves extremely dangerous ... especially when the officers are forced to deal with a sociopathic bomber, who hides a bomb at a grocery store. The rookie officer is unable to determine that the bomber's "hostage" is actually an accomplice; Reed isn't fooled and steps in before the other guy draws his gun. In the episode's moral, Precinct Chief MacDonald says that every officer makes mistakes, but the rookie's inability to learn from his mistakes — and no doubt, his ultra-arrogant pride that he was the greatest cop played the key part in all that — led to his downfall.
  - The 1975 episode "Pressure Point," where officers Reed and Malloy deal with an autistic rookie officer who hides his disorders, including stuttering. These all lead to a situation where he is unable to alert Reed and Malloy to a potential trap set up by the episode's bad guys; don't worry, the main protagonists use their instincts to save themselves and capture the baddies. Later, Reed and Malloy interrogate the rookie cop, who admits his shortcomings and resigns. (Reed and Malloy, albeit upset, are calm and rational when getting answers; the rookie's training officer, Jerry Woods, has a cow and wants to skin his hide.) It's all part of an episode explaining why police forces sometimes "discriminate" due to certain disabilities.
  - Side note on "Pressure Point": Perhaps aware of some of the rookie officer's shortcomings, Reed and Malloy are calm with him both during the shooting incident and an earlier landlord-tenant disturbance. In that earlier incident, the rookie recites verbatim the code for breaking-and-entering to one of the subjects; Reed, having determined that the woman was not a suspect, allows the rookie to finish, then privately (and in Malloy's presence) helps him understand why his handling could have been dangerous. The latter incident sees Malloy shout down Officer Woods when he blows his stack with the rookie officer.
Family Matters: Lt. Murtaugh, an egotistical, thinks-he's-the-greatest-cop superior officer played brilliantly by Barry Jenner. More often than not, Murtaugh would bumble his way through a given situation only for his subordinate, Carl Winslow, to handle the situation correctly and save their hides. Two other episodes highlighted serious mistakes made by Carl's other fellow officers:
- "Good Cop, Bad Cop": Eddie complains that he was the victim of racial profiling by two overzealous cops. Carl at first refuses to believe Eddie, since Eddie had lied before about late-night carousing, and this latest incident did take place late at night when he was supposed to be home. When Harriette asks Carl to at least get the other side of the story, he does ... and Carl finds out that the senior officer is indeed a severe racist who stopped Eddie simply because he was "a black in a white person's neighborhood." Carl is furious and says he will report him to the captain; he then urges the rookie officer – sensing potential and that he had made a mistake that he can learn from – to examine his own attitudes.
- "My Uncle, the Hero": Carl is leading a tour of the police station for his nephew Richie's class, and the predictably dull tour is about to end flatter than a pancake ... when a young officer's brief inattention to an un-handcuffed sociopathic bank robbery suspect leads to a brief hostage situation involving one of Richie's friends. Carl is able to talk the robber out of doing something he'd regret then, after the situation is resolved and the suspect taken to the holding cell, Carl takes the young officer aside and sets up a meeting time to discuss the situation and the mistake he made.
24 gives us CTU, who were are repeatedly told are a premier Counter Terrorist Unit and whose Badass reputation apparently is based upon their performance over the course of the show. This is strange, since over the course of the show they usually find out about major terrorist attacks mere hours before they are scheduled to be executed, and in the process of dealing with them often uncover more terrorist threats that were linked to them- on several occasions, they fail to stop them, so over the course of a decade America falls victim to chemical, biological and even nuclear attacks with tens of thousands of people killed. Several prominent political figures are also targeted for assassination on their watch, including several domestic, foreign and ex-Presidents (several succeed- if the official isn't killed, they are often at least crippled). And agents almost always manage to let personal problems get in their way in the middle of a national crisis, at least on the occasions when they aren't The Mole, of which there is at least one every Day (and sometimes even the moles are bogged down by their private lives). Other perils of becoming an elite counter-terrorist agent is criminals, traitors, and terrorists find it easy to blackmail or threaten you, or hold your close friends or family hostage. And if they manage to capture one of the perps and hold them prisoner, don't expect them to remain their long- they invariably tend to escape, die, or escape and then die after killing a whole bunch of people.
The Dukes of Hazzard: Rosco P. Coltrane, in many instances aside from his frequent inability to catch the Duke boys and his poor driving skills. For instance, his inattentiveness to several "10 Most Wanted" suspects he has arrested allows the criminal(s) to escape. In another episode, he (along with Boss Hogg) are smitten by a beautiful, conniving woman they have just hired as a deputy; a simple background check would have found she was the boyfriend of a syndicate bank robber and murderer (one who was to spend the night in Hazzard). In the later episode "Enos' Last Chance," Rosco's arrests an escaped syndicate criminal convicted of murder and robbery, but when he brings him to the courthouse for booking, uncuffs him and briefly turns his back, the wily criminal escapes!
