"Pig" is one of the many common slang terms for police officers. Since pigs are generally viewed as being foul and unpleasant creatures, and comparing pigs to humans is almost always done unfavorably in an offensive way, it's frequently used as a very derogatory insult by people who don't really like the police for various reasons.
"Pig" is especially reserved for cops who are regarded as being idiotic or incompetent, corrupt crooks, and violently (or even homicidally) aggressive towards other people. These negative stereotypes of the police also strongly parallel boorish behaviors commonly associated with pigs; such as greed and gluttony (which fits well with the common joke of donut-munching cops), leaving behind big messes for others to clean up, and generally being quite stubborn and ill-tempered (pigs can be very aggressive when it comes to securing food and territory, or when reacting to other perceived threats and provocations).
For this reason, fiction often uses "pig/cop" as a Literal Metaphor or Visual Pun, and portrays police officers as anthropomorphic pigs. In more realistic works, cops may instead have pigs as an Animal Motif or may have some vaguely pig-like traits. However, this isn't always used in a negative way; in some stories (such as those set in a World of Funny Animals), a policeman may be a pig solely as a Stealth Pun—it also helps that pigs themselves have positive traits; deceptively intelligent, strong, and keen-sensed, traits which could also be applied to particularly effective law enforcement personnel. That being said, Stealth Pun examples are more likely to be seen as more neutral as opposed to outright heroic due to the negative context. However, this trope is not about simply calling the police "pigs"; the association must be strong within the work itself or at least prominently drawn attention to at some point.
This trope is Older Than They Think. The first known usage of "pig" to refer to a police officer was recorded in 1785. The 1972 animated film Fritz the Cat portrayed the cops as pigs, which helped to give the term a big comeback in modern times. This term is not exclusive to the English language either; the association of pigs with police carries over to other languages as well. Just for one example, the Finnish word sika ("pig") is also used as an insult to the police.
Existing tropes about pigs can also easily be combined with tropes about police. When The Bad Guys Are Cops, this trope will be naturally combined with Sinister Swine. Anthropomorphic pigs also have a tendency to be portrayed as (racist and/or sexist) Politically Incorrect Villains, so Bigot with a Badge naturally compliments that. As mentioned above, expect to see Donut Mess with a Cop mixed with Gluttonous Pig. There's also a fair amount of overlap possible with Messy Pig or Perverted Pig. However, police pigs are rather unlikely to be Brainy Pigs, instead playing up the stereotype of being stubbornly (and literally) "pigheaded" to comically dimwitted extremes.
Also see Detective Animal, if the pig-cop is played as being more of an observant investigator. Contrast Policeman Dog; generally speaking, policemen tend to depicted as pigs in negative portrayals and as dogs in neutral or positive ones. For other Animal Occupation Stereotypes (although these usually have much more neutral or even positive connotations), see Firehouse Dalmatian, Boxing Kangaroo, Fighting Panda, Mole Miner, Semiaquatic Species Sailor, and Busy Beaver. Also compare Foxy Vixen for another trope about animals being used as a Visual Pun regarding their name.
No Real Life Examples, Please! Since this trope is about a derogatory term, real-life examples (especially in the context of police-related controversies, or political activism in reaction to it) would only attract controversy.
Examples:
- Banksy's first exhibition, Turf War, has a police van with a pig grafitied on it, and painted live animals including a pig done in blue checks.
- Pearls Before Swine: Mentioned in one strip, where Rat loses Pig at a protest and shouts "Pig! Come here, Pig!" while trying to find him. He accidentally attracts the attention of an irritated police officer in the process.
- Maus portrays the Nazi police officers as literal humanoid pigs.
- A one off strip in Oink! featured a Funny Animal parody of Judge Dredd called Judge Pigg.
- The Air Watch, in the Discworld, is made up of Witches with a passion for flight who provide Sam Vimes with an aerial dimension. Aware of the derogatory nickname, the Air Witches have claimed N-Word Privileges for themselves and their unit badge depicts a pig in a pointy hat astride a broomstick. Of course, any civilian referring to Flying Pigs might still get a taster of Watch brutality. Read more in the works of A.A. Pessimal, specifically The Price of Flight.
- Fritz the Cat portrays police officers as corrupt, incompetetent, anthropomorphic pigs. As noted earlier on the page, the film was a major reason for the usage of "pig" as an insult for cops making a big comeback in The '70s.
