Characters / Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Main Characters

Brooklyn Nine-Nine Main Character Index
Main Characters (Jake Peralta, Raymond Holt) | Other Government Employees | Family Members | Other Characters

---

The main cast of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

---

Character-Specific Pages

• Jake Peralta
• Raymond Holt

---

In General

• Badass Creed: "NINE-NINE!"
• Badass Crew: They've brought down drug rings, mob bosses and corrupt cops and all individually qualify as badass in their own way.
• Badass Family: They're not related (at least at the beginning — as of the end of Season 5, Amy and Jake are married, Charles and Gina are siblings through their parents' marriage, and Charles is related to Gina's baby on her father's side), but make no mistake about it - these guys consider themselves to be a family, and all of them are capable of wrecking a perp's day if given the chance (yes, even Gina).
• Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: The women fit these roles.
  • Gina — Beauty. She cares a great deal about her looks.
  • Amy — Brains. She's highly intelligent and is enthusiastically nerdy about police work.
  • Rosa — Brawn. She's an intimidating badass who is the quickest to resort to violence.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: They all have their own set of quirks and eccentricities, but are nevertheless effective at their jobs... except Scully and Hitchcock, most of the time.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Played for Laughs. After seeing a potential eyewitness have a Freak Out when they see a grisly crime scene, Jake mentions that he always forgets how "weirdly numb" to horrific things they all are. This is often Truth in Television for police and law enforcement workers in general, who have to cope with all the grisly things they see in their line of work.
• Consistent Clothing Style/Clothing Reflects Personality: Pretty much all of them regularly wear different variations of the same outfits. The only exception is Gina, which is in line with her fashionista personality
  • Jake wears a flannel shirt with a tie, which shows he's more casual and less professional than his team, with either a hoodie, a leather jacket, or both, which shows that despite his youthful and immature personality, he's still a competent detective.
  • Captain Holt wears his captain uniform, either with or without the jacket, which befits his coldly professional and focused personality.
  • Amy is usually seen in a pantsuit, which fits her formal and professional temperament, as well as her ambitious nature. This also applies when she switches to standard police uniform as a sergeant, which adds to her image as a competent leader.
  • Charles wears a simple shirt and trousers in beige and drab colors, and accordingly, is more generic and less interesting than his friends.
  • Rosa wears a biker jacket with black pants and combat boots, as she's a tough and intimidating person.
  • Terry always wears a long-sleeved shirt rolled up to his elbows, a tie, and suspenders, as he's more professional than Jake or Rosa while more laidback than Holt and Amy, but still is not to be messed with.
• Found Family via Work: Aside from Amy and Jake's Office Romance, the entire squad of the Nine-Nine are very close. Hitchcock and Scully are never seen apart, Terry is a Mama Bear more than a boss (a fact that he gladly admits), while Holt is a Papa Wolf. Jake and Boyle are also best friends, and both are very close to Rosa. The only exception is Gina, who is actually Jake's childhood best friend and therefore not linked to him through work.
• Gentle Touch vs. Firm Hand: All over the place. Most clearly, Holt (firm hand) to Terry's "gentle touch", but Rosa is always the firm hand to whichever character she is paired with.
