Just another day on the job.
In fiction, public service careers may be subjected to Rule of Cool by exaggerating them to be much more awesome and over-the-top than they actually are, often up to "Saturday morning cartoon" levels of outlandishness.
Police officers, firefighters, doctors, construction workers, astronauts... basically any job that every kid wanted to have when they grow up are commonly given this treatment. Other personnel such as garbage collectors, teachers, mailmen, milkmen, literal Almighty Janitors, etc. can also appear, and villainous examples aren't uncommon either.
Odds are high the police force that upholds public order will have a facility filled with an assortment of impossibly cool vehicles and gadgets that would make Batman blush. The firefighters tasked with saving lives and containing blazes don't just have firetrucks; said firetrucks transform into Humongous Mecha equipped with water cannons designed to fight 50-foot fire monsters that pop up every now and then. The local hospital even has its own elite team of undercover medic ninja SWAT squads with jetpacks who immediately mobilize at the slightest hint of a potential flu epidemic.
And don't even try to light up a smoke in a forest, or else Smokey Bear and his army of cyborg bears and forest rangers in fighter jets will magically appear to snuff out your cigarette quick, before smacking you upside the head with their magical Shovels of Wisdom and Hindsight... and having the Kill Sat of "I Wasn't Asking" pointed at your sorry ass just in case you have any objections. Bonus points if all of the aforementioned personnel join together to form their league of righteousness.
In some cases, characters don't necessarily have to perform their actual jobs and can be simply heroes, villains, or combatants with a public service motif.
Can overlap with The Real Heroes, which is often used for delivering An Aesop about how these men and women should be respected and appreciated, though said heroes are portrayed in a more grounded manner instead.
A common staple of Rescue works aimed at younger audiences. Super-Trope to Deadly Doctor, Space Police, and Super Cop. Has nothing to do with Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids. See also Unstoppable Mailman (courier with implied juggernaut superpowers) and Police Psychic (supernatural detective partnering with mundane police to solve mundane crimes).
See also Real Life Superpowers.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Brave Express Might Gaine: The titular mech is part of the Brave Express Corps, a private emergency rescue service force that helps people in disasters through a variety of ways, all of which are handled by more mecha with Super AI that can also use their abilities for combat against the show's various criminals.
- Dominion Tank Police is a parody of this concept. The police are shown using tanks to fight crime, and it's spelled out that this is due the setting being a Crapsack World that needs police to be militarized to that degree to maintain order. It doesn't help that the cops are often mavericks who even Dirty Harry would think are too extreme.
- Fire Force takes place in a Heroic/Urban Fantasy world where special firefighter teams literally fight fire with fire. They are in charge of combating and putting to rest the threat of "Infernals", former humans turned into blazing, rampaging beasts in fiery agony.
- Lyrical Nanoha: The parallel dimension of Midchilda is a Magitek-powered society, even though only a small percentage of the population are trained mages. Most of said mages are aggressively scouted by the Time-Space Administration Bureau — a bureaucratic governing body overseeing the relations between Midchilda and its adjacent magitek-powered dimensions — and put to work either in its Space Police force or in its various disaster relief branches (the Bureau has no formal military). The most prestigious of the latter is the Gulf Special Rescue Unit on Midchilda, and the protagonist of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Subaru Nakajima, dreams of joining it (and actually does in later installments).
- My Hero Academia:
- The police are explicitly a subversion of this. While Everyone Is a Super, and cops are as essential as licensed heroes in the legal system due to handling much of the investigative and logistical work, police officers are discouraged from using their Quirks or getting hero-grade gadgets in order to avoid blurring the laws requiring people to get a license to use their Quirks in the line of fire. A few police officers have gotten away with using their Quirks to protect others, but they still had to write up a public apology letter afterwards. There are few superheroes who play this straight:
- Recovery Girl is both a doctor and a pro hero who has been in the business for years. As a result, she is able to use her Healing Hands (read: lips) Quirk to quickly patch up people's wounds, but is also trained to perform everything from general checkups to surgery when necessary.
- Backdraft from the first chapter/episode is a firefighter-themed pro-hero who possesses an unnamed water quirk that allows him to control the water that he expels from hand-mounted faucets. He seems to act as more of a support hero than a combat-based one, creating water-based fences to fence the civilians away from a hero/villain fight and he tries putting out the fires Bakugo makes trying to escape the Sludge Villain.
- Subverted more often than not in Patlabor. While the titular Humongous Mecha are police mecha, the pilots... well... let's just say that Ohta could be a bit more tightly wrapped...
- Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee: Letter Bees are basically mailmen who live in a world in which large insects known as Gaichuu roam in the wild areas outside towns. Gaichuu feed on a type of Life Energy that tends to be present in small quantities in letters, resulting in travelling Letter Bees being prime targets for them. This means Letter Bees need to have special weapons and skills to survive each trip between towns. In other words, the job takes Unstoppable Mailman to a whole new level.
