Line #29 Main/OddlyOvertrainedSecurity


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6	They are elite, and have the best equipment and training their government can provide. They're carrying rifles and wearing body armor and helmets, looking ready for battle. If you ever meet one, be prepared to quake in your boots and change your shirt from the nervous sweat as they step out of their vehicle, walk over, and ask...
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8	->"License and registration, please."
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10	Despite being the best of the best, they are also everywhere and doing every security oriented job, including traffic cop. The reasons are various: laziness or lack of research on the part of the writers, RuleOfCool, conservation of animation or costuming budget, etc.
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12	This can operate at different scales; it would be unusual to see special operations soldiers guarding every US Embassy (normally guarded by Marines), just as it would be unusual if every security guard, police officer, and traffic cop was a Marine, every clerk and retail worker was a cop, or darn near everyone was wearing a combat uniform.
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14	Some examples may be justified by the story; for example, an area under military occupation or martial law will often see soldiers in many roles held by policemen under more normal circumstances.
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16	Contrast TheGuardsMustBeCrazy. May result in ShopliftAndDie.
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19	!!Examples:
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21	[[foldercontrol]]
22
23	[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
24	* An episode of ''Anime/GhostInTheShellStandAloneComplex'' has Togusa go undercover to investigate a facility for youths suffering from "cyberbrain addiction". The first sign something's up is the presence of an 8 foot tall cyborg covered in solid metal armor. Unlike many other examples of this trope where it's treated as being normal by the characters, Togusa immediately becomes suspicious of the facility because of it.
25	[[/folder]]
26
27	[[folder:Comic Books]]
28	* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'' has this to a society crippling degree. The Judges are very well trained, very thinly spread, and apparently the only law enforcement or security force in the Mega City. A larger number of less trained people could go a long way towards keeping a lid on things.
29	** ''Judge Dredd'' writer Michael Carroll has said that the story he's always wanted to do is about the people who go through the gruelling process of becoming a highly-trained Judge ... and end up as a supply clerk or similar. The Judges do not have civilian support staff outside of Auxiliaries, who are worked pretty much to the bone.
30	** Judges have wound up [[ReassignedToAntarctica doing more menial tasks]] if they fail their final assessment or a fitness evaluation upon returning to the streets after an injury. This can result in a meat wagon driver, sewage inspector, or control dispatcher with fifteen years of Academy Of Law training plus however many years of street experience.
31	[[/folder]]
32
33	[[folder:Fan Works]]
34	* Lampshaded and eventually justified in ''Fanfic/AllGuardsmenParty''. The party is harassed by an oddly determined and overarmed traffic cop who stops at nothing to take them down. It turns out that this particular cop isn't an ordinary member of the planet's police force--he's an Arbites, one of the Imperium's interplanetary law enforcers, who was tasked with managing the planet's whole police force, and got stuck managing traffic.
35	[[/folder]]
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37	[[folder:Film -- Live Action]]
38	* ''Film/TheLivingDaylights'' opens with the Double-0 section taking part in a training exercise to attack a radar installation on the Rock of Gibraltar. Their opponents in the exercise are the Special Air Service, who are ''not'' used for mundane guarding duties.
39	* ''Film/MenInBlackII'': J re-recruits K from his retirement at a post office. The retiree deals with a spilled coffee by issuing orders like he's containing a nuclear breach. This scene does admittedly take place in the sorting room, and getting spilled coffee all over someone else's mail is a great way to get yourself in a whole hell of a lot of trouble, but it definitely hints to J that his old partner might not be entirely happy in retirement.
40	* ''Film/SpiesLikeUs''. An abandoned movie theatre is guarded by plainclothes men armed with automatic weapons. This is RuleOfFunny as the 'theatre' is actually a working component of the Strategic Defence Initiative.
41	* In ''Franchise/StarWars'' it's averted by the actual films which are fairly consistent about noting that Stormtroopers are elite troops (we only see them so much because we see Vader so much), but the ExpandedUniverse tends to depict them as cannon fodder that are all over the place doing everything, especially videogames.
42	** Predating Stormtroopers are the Clone Troopers. Despite the very low[[note]]Relative to the size of the war they're fighting - there may be millions of them but the Republic has millions of worlds to protect, so if they divided them up equally they might have enough men to give each world a garrison of one squad[[/note]] canon number of clones and several mentions in story of how tightly stretched they are, ''WesternAnimation/StarWarsTheCloneWars'' has them doing everything from street patrol to prison guard duties. Justified, albeit thinly, by the fact that the Republic didn't ''have'' a standing army beforehand; recruiting and training regular troops was still a work in progress when the war ended.
43	[[/folder]]
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45	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
46	* In ''Series/{{Leverage}}'', a large ''processed food company'' hired ex-CIA agents to protect their recipes! According to Nate, it's common practice in the industry.
47	* ''Series/PersonOfInterest''. When this happens it's a sign that the apparently innocuous business the protagonists are trying to break into this week is actually an NSA BlackSite.