- Hoodwinked!: There are three policeman pigs who appear a few times in the movie, and they are shown to be quite gluttonous.
- Sing: Serves as a double Stealth Pun. When Marcus breaks out of jail to see Johnny perform in the ruins of the Moon Theater, one of the cops searching for him is a pig flying aboard a helicopter.
- Zootopia: A Stealth Pun example. At the end of the film, when Dawn Bellwether is in prison, a pig policewoman/guard can be seen watching the prisoners.
- Discussed and Played for Laughs in Dr. Dolittle, where a group of animals block the path to the building where the titular character is performing a life-saving operation on a circus tiger, which he kidnapped. The animals respond by chanting "Pigs, go home!" Actual pigs were among the animals, and assume they actually wanted them to go home until Lucky said they weren't speaking about them.
- Spiral (2021): As a Visual Pun in regards to their MO (specifically, targeting corrupt cops), the Spiral Killer has a police pig puppet named "Mr. Snuggles."
- In Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond and Tiffany Case are in a hotel room being guarded by three federal agents, causing Tiffany to joke about "the wolf being guarded by The Three Little Pigs."
- Animal Farm: Played with. The pigs aren't necessarily police but are still in high positions of authority, and turn the farm into an oppressive dictatorship, using Angry Guard Dogs to enforce their Reign of Terror. The acceptable targets part of this trope is played straight, in that the pigs were meant to represent tyrannical despots such as Josef Stalin, who ran the Soviet Union as a totalitarian Police State.
- Filth: The book's cover depicts a pig in a police hat, and the book itself is about a Corrupt Cop undergoing Sanity Slippage. The film adaptation's animated ending credits has the protagonist represented by a cute cartoon pig
.
- The Stand: Randall Flagg, the demonic protagonist of the book, is described as wearing a denim jacket with several buttons pinned to it. One of them depicts a dead pig wearing a policeman's cap. "How's Your Pork?" is written along the bottom of the button.
- In Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the policemen are pigs. This raised controversy and resulted in the book being banned in some schools and libraries.
- Shakespeare Re-Told: Discussed. In the show's version of the original play's infamous Prophecy Twist, Macbeth is told he will be killed "when pigs fly". His downfall at the episode's climax involves the Police Helicopter Squad.
- Grimm features a were-pig arson investigator. There's also one who's a chef, but that's another trope altogether.
- The Muppets:
- In the "Bear on Patrol" sketches on The Muppet Show, Officer Fozzie's superior is Link Hogthrob.
- In The Muppet Movie, when Dr Teeth is running through a variety of slang terms for the police, he gets as far as spelling "The P.I..." before Miss Piggy tells him not to finish that sentence.
- Pikelet from Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a Pig Man and the chief of the Showdown Town Police Force. While he doesn't even pretend to not be looking forward to beat the bear and bird duo if they even think of breaking one of his highly arbitrary rules, he isn't above letting them go if they are willing to grease his hooves a bit. Notes make the world go around, after all.
- In Disco Elysium, "pig" is a common insult used against cops in Revachol, and since many residents of the Martinaise district lack respect for the RCM, it gets thrown at the Detective and Kim a lot. Also referencing this trope is a woman who calls herself "The Pigs", who has a large collection of police paraphernalia and speaks almost entirely in nonsensical copspeak. When you're first told about her, Kim wryly notes how refreshing it is that someone else is being called a "pig" for once.
- In the Duke Nukem series, one of Duke's most typical enemies are the Pig Cops, who are LAPD officers that were mutated into monstrous Pig Men by the evil aliens.
- Mother 3: The main villains are the Pigmasks, a paramilitary organization whose members wear pig-faced masks and helmets, and whose leader is Porky Minch (himself likened to a pig) turned Dragon Ascendant.
- Pizza Tower: One of the enemies is Hamkuff who is an anthropomorphic pig cop. He latches Peppino with rope made of sausages and he takes Brick the Rat away from Gustavo.
- Police Quest: Many antagonistic characters throughout the series call Sonny Bonds or the Lytton police in general pigs. Tawnee V. Helmut in the first game's remake even mocks the protagonist with several things associated with pigs (a sty, rolling in mud, and oinking) after receiving a ticket. Conversely, in the fourth game only Yo Money references those animals, calling Dennis Walker "a boil on a pig's butt", which is not meant to disparage the new protagonist John Carey and he immediately apologizes for any potential insult from that line.