- Tenchi Muyo! GXP: The Galaxy Police ("GP" for short) are Exactly What It Says on the Tin—a galactic police force whose primary duty is to oppose and arrest space pirates causing havoc, but also explicitly state that they do not limit their services to just that. In addition to performing small civic duties for citizens (demonstrated by helping a little girl get a balloon out of a tree), they also oversee a galactic postal service that is stated to be where they receive most of their funding. Some special officers even command their own ships filled with advanced (and seemingly mystical) technology and weaponry.
Comic Books
- Earth X: The New York City Police Department is composed of superhumans (mostly former superheroes) that maintain law and order in this universe. Older versions of Peter Parker, Luke Cage, May Parker (as Venom) and Bobby Drake are part of the NYCPD, all of them using their superpowers in the service of the public law.
- Legion of Super-Heroes: In most versions, most ordinary crimes and disasters are under the jurisdiction of the Science Police, who have access to all the advanced technology one would expect in the 30th/31st century. Only one hundred officers are present at any time on Earth; this is because no more than that are needed since most routine disturbances are handled by drones.
- Top 10: Since Everyone Is a Super, the jobs of police officers have gotten a lot more complicated. Between investigating teleportation accidents, intergalactic murderers, and the deaths of gods, there's plenty for its Dysfunction Junction of superpowered officers to handle.
Fan Works
- The Infinite Loops: In one Fate/Grand Order snip, the United Nations places a restraining order on Beryl for Mash; if he comes within five miles from her, he will be struck down by Odin.
Film — Animation
- The LEGO Movie: As the page image shows, the minifigs across the worlds were inspired to build awesome machines and mechs to combat Lord Business. Emmet himself was just a construction worker before he was a Master Builder.
- Promare: The Burning Rescue team are both a fire-fighting and a crime-fighting force, who not only rescue civilians from fires but also combat pyrokinetic arsonists with Mini-Mechas and wind/ice-based weaponry.
Film — Live-Action
- R.I.P.D.: The eponymous Rest In Peace Department is — as its name implies — a department of undead police officers who serve to protect the living from malevolent souls who refuse to move on to the afterlife.
Live-Action TV
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Drive: The Metropolitan Police's Special Investigations Division is in charge of investigating the strange happenings regarding the Roidmude and "Heaviness" within the city.
- Kamen Rider Zero-One: Isamu Fuwa and Yua Yaiba are members of the Artificial Intelligence Military Service, a tactical police force dedicated to taking down rogue HumaGears. Both Isamu and Yua have access to Progrise Keys they use to transform into Kamen Rider Vulcan and Kamen Rider Valkyrie respectively.
- Power Rangers/Super Sentai:
- Power Rangers Turbo/Gekisou Sentai Carranger has probably the first in-series example with the Blue Centurion/Signalman. In Turbo, Blue Senturion is a robot cop from the future sent back to stop the villains from all teaming up to conquer the universe, while in Carranger, Signalman is a space cop tasked with hunting down the main villains. Both versions of the character even have a giant police car that turns into a robot.
- Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue/Kyūkyū Sentai GoGoV gives the Rangers a first responders theme, complete with mecha suited for rescue work.
- Power Rangers S.P.D./Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger is probably the most notable — the title heroes are actually cops and the attacking monsters are criminals disturbing the peace.
- Thunderbirds is about a privately-owned search-and-rescue service headquartered on a tropical island in the South Pacific Ocean which employs a bevy of exceptionally toyetic vehicles.
- Tomica Hero Rescue Force, as a show known for making the Rescue genre ten times more awesome and beyond, naturally features this trope. Special mention goes to its spin-off Tomica Hero Rescue Fire, featuring some extremely over-the-top firefighters tackling demons with Wave-Motion Gun-toting Humongous Mecha.
Professional Wrestling
- ECW: Played for Laughs with Al Poling, known as "911". As with the emergency phone call, when a wrestler needs help to handle his rival or to finish him (or even Paul Heyman himself to save a fight), they call 911 and he appears from nowhere and chokeslams them. This made him loved by ECW fans.
Tabletop Games
- Silver Age Sentinels: Officer Prometheus, one of the top heroes of the setting, is a policeman with the powers of the Human Torch and the All-Loving Hero mindset of Captain America. He explicitly thinks of himself as a cop first and a super second, and when he's not acting as a liaison between the Empire City Police and the local super teams, he helps on police raids as firepower to deal with the inevitable superpowered crook.