48	* In ''Series/TheUnit'', Jonas, Mack, and Charles spend an episode bodyguarding a prima donna singer because the brass doesn't want anything bad to happen to such a high-profile artist. Nearly everyone is unaware that the three of them are highly skilled special forces operators.
49	[[/folder]]
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51	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
52	* Justified in the Planet Cadia from ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000''. The planet is right next to the [[IDontLikeTheSoundOfThatPlace Eye of Terror]] and is the first line of defense against Chaos incursions. With a conscription rate equal to the birth rate, there is no difference between 'military' and 'civilian' in Cadia. What we call military camouflage is everyday fashion in Cadia, city planning is done as with defensive lines, and Cadian kids learn to shoot before they learn to walk.
53	-->''Any Cadian who can't field-strip his own lasgun by age ten was born on the wrong planet.''
54	[[/folder]]
55
56	[[folder:Video Games]]
57	* ''VideoGame/DeusExMankindDivided'': You will see heavily armed police including some in PoweredArmor and supplanted by AttackDrone swarms in every corner of every street in the “Aug” sections of Prague. This is because [[{{Cyborg}} mechanically augmented people]] are [[PersonOfMassDestruction walking weapons]] and the “Aug incident” of ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'' has resulted in the segregation and systematic persecution of “augs”.
58	* In ''VideoGame/TheMatrixPathOfNeo'' there's a former cop turned security guard in charge of an abandoned church, the worst thing going on in it is graffiti.
59	[[/folder]]
60
61	[[folder:Webcomics]]
62	* Lampshaded and exploited in ''Webcomic/AMiracleOfScience'', when a trio of {{Mad Scientist}}s break into a government facility that's disguised as an ordinary recycling plant... with four security guards with rifles posted outside. The ringleader notes that this was an important clue to the location of the McGuffin they're trying to steal, and then for an encore he uses binoculars to look over a guard's shoulder when he enters the code to unlock the door when he goes inside to take a leak.
63	* ''Webcomic/QuestionableContent'' uses it with a good amount of lampshading when a lieutenant on a space station is charged with carrying out standard security checks on new arrivals. This is despite the presence of an AI that can do molecular scans on them and their coming from a spaceport, which presumably has security of its own.
64	[[/folder]]
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66	[[folder:Web Video]]
67	* In the Batman Abridged series there's a scene where Batman literally punches through a guy's windshield and demands "license and registration." After he causes the truck to crash he remarks "that's what you get for driving without a hubcap."
68	[[/folder]]
69
70	[[folder:Western Animation]]
71	* Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/InvaderZim'' with Slab Rankle, a mall cop who [[MundaneMadeAwesome seems to think he's some kind of military super commander]], doing stuff like kidnapping and imprisoning misbehaving customers, boobytrapping the mall with lethal obstacles, and creating a horde of zombies to do his bidding.
72	[[/folder]]
73
74	[[folder:Real Life]]
75	* Can be TruthInTelevision on occasion in some parts of the world and at some times.
76	** At one time it was quite common to see officers of the then-Royal Ulster Constabulary carrying sub-machine guns on routine foot patrols, for example, but at the height of UsefulNotes/TheTroubles there was likelihood they'd need them.
77	** In the Philippines it's not unusual to see even [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Fil-security-guard_9025.jpg mall cops packing heat,]] up to and including automatic weapons and shotguns. This is mostly because firearms, legitimately acquired and otherwise, are so common that more lightly armed guards are not taken seriously by most career criminals. This goes double for the PNP as by late 2010's, they are now also armed almost exclusively with automatic rifles and traded their police uniforms with camo uniforms to the point that they look less like police officers and more like an occupying army.
78	** US, British, and other NATO Special Forces are often tasked to man checkpoints in high-risk areas or when protecting an area with [=VIPs=]. They essentially pull the same security jobs as regular guards, but are ''very'' well-prepared to deal with troublemakers.
79	** There is debate in many places about the degree to which this is the case for law enforcement. Using the US as an example, 20 years ago pistols were the most firepower that most patrol officers carried, with semiautomatic rifles at the station maybe. Since then military grade gear and SWAT teams have proliferated. [[note]]Depending on who you ask, the degree may be exaggerated; an "MRAP armoured military vehicle" is functionally an unarmed armored truck, and "40mm grenade launcher" sounds scary unless you know it's used only for launching tear gas.[[/note]] There are even laws that let police departments get military surplus for peanuts. On the other side of the argument, pistols are still the standard patrol weapon, with more less-lethal options available, possibly with shotguns and/or rifles carried in the trunk, which mostly became a thing after the North Hollywood Shootout.
80	** There are some security companies in the United States that only hire off duty and retired cops.
81	* The infamous [[http://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas "Mall Ninja"]] ''claimed'' to be this.
82	[[/folder]]

Context Main / OddlyOvertrainedSecurity