Police Brutality / Live-Action Films

• In '71, the RUC are violent and abusive when they search the homes of Catholics for guns. When the soldiers arrive in the west Belfast neighbourhood, the local children throw water balloons (filled with urine) and verbal abuse at them. When the RUC arrive, they beat a hasty retreat.
• Across the Universe (2007): The National Guardsmen during the Detroit Riots shoot unarmed Black people simply for looting. NYPD officers later beat up peaceful protesters, and Jude when he's trying to help Lucy.
• Billy Club (2013): The police who arrest Bobby in the middle of the movie like to administer beatings to their prisoners, as seen with the one who manhandled Bobby in his own cell. Bobby is seen cowering in the corner from watching the beating, and is left in his cell with the guy after his beating. Plus, when Bobby gets out, we see bruises all over his sides and back, which he says the cops gave him.
• "Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of The Blues Brothers has been approved."
• Born on the Fourth of July: In every protest scene, the police attack the protesters with batons flying even if they're completely peaceful, and the Kent State incident (where four were shot) gets mentioned too.
• In Boyz n the Hood, Officer Coffey is a black policeman who is racist towards other blacks because he thinks they're all criminals. When he and his partner question Tre and Ricky, Coffey shoves a gun in Tre's face to see him scared for his life and explains that he signed up specifically to rough up those he hates.
• Bridge of Spies features standard beatdowns from Soviet and East German security forces. Meanwhile, American police aren't too excited about helping James Donovan after his defense of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, leaving him to the wolves of America's populace.
• The Cat in the Hat does a comedic take on this. While distracting Conrad and Sally's mom, the Things dress up as police officers and give her a ticket. Thing One accidentally eats the ticket, prompting Thing Two to give him the Heimlich Maneuver. Thing One has this to say, "Police brutality! Illegal chokehold!"
• Changeling has this. A mother loses her son and asks the police to get him back. They come back with the wrong kid and have her sent to the loonie bin to keep their credibility. It was a true story.
• A Clockwork Orange:
  • While Alex is in custody for murder, the cops pummel him bloody and offer to hold him down to let his parole officer take a few swings at him.
  • Alex discovers to his horror that Georgie and Dim, members of his former gang, became cops while he was away. They proudly proclaim, "A job for two who are now of job age! The police!" Having delighted in ultraviolence in their youth, they're more than happy to get paid for it. Still holding a grudge against Alex for his tyrannical rule of the gang, they drag him into the woods and hold his head underwater while beating him with batons as further revenge.
• In Convoy, Spider Mike, one of the truckers forming the eponymous convoy, is brutally beaten down by the Sheriff of a little Texas town.
• The Cordon: Serbian riot police brutally cracks down anti-Milosevic protests in 1997. The film tries to humanize the riot policemen, showing that most of them are merely Punch-Clock Villains, a couple of them are seriously questioning what they do, and finally, there are a few who actually like what they do.
• The Taiwanese police in Crime Story is depicted as such, having the protagonist, Eddie, arrested, subjected to Shameful Stripping and beating him up to force a confession from him. Meanwhile, Eddie's boss, Hung, is free to use his mob connections to escape unscathed, and is shown having a casual chat with the Taiwanese superintendent while Eddie is getting his snot beaten out.
• Dark Angel: The Ascent: Two of Veronica's victims were a couple racist white cops who harassed and then beat a black man for no reason except he was there. It later turns out the pair both had some long records of complaints for excessive force. The police officer guarding the mayor who later shoots Veronica is another example, as he does this after ordering her to stop while flying, even though she didn't have a weapon or pose any visible threat.
• Dementia (1955): It was necessary for that detective to intervene when the wino grabbed the woman in the alley and tried to force some liquor down her throat. It was not necessary for the detective to then beat the man senseless with a billy club, as both the detective and the woman laugh mockingly as blood pours down the wino's face.
• In Den of Thieves, O'Brien and the Major Crimes Squad have no issues with beating information out of a suspect.
• In Detroit, cops raid the Algiers Motel during the 1967 riot for the source of shots fired. By the end of the night, three black teens would be dead.
• The first Dirty Harry movie has Harry roughing up the Scorpio Killer while in custody to learn where he had hidden a kidnapped girl, and getting called out on it. After Scorpio gets let out of custody because of it and other red tape issues, the killer pays a guy to beat the crap out of him so he can blame the beating on Harry, whose only defense is that it couldn't have been him, 'cause if he was the one who beat him, the guy would look a lot worse.