Video Games
- Astral Chain has you play as a member of NEURON, a special police task force charged with fighting interdimensional monsters in a Cyberpunk city harboring the last remaining members of mankind. You employ the use of acrobatic fighting techniques, weapons such as BFSes, and the assistance of Stand-esque biomechanical lifeforms serving as NEURON's equivalent of K-9 police dogs. Of course, you also have to do actual footwork to solve regular mundane tasks such as finding an elusive graffiti artist and helping a lost child return to her mother.
- Burning Rangers is about a team of firefighters who have their own spaceship with the ability to teleport the burning rangers down to the location of the fires, and bring survivors onto the spaceship. They also have Jet Packs and fight fires by shooting lasers at them that turn the fires into crystals. The game also involves fighting robots and has a "Save the World" Climax.
- Kingdom of Loathing:
- The Heavy Rains path deals with mitigating the flooding caused by the eponymous torrential rainstorm.
- Wildfire, of course, involves firefighting, complete with firefighting equipment and a secondary resource stat that represents how much water your character is carrying.
- Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan is about a group of male cheerleaders whose antics become increasingly absurd as the game progresses. These guys root for people in all sorts of tasks, from helping a restaurant owner attract more customers, to helping Cleopatra lose weight with the power of her pyramids, and finally saving the Earth from an incoming asteroid by cheering on every person in the world to blast it with a concentrated laser beam of pure hype.
- Overwatch: Orisa, one of the playable "Tank" heroes of the roster, is a decommissioned, centaur-like Omnic reprogrammed to be a guardian of Numbani, with the personality of a caring, but assertive policewoman. On the battlefield, she is a valuable ally capable of providing long, sustained fire from her Arm Cannon; outside of combat, however, she is shown helping pedestrians safely cross the street in her intro short, though she needs help on not accidentally wrecking approaching cars in the process.
- Pokémon Ranger: The title characters are basically a combination of forest rangers and police officers. They use capture stylers to acquire Pokemon to aid them in stopping villains from taking over the world, put out raging forest fires, redeem people who have caused problems, and help prevent littering.
- Team Fortress 2: The Medic appears to fit the criteria of this trope. Not only is he a Deadly Doctor (who lost his medical license in the past due to a bizarre Noodle Incident) armed with bonesaws and firearms that shoot syringes, but he also developed the technology to instantly heal his teammates' wounds, turn them into glowing Implacable Men capable of laughing off bullets and explosives, and even bring them back from the dead no matter what's left of them.
Western Animation
- Codename: Kids Next Door:
- The Ice Cream Men are the employees of the evil Tasty Taste Ice Cream Corporation, who also double as the heavily-armed soldiers under Father and the Delightful Children's command. When not emptying their inedible ice cream-shooting guns on the KND during shootouts, they go around in ice cream trucks serving frozen treats, except their jobs as Child Haters require them to never stop for children and only serve "responsible adults".
- Knightbrace is a failed dentist turned villainous costumed vigilante obsessed with forcing good dental hygiene on kids. His motive wouldn't sound so bad if it weren't for the fact that his modus operandi involves forcibly attaching Braces of Orthodontic Overkill on his victims, and that the reason why he was kicked out of dentist school was that he wanted to put such braces on babies.
- C.O.P.S. (1988): The Central Organization of Police Specialists (C.O.P.S.) is a special group of police officers with cyborg enhancements that strengthen each member's particular talents. They fight crime in Empire City in the year 2020.
- In an episode of The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy wishes he could stay up all night, and one of the first things he sees is a street cleaner becoming a giant robot.
- Masters of the Universe: Hose Nose is an Eternian fireman equipped with a large, mechanical helmet in the shape of an elephant's head. It has its own water supply, but the trunk can also suck up even larger bodies of water to spray out and extinguish fires.
- PAW Patrol has the same concept as Rescue Heroes, only the team is made up of Precious Puppies whose respective doghouses transform into special vehicles suited for each member's respective skills.
- Rescue Heroes is a take on the Rescue genre based on the toy line of the same name and may as well be the Trope Codifier. A team of various emergency and public service personnel tackle major emergencies around the world with the help of high-tech vehicles and many improbable animal sidekicks, including a dolphin, a mountain lion, and a bat.
- ThunderCats (1985): Mandora the Evil Chaser is a by-the-book space cop and staunch ally of the heroes.
- Transformers: Rescue Bots centers around a group of four Transformers, styled after first responders, who team up with a family of rescuers and work mostly on rescue operations.
- Ultimate Spider-Man (2012): Stan Lee is the janitor at the school the heroes attend. Stan the Jan also happens to be exceptionally skilled in martial arts and has access to highly advanced tools like grappling hooks to make a quick getaway and reach the hard-to-clean places after an intense food fight, as well as lasers capable of cutting through both steel and dried wads of gum the students stick under their desks. What else would you expect from a founding member of S.H.I.E.L.D.?