• Good Is Not Soft: Except Gina, all of the Nine-Nine are motivated by a genuine desire to do good, spread justice. They're also not to be messed with, as they are a highly capable team who can and have taken down many criminals.
• Jerkass Ball: Played for Laughs during all the Halloween Heist episodes. It happens Once a Season where they all turn into ruthless, backstabbing Competition Freaks.
• Nice Mean And In Between: The three female members of the police department — Amy Santiago (nice), Gina Linetti (mean), and Rosa Diaz (in-between). Amy has her moments of being rather competitive and sometimes even a bit snide while focusing on a task, but she's generally a sweet, friendly and compassionate person who's pretty easy to get along with in spite of that. Gina is a narcissistic Alpha Bitch with delusions of grandeur and no real desire to do good for the people of Brooklyn, aside from the occasional Pet the Dog moment. Rosa is surly, short-tempered and sarcastic, but she's nevertheless loyal to her friends, always having their backs in whatever the situation and even giving them some good advice sometimes.
• No Social Skills: When it comes to anything outside of work (and even inside it at times), the detectives in Brooklyn Nine-Nine run the line from "functional but have some slightly odd quirks" to "don't appear to understand how humans work at times". Each character has their own eccentricities which tend to interfere with social interaction; Jake is an immature Cloudcuckoolander, Captain Holt is an impassive robot with several odd tastes, Amy is easily flustered and tends to babble nervously, Rosa combines Holt's offbeat impassivity with added anger issues, Charles has no verbal filter and seems determined to find the creepiest way to express every thought he's ever had, Gina is a Narcissist with no interest in anyone else whatsoever, and Scully and Hitchcock basically live in their own odd, rather stupid world. About the only character who seems capable of interacting with other adults with a consistent level of social competence is Terry, which frequently puts him in the Only Sane Man role when it comes to social interaction.
• Sitcom Character Archetypes:
  • The Square: Amy, Terry.
  • The Wisecracker: Jake, Rosa.
  • The Bully: Rosa, Gina.
  • The Dork: Amy.
  • The Goofball: Jake, Charles, Gina (on rare occasions, when she's not being the Bully).
  • The Sage: Holt.
  • The Bigmouth: Scully and Hitchcock (Hitchcock more so than Scully).
• Tender Tomboyishness, Foul Femininity: Downplayed with Rosa and Gina, respectively. Rosa, a tough Badass Biker and the resident badass of the squad, has a Hair-Trigger Temper and is hyperviolent, but her spiky exterior hides a big heart of gold, as she proves over and over again that she cares a lot about her friends and even helps them out in her own way. Gina, the fashionable Alpha Bitch who is obsessed with her looks, her phone, and dance, on the other hand, is constantly cruel to her co-workers, especially Amy and Boyle, and is self-obsessed to a narcissistic degree. She has the occasional kind moment, but they are few and far between.
• Town Girls: High-maintenance dance enthusiast Gina is the femme, stone-cold badass Rosa is the butch, and Go-Getter Girl Amy is neither.
• True Companions: They're basically an extended family who have each other's backs no matter what Terry and the rest (even Gina) travel to Florida to help Jake and Holt catch Figgis.
  Jake: So, I'd just like to say I'm happy to be here... With my family. My super-weird family, with two black dads and two Latina daughters and two white sons and Gina, and... [to Scully] I don't know what you are... Some strange giant baby?