- Enos Strate, who has been shown to be a competent lawman on many occasions, even slips up once in awhile. His biggest mistake came in the 1983 episode "Too Many Roscoes," where he gets upset when Rosco's double (an experienced bank robber) flubs simple facts ... and he is unable to call him on this when "Rosco" recalls a scheduled armored car delivery to exact detail.
Murder In Coweta County: In this 1983 adaptation of real live events surrounding the life of Meriwether County, Georgia, land baron John Wallace and his killing of a sharecropper (in a neighboring county), Wallace (the "master" of "The Kingdom") had the entire sheriff's department and court system under his thumb.
The short lived Australian comedy Bad Cop Bad Cop is all about this.
The Reno Sheriff's Department from Reno 911!, although with much more emphasis on incompetence over brutality.
Turn Reno 911! 180 degrees, and you've pretty much got The Shield.
There appears to be grand total of one cop in the Firefly 'verse who's not incompetent, corrupt or both.
99% of the Sunnydale police department is either corrupt, or "deeply stupid."
The Wire. The entire BPD is painted as some combination of incompetent, corrupt, or aversed to actual police work. On the bad side (bordering on sadistic, even) you have Walker, then on the incompetent side you've got... cripes... half the main cast of the show. Valchek, Burrell, Polk, Mahone, Prez is shown as incompetent early in season one, but he gets better, much like Carver. Even the seemingly good cops like Lester and Jimmy aren't above convincing everyone that there's a serial killer on the loose. The crown for King of the Morons, however, undisputedly sits atop Herc's bald bean. He is dumber than a sack of hammers, frequently outsmarted by people who are obviously guilty, and he's so over-zealous that he frequently abuses people who are obviously innocent.
- If cops on the show talk about "Doing it the Western District way" you can expect excessive brutality and brain-bending stupidity to follow. Especially with Herc.
- BPD are pretty competent and they definitely are not crooked. In most cases (like the killer scam) were examples of circumventing the rules with reality ensuing. McNulty, Kima, Lester, Carver and even Herc are shown as very competent if somewhat rebellious (save for McNulty, who is a typical Cowboy Cop). Prez is a cocky and unexperienced, but learns quickly. The whole premise of the series was to show that police efficiency is influenced by far more factors that competency and honesty (e.g. political ambitions, public opinion and chance).
The Bill, started as a low key cop show, then featured the cops more than the crime and finally went into all-out soap mode. By the end you could have halved the crime rate in Sun Hill by asking the local drug gangs to take over policing the area.
Prison Break: Except for the Warden (whose naively oblivious), the other COs at Fox River are corrupt. And technically all are incompetent, considering the escape.
DOC Member: Why did these inmates have so much time to dig a hole in the floor of the guards break room while working prison industries?
- Then the show brings us Agent Mahone (who goes around killing the escapees because he's being blackmailed for killing a different criminal earlier in his career.)
- And Agent Self.
While Burn Notice is fairly realistic in everything it portrays save its hyper-competent conspiracies and cops are usually very useful for Michael Western, even though they're also usually (justifiably) after him, sometimes you wonder how neglectful the Miami Metro-police is considering how often Michael finds himself in a siege against non-silenced fully automatic armed thugs that never, ever even try to be subtle and take every chance to empty a clip. In the middle of the city. For hours. With no policemen ever in sight.
- One of the worst examples is in the finale of season 4. A literal army of thugs are accompanying Voughn to corner Michael into a non-finished hotel in the middle of the city, shooting whenever he pops his head out, and the police only ever shows when Michael sends out a signal to the police with the highest possible alert. And even then it only takes a little obfuscating from upwards in the chain of command for the full force to just ignore the shootings literally down the bloc.
Subverted HARD with the police in Kamen Rider Kuuga, not only do they accept that Kuuga is on their side (despite only one of them knowing anything about him...which he doesn't tell his coworkers, but they're actually capable of doing something to the Monster of the Week. The police in Kuuga are the hardest subversion of this in the Kamen Rider series
- Kamen Rider Agito, the sequel to Kuuga (Kuuga and Agito are shown to be part of the same canon. In the Agito arc of Kamen Rider Decade it's even lampshaded) is perhaps a close(er then others) second; while the police in general can't do anything to the Monster of the Week, they did make the G3 system, something that could fight them...granted it started out pretty useless(even in it's debut fight)...and the only real reason it's first user even became it's first user was to buy his silence about an event they didn't want people to know about (not that he knew about this, he thought he got it because he was the best man for the job)
Murray the cop on "The Odd Couple" is so incompetent that Oscar Madison refers to him as "The only cop who's gonna retire a rookie". He tries to find a missing pregnant girl and brings a different pregnant girl back, despite her protests. Felix Unger tells him "That's all right. You did your best. That's the tragedy of it."