  • Subsequent films continue the trend, naturally.
  Briggs: I've got nothing personal against you, Callahan, but we can't have the public crying 'police brutality!' every time you go out on the street.
• In Electra Glide in Blue, this is one of Detective Poole's favorite tactics. When the members of a hippie commune won't tell him where a certain drug dealer is, Poole punches random people until someone starts talking.
• Face/Off:
  • The Erewhon prison guards use far more force than is necessary, including electroshock treatment on prisoners as punishment, which the head guard at least clearly enjoys.
  • Castor, disguised as Archer, leads FBI agents in opening fire on Dietrich's penthouse with no attempt to announce themselves or arrest them. Legally, this is attempted murder, and Director Lazarro is outraged by this afterward, calling it "Gestapo tactics".
• Fallen Angel (1945) has Mark Judd, who puts on special gloves to beat a confession out of a suspect.
• The Fighter has some cops break Micky's hands simply due to him being a fighter. It's also worth noting that he didn't do as much damage as his brother, Dickey.
• First Blood has its plot kick off when small-town police manhandle Rambo, a Shell-Shocked Veteran, in custody, when all they were supposed to do was clean him up for his court appearance. Their attempt to forcefully shave him presses his Trauma Button and he escapes, beginning the manhunt that forms the story. One cop spends the rest of his screentime trying to literally hunt Rambo down with a hunting rifle; he starts with trying to shoot the unarmed man on a crowded street and progresses to sniping him from a helicopter.
• Un Flic has two examples, one explicit and one implied:
  • Commissioner Coleman has to deal with a team of pickpockets who claim not to speak French. He slaps one of them in the face, and his language skills improve.
  • Coleman and his team arrest one of Simon's gang, who denies everything. They then lower the shutters on the windows in Coleman's office, and shine a bright light on the suspect. Cut to Coleman phoning Simon: "Do you know Louis Costa?" "No." "Well, he knows you."
• Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives: The police used to target lesbians with harassment, beatings and even rape.
• Freebie from Freebie and the Bean jumps at the slightest excuse to beat people up. He punches one man in the face as a greeting.
• Getting Straight: During a protest, police beat protestors with batons and spray them with fire hoses, knocking them down a flight of concrete stairs.
• The Girl From Monday: William is shot dead by the police for running away from them.
• Glass (2019): Cops in the employ of the Ancient Conspiracy murder David and Kevin under a guise of taking down dangerous threats (when both were actually no longer threats when this happened).
• Goodbye Lenin has an important scene in which an anti-government demonstration the main character takes part in is violently suppressed by the police, leading to his mother having a heart attack (his pleas for his mother are only rewarded by being herded into the back of a truck, held down, and beaten up). Justified as the setting is East Germany when it was still under an oppressive totalitarian communist regime.
• La Haine shows a particularly brutal vicious circle relationship between the Paris police and a group of teenage thugs from the local banlieues. The police raid the deprived banlieues, the people who live there fight back, which means the police crack down harder on the area, which means the people start rioting... It eventually culminates in the police shooting an unarmed teenage boy by accident, and one officer and the boy's best friend holding guns to each other's heads. End of film.
  • With a single gunshot, just after the screen goes black, as well.
• How To Blow Up A Pipeline:
  • Security guards for the pipeline shoot at Logan as he runs away, which is illegal, though he'd have to get caught to actually get them in trouble for it.
  • Xochitl and Theo get brutalized by cops as they attempt to surrender peacefully.
• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has the song "We Love Violence (Join the Fuzz)" where a troupe of singing, dancing policemen extols the virtues of being able to perform violence within the law.
• Seen in In the Mouth of Madness, where a cop viciously beating an unarmed graffiti artist and threatening the protagonist is one of the early signs that something is wrong with people. He later sees a nightmare of the same scene, except that the cop has become an inhuman monster.
• In Ip Man 2, one British policeman has his buddies hold down editor-in-chief Kan while he deals out a beating.
• An early example can be found in the 1941 Film Noir I Wake Up Screaming and its 1953 remake Vicki. A detective browbeats his lieutenant into giving him the murder case of a beautiful model. He does everything in his power to pin the killing on her publicist: beating him, breaking into his apartment, and planting evidence. In truth, he's known from the beginning that another man killed her. He doesn't care, though.
• In Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a small-town police officer tries to do this to one of the titular invaders. It doesn't end well for him.