- The fan-made Pokémon parody Pokémon Clover has Piguson, a pig-like Pokémon who dresses up as a police officer. It also chases after Vandash (a Pokémon based on Black stereotypes) in a jab at the bias against black people from the police, and its name references the Ferguson riots, which began after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer.
- Sly Cooper: While the most prominent cop in the series is Carmelita Fox, most if not all of the uniformed grunts working under her are pigs.
- Helluva Boss tends to depict the police as being incompetent, violent, or both. In the episode "Spring Broken", Verosika Mayday and her crew (who are Succubi and Incubi demons) realized that they need to "suck a lot of pig dick" to bribe their way out of being arrested, much to their disgust.
- The SCP Foundation knows of at least two distinct anomalies which both invoke this trope, albeit in very different ways:
- SCP-4670 is a Greek-American witch named Cici Heliou, who has the ability to transform humans into pigs (basically a modernized version of Circe from The Odyssey). Cici is also a militant socialist with a murderous hatred for police, so she uses her powers to turn cops into pigs, slaughtering each of them to provide fresh pork for a barbecue restaurant she owns.
- SCP-5740 is a chain of automated food stalls that dispense "dado-nuts" (SCP-5740-A), which are cursed donuts that have a strange property; if a police officer eats one of them, then they'll soon suffer from severe diarrhea which ultimately leads to defecating a live pig out of their anus. The size and number of these swine will vary depending on the affected cop's morality; the more crooked they are, then more big pigs will be pooped out as a result.
- According to Project Isorropía, SCP-5740-A was used to successfully neutralize SCP-973-2 (a demonic, homicidal policeman known as "Smokey", who brutally murders anyone he catches speeding through a highway that he "patrols" at night). One of the Foundation's D-class personnel somehow managed to force-feed one of the dado-nuts to Smokey, which apparently caused the demon-cop's body to violently explode from a ridiculously large number of pigs bursting out of him.
- According to Project Isorropía
- SCP-4670
- Vixen: NYC: Maksai gains the ability to change his minions into animal men. He turns a cop who stumbles onto his hideout into a pig-man, lampshading it as an appropriate transformation.
- When Brian becomes a police dog on Family Guy, Peter jokingly asks him whether if cops are pigs, that makes him a snausage (a joke that apparently took him hours to come up with).
- In the Samurai Jack episode "Jack and the Scotsman", the title characters both get chased through a bayou by a Pig Sheriff leading a posse of hillbilly henchmen and robot alligators, looking to collect the massive bounty on both of them. These bounty hunters all play up redneck stereotypes to comic effect, especially with the Pig Sheriff speaking in a ridiculously fast-paced vernacular that sounds like gibberish.
- Chief Clancy Wiggum from The Simpsons is the comically corrupt and dimwitted leader of the Springfield Police Department. He has some resemblance to a pig, due to being an obese glutton with a nose that looks like a pig's snout, a big portly belly, and small black shoes resembling hooves. His pig-like traits have been lampshaded by multiple jokes throughout the series:
- In "Cape Fear", Chief Wiggum complains during Sideshow Bob's parole hearing that he called him "Chief Piggum", which makes everyone in the courtroom laugh. Wiggum then admits that it was Actually Pretty Funny.
- In "Lisa the Vegetarian", Wiggum laughs at the roasted pig's nose at Homer's BBQ, even though his nose looks the same.
- In "Take My Wife, Sleaze", Homer's biker gang (the Hell's Satans) harass Wiggum, calling him a "pig" and repeatedly "oinking" at him. Later when a rival biker gang with the same name takes over the Simpsons' house, Wiggum refuses to help, explaining that "Those pig noises you made really hurt my feelings... looking like a pig as I do."
- In "Day of the Jackanapes", Wiggum refers to his feet as "little hooves" while he struggles to keep up with Bob's walking pace.
- In the "Treehouse of Horror XIII" segment "The Island of Dr. Hibbert," Clancy and his wife Sarah both get turned into human-pig hybrids by Dr. Hibbert, thus making Wiggum a literal pig cop.
- In "Marge Gamer", Wiggum's avatar in Earthland Realms looks a lot like a Pig Man.