Tabletop Games

In Street Fighter: the Storytelling Game, Interpol relies on fighters from a highly organized illegal street fighting circuit to take down Shadowloo operations because 50% of every single local police force in the world is on the take (basically if there is a small sheriff's office with only a sheriff and a deputy, at least one of them will be on the take).

Theatre

West Side Story features Officer Shrank (Bad Cop) and Officer Krupke (Incompetent Cop) - not that Shrank is in particularly competent, it's just that the Bad is more important in his characterisation.

Video Games

A lot of it is All There in the Manual, but in Grand Theft Auto III, Liberty City cops are mostly corrupt and/or incompetent. Of course, in GTA's world, pretty much everyone is.
Andi: "In nearby Carcer City, a good day for law and order as police chief Gary Shaver was cleared of corruption charges in a controversial decision by the court. Let's hope those missing witnesses turn up safe and sound."
In Ace Attorney detectives are partnered with prosecutors rather than other cops. Until Investigation (where he's with Edgeworth after the latter's Heel Face Turn) this applies to Gumshoe and whatever jerk he's been partnered with this time. In Apollo Justice, though, Ema Skye was actually more of a Jerkass than the prosecutor she was paired with, mixing up the dynamic.
- She was not as much of a jerkass as she was simply bitter and irritable for being stuck with a job she didn't really like.
The cops in Heavy Rain aren't terribly competent; Blake the Jerkass detective is more interested in beating people up than finding the truth and he hasn't been able to get even close to a real suspect for the Origami Killer in years. His captain is revealed as being equally incompetent when he backs up Blake and thinks that totally circumstantial evidence has their Red Herring suspect "dead to rights." However, the cops display hyper-competence whenever it'll impede the progress of the main characters, such as setting up a road block less than a couple of minutes after Ethan's been driving down a highway the wrong way. In other words, it's an inversion of Be as Unhelpful as Possible, where the cops do everything they can to block the plot.
The police in EarthBound spend most of their time standing around being incompetent (when they're not corrupted by Giygas). However, after you defeat Frankie and the first My Sanctuary guardian in Onett, you're called into the chief of police's office, where they take turns attempting to inflict police brutality upon you before the chief himself attacks. There's no clear reason given for why they want to beat up a ten year old boy (they say it's because they want to make sure you can survive the dangerous cave you're asking to go to, but they'll still gladly send you to the hospital).

Web Comics

The Podunkton police force from Sluggy Freelance. Officer Tod is a former mob enforcer who lets the town's Vigilante Man do all the work, while Deputy Edsel, upon seeing the police station is on fire, runs home to call the police station and report it.
- Seeing as how the town used to be completely controlled by drug-runners, it's likely that competent honest cops wouldn't have had a very good life expectancy.
The Bison Guards in The Water Phoenix King are supposed to be protecting the highways from the bandits infesting the hills thereabouts, but they'd rather stay at the inn where it's warm and dry and there are pretty barmaids who freelance on the side. And those are the good ones — some of them joined up for the opportunity to beat down uppity peasants as well as a paycheck, and prefer bullying the immigrants and foreigners, human and otherwise, who have dared invade their realm looking for work to chasing baddies and getting shot at (or worse!) Fortunately for business in Vasgol, Our Heroes are on hand to do the job — one Elven Ranger with PTSD , one Ax Crazy Dark Magical Girl, one Fun Size Fallen Angel, and a whole lot of coffee to keep them going. Yeah, it's a mess.

Web Original

The Wretched Hive city of Denton in Survival of the Fittest is partially such due to the fact that the police force are either corrupt or really just plain bad at their jobs.

Western Animation

Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons.
- Although the Chief and his men tend to lean more towards ignorant and bumbling. They can be corrupt but aren't usually viciously corrupt like most of the examples listed in this trope.
Officer Barbrady on South Park.
Cartman: "Respect mah authoritaaah!" <clubs man in the kneecap>
Officer Barbrady: "What are you doing?!" <grabs baton from Cartman> "Hit them in the head, they go down faster!"
- Barbrady's been replaced on the show with a whole police department full of complete idiots. The department serves as a parody of "Cop Drama" shows and movies.
  - In addition to supreme idiocy and disregard for legality in most cases, the South Park P.D. also resort to violence at a pin drop, savagely beating any suspect to a pulp regardless of their compliance (unless, of course, they suspect the person for logical reasons), and ventilating anyone who doesn't respond to a confrontation fast enough.
  - Barbrady is still on the show. Sometimes he and the plainclothes detectives are in the same episode.
On Family Guy the cops try Good Cop, Mentally Challenged Cop on suspects.
In Adventures Of The Galaxy Rangers, the Crown garrison on Tortuna engage in "routine torture," regularly accept bribes, and can't seem to organize a picnic without a Slaverlord present.
The two regular cops on Futurama behave this way.
Leela: (after stopping them from savagely beating Fry) You guys were out of control!
Smitty: That's our job! We're peace officers!
URL: You gotta do what you gotta do.
On The Venture Brothers, Brock and Doc are brought in for the murder of Jean-Claude LeTueur and get interrogated by aggressive muscleman Sgt. Heat and bumbling moron Lt. Collar. Heat slaps Doc every time he tries to talk, and Collar does a weak job of making a Quip to Black-style pun on the details of the killing. Doc gets fed up and eventually derides them as "The bad cop and the retarded cop".