• This is present quite a bit in L.A. Confidential. The most noteworthy example is probably the Bloody Christmas scandal, where a bunch of alcohol-imbibed officers rough up a group of unarmed prisoners as retaliation against the beating up of a pair of cops earlier that evening.
• Lakeview Terrace shows a newlywed couple being terrorized by a corrupt cop neighbor, who is played by Samuel L. Jackson, someone you don't want to mess with. His only problem with them seems to be their mixed-race relationship... although it's also possible that that's just an excuse.
• Light Sleeper: Slimy cop Radone slams John into a shop window hard enough to break the glass to intimidate him.
• Malcolm X, a biographical film of Malcolm X, opens with alternating scenes of a burning American flag and the Rodney King beating.
• The corrupt vigilante cops led by Lt. Neil Briggs in Magnum Force enjoy pulling this. As Dirty Harry says, "A man's got to know his limitations."
• In A Man Called Sledge, Sledge's plan relies on him being locked up in the prison for the night. However, the warden plans to hand him over to Sheriff Ripley to be held in the county jail overnight because he hasn't been convicted of anything yet. So Sledge goads Ripley by taunting over the death of his deputy till Ripley not only punches him, but kicks him several times while he is own the floor. The warden is horrified and—fearing Sledge might not survive a night in the jail—agrees to hold him overnight.
• Margarita with a Straw: Laila meets Khanum while at a protest over the death of a black man who NYPD officers shot which is alleged to result from this. The protest then shows examples itself as it gets unruly and the police heavy-handed. Laila mentions the Delhi Police where she's from are also like this.
• John Wayne's character in Mc Q (1974) is implied to have beaten up suspects in the past. One occasion has a radical giving him lip in a corridor, whereupon Wayne stamps on his foot. When another cop asks what happened, John Wayne replies, "He stubbed his foot on a chair." (The corridor is empty of chairs.)
• In Menace II Society, Caine and Sharif are beaten by cops and left in a rival gang's neighbourhood.
• The action-comedy National Security kicks off with a white cop allegedly beating an innocent black man. In reality, the cop was about to arrest the guy for attempted Grand Theft Auto and resisting arrest (as well as insulting him). Then a "big-ass bumblebee" showed up, and the suspect, who is allergic to bees, asked the cop to get rid of it. Which the cop did... with his nightstick. A tourist films the whole thing from far away and from an angle that hides the bumblebee. The shot of the suspect on TV suggests he was brutally beaten up, due to his face being swollen. He shows up the next day completely fine, explaining that it was an allergic reaction to the bumblebee. He still maintains that he was assaulted, though (the cop does admit in court that he missed the bumblebee a few times and hit the guy). The cop loses his job and is jailed for 6 months (which is done more for PR than anything). When he comes out, the only job he can get is in security.
• No God, No Master: The NYPD breaks up a rally by the anarchist Emma Goldman and IWW union organizer Carlo Tresca, even though neither they nor the listeners committed any crime, liberally beating people with batons despite Flynn's objections.
• The setting of Pride And Glory begins with a group of corrupt cops deciding to get rid of Angel Tezo so that they can do business with another dealer. The plan starts to go downhill when Tezo escapes from a botched hit, forcing the group into a frantic search to find and kill him before anyone else in the NYPD discovers his connections with them. The corrupt cops eventually catch Tezo and have him tortured before being killed. Unfortunately, the last moments of the brutality were witnessed by Ray, another officer on the task-force which was assigned to investigate the incident, which is later followed by a private interview between a reporter and Sandy, another corrupt officer who soon commits suicide after exposing the group that he used to work with.
• Queen & Slim: What kicks the plot off is Queen being shot in the leg by a Rabid Cop for just objecting to his hassling Slim for no reason. Slim then kills him in self-defense. It turns out that the cop also had shot an unarmed black man prior to the events of the film. Queen and Slim are also killed by the cops at the end when neither is posing any threat but simply don't orders.
• In Red State, the local Sheriff accidentally shoots one of the hostages, who had escaped with a rifle in hand. The ATF then panics, declares the entire Cooper family to be domestic terrorists, and orders everyone killed. The federal agents wind up murdering the remaining hostage and several unarmed people over the rest of the movie.
• In Riot on Sunset Strip, Lieutenant Lorimer gives television speeches about the importance of nonviolent law enforcement, but he eventually loses control and punches his daughter's rapists in the hospital.
• RoboCop (1987) uses this trope to satirize the notoriously trigger-happy police forces of major American cities, and is an over-the-top parody of the "tough on crime" attitude in general. RoboCop has an Obstructive Code of Conduct that means he will Never Hurt an Innocent, but aside from that, he's free to enforce the law using as violent means as possible as long as he technically doesn't do anything illegal. Apparently, this doesn't extend to throwing a perp out a window or shooting an attempted rapist in the balls.
• R. P. M. (1970): When the police come to remove the students from the building, some of them beat unarmed protestors with batons.
• See You Yesterday: A pair of police officers shoot Claudette's brother due to being mistaken for robbers.
• The Siege: FBI Agent Frank backhands Samir, a handcuffed suspect, after he insults him. Hubbard chews him out, while Frank defends himself by offering to tell him what Samir's people (the Palestinians) did to his village in Lebanon (presumably during the Lebanese Civil War, when numerous massacres were committed on all sides).
• In Snuff Movie, the police take Andy into an empty room and kick the shit out of him for wasting their time and making them look like fools.
• Strange Days: Complaints around this have heightened racial tensions in the US during the film, and in particular the plot revolves around an outspoken rapper being killed by two cops, which is inadvertently recorded, with them trying to track down the recording.
• In The Strawberry Statement, Simon's right-wing rowing teammate punches him in the face, giving him a bloody lip. He spits blood on his shirt and smears it on his face so he can pretend to be a police brutality victim in order to increase his clout. Later he experiences the real thing when cops raid the building and start kicking and beating peaceful protesters.
• In Suffragette, the policemen throw women to the floor and then proceed to beat them up.
• Surveillance features a pair of police officers who enjoy shooting out the tires of passing motorists and then terrorizing said motorists, claiming that speeding led to the tire blowing out.
• The LAPD are called out for this in S.W.A.T. (2003) when a fleeing African-American suspect is apprehended. The accuser knows full well that the officers are none other than Samuel L. Jackson and LL Cool J, making the suggestion either Too Dumb to Live or Played for Laughs, you pick it.
• Tales from the Hood: Billy, Newton, and Strom conspire to murder a black politician who was exposing their drug-dealing business. Their victim subsequently rises from the grave to get revenge.
• Tales from the Hood 2: In the changed reality Henry finds himself in "The Sacrifice", the Klan Patrol have no reservations about beating to death a black man they think raped a white woman.
• They Live!: When the cops raid the homeless camp, they brutally beat people with no provocation in most cases, or use excessive force against the few who attempt to resist (including the minister, who's blind).
• Transformers (2007) has a cop threaten to "bust [Sam] up" for looking at his gun. Because reaching for a gun won't cause people to automatically look at you.
• In 2010 film The Traveler, the Drifter was assaulted extremely badly to the point of coma by Detective Black and the rest of the police officers who were at the interrogation scene. This sets off the entire vengeance plot of the film.
• The Trial of the Chicago 7: 99% of the police footage in this film is of them beating and arresting protestors (usually without any cause), including one scene where they rip off their badges before assaulting them right outside a fancy diner. Fred Hampton is also killed by police offscreen when he was already helpless. "Executed", Seale rightly says.
• Turkey Shoot: In the opening scene, a pair of police officers chase a running man into Chris' shop, then they start kicking him after he falls down. Her protesting it makes them suspect that she's his accomplice and she gets sent off to a reeducation camp.
• The V for Vendetta film has the Fingermen, who are the Norsefire party's Secret Police. They are allowed to pretty much do anything, though as order in England breaks down, people put up with them less and less. This culminates in a Fingerman shooting an unarmed little girl who was spray-painting a V symbol. A lot of people — very mean-looking people — then come out of their houses and kill the guy despite his gun and badge.
  • Of specific note is that V only meets Evey because he has to intervene to save her from a police gang rape.
  Fingerman: ...we exercise our own judicial discretion.
  Another Fingerman: And you get to swallow it.
• In Where the Sidewalk Ends, this the moving force of the plot. Dixon has gotten many warnings about his violent behavior towards suspects, so much so that he will be demoted if it happens again. His altercation with Ken Paine, and his subsequent death, makes him turn into a full out criminal.
• The World Unseen: The White South African police are quite brutal, hitting people freely and threatening Miriam with having her children taken away to get information.
• Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni deals with LA's counterculture of The '60s, and features police as trigger-happy, stupid, and racist.

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