Det. Rosa Diaz

Det. Rosalita "Rosa" Diaz

Played By: Stephanie Beatriz

"Next time I catch him shaving, I'm gonna punch him so hard in the mouth that he bites his own heart."

An extremely tough and bad-tempered detective in Peralta and Santiago's unit. Her permanent scowl, sour disposition and willingness to use violence successfully intimidate most of the perps she encounters in her day-to-day work — and most of her colleagues as well.

---

• Abusive Parents: Downplayed because her parents do clearly care about her and also have improved their relationships with her, but they did believe strongly in Tough Love and it's shown that that screwed Rosa up and is implied to be why she is so reluctant to rely on anyone or to be vulnerable with anyone. They kicked her out of the house after she was sent to juvie when she broke into houses due to stress from the ballet academy, instead of trying to help her through this difficult period.
  Rosa: Same crap my parents pulled. Always pointing out my flaws, never helping and then bailing when things got messy... I spent years telling myself that tough love made me stronger, but you know what I really wish they'd done?
  Debbie: What?
  Rosa: Been nice to me. I wish they would've told me I made a mistake, but they still loved me and they would help me try to figure it out. Would've saved me a lot of pain.
• The Ace: Amongst the Detectives, she is the most competent and reliable. There is a good reason why she was assigned to lead a drug task force, because unlike the other detectives, she doesn't need to be constantly supervised due to a massive flaw in her personality or professionalism.
• Action Girl: She can easily take down people twice her size, owns an impressive arsenal of weapons, and has a Death Glare that can cow most perps (and most of her colleagues). There's a reason everyone's so intimidated by her.
• Afraid of Needles: As it turns out, she's scared of needles.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: From what little we can get about her personal life, aside from a handful of exceptions she appears to fall solidly in this trope. It's implied that she's had a fling with The Vulture and she spends much of "Adrian Pimento" lusting after the rather tortured and messed-up titular undercover detective. Deconstructed in "Charges and Specs", where she admits that the only reason she's been the one to end all her relationships is because most of the guys are messed-up losers and that she enters these kinds of relationships precisely so that she'll be able to be the one to end it. Her female love interests are all comparatively normal.
• Aloof Ally: The fact that she scares off most people and most of her colleagues know very few things about her (including Jake, who was in the Academy with her) is often played for laughs.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Tall, aloof, and intimidating to those around her. The only emotion she frequently displays aside from her aloof exterior is a Hair-Trigger Temper, although, after Season 1, she begins to openly show signs of other emotions, such as nervousness and a genuinely big smile.
• Ambiguously Christian: Rosa regularly wears a Saint Christopher pendant and she went to Catholic school before leaving to join the American Ballet Academy. Also, she crossed herself in the season 7 finale when it was suggested that she call the firefighters to rescue Holt and Terry from the stuck elevator. There aren't really any other references to her religious beliefs, though.
• AM/FM Characterization: She listens to death metal especially when feeling upset in order to "get [her] head right."
• Badass Arm-Fold: She frequently stands with her arms crossed.
• Badass Biker: She regularly gets to work on a motorcycle and she's often seen carrying a motorbike helmet, which serves to emphasize her reputation as the squad's resident badass. This is also highlighted by other members of the squad being terrified of even the idea of riding a motorbike, with Jake, the one time Rosa gave him a ride on her motorbike, holding "on to [Rosa] so tight it was like a two-mile heimlich," and Terry and Holt balking when Rosa requested for them to take her motorbike out regularly when she was in prison.
• Berserk Button: She's surly and aggressive a lot of the time anyway, but technology failing on her seems to really piss her off; her Establishing Character Moment in the opening credits is her slapping her computer, she once destroyed a defective printer with a battering ram, and after Holt switches her computer monitor with a malfunctioning one (for reasons of his own) it takes all of five seconds of frustrated prodding for her to start screaming and smashing it.
• The Big Gal: While Terry may have the strength of this archetype, Rosa has the typical personality (and is no slouch in the strength department, either). She's gruff, mean, and has a very short temper, and she's the quickest of the cast to resort to physical and violent solutions.
• Birds of a Feather: A platonic version with Holt. He and Rosa clearly have lots of similarities, at least in terms of how stoic and seemingly unemotional they can be. By Season 7, this has progressed into a true instance of this trope, where Rosa is explicitly Holt's favorite of the main cast.
• Birthday Hater: She despises birthdays. Once, she punched Scully for wishing her a happy birthday.
  Rosa: Anyone over the age of six celebrating a birthday should go to hell.
• Black Sheep: It's implied she's this to her family; the one relation of hers we've briefly met (her sister) is an irrepressibly cheerful Happily Married mother with an enthusiasm for pink cardigans, parlor games and ice cream, and she has described her parents as "smiley morons and hug freaks". She begins to reconcile with them after she gets out of prison, as she comes to realize deep down just how much they mean to her.
• Blade Enthusiast: She has an extensive knife and sword collection.
  Rosa: Are they going to be looking in our desks? Also, unrelated, someone left a bunch of swords in my desk.
• Blood Knight: She really loves fighting and is not afraid of getting physical. Her "happy place" involves her beating the crap out of a slimy defense attorney.
  • Probably best exemplified by this exchange:
    Rosa: No way, the best cop movie of all time is RoboCop. It's got everything I love: gratuitous violence...
    [beat]
    Jake: Oh, I thought you were listing things.
    Rosa: I was. I'm done.
• Boots of Toughness: Rosa wears leather motorcycle boots that are as tough as she is.
• Breakup Bonfire: Her preferred method of dealing with breakups (or at least anything that makes her "feel"), as she demonstrates to Boyle in "Charges and Specs"?
  Rosa: Burn. Everything.
• Broken Ace: She's one of the most competent and skilled detectives in the 99th precinct, but she also has serious anger and personal issues that partially stem from her conservative parents.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: She is incredibly aggressive and is quick to resort to violence to solve her problems, but she does care a lot about her friends and values her friendships with them.
  Terry: I knew it! I knew you were a big softie.
  Rosa: You tell anyone, I break your face.
• Brutal Honesty: Rosa is blunt when criticizing others and doesn't sugarcoat anything. This causes problems when in more formal settings, like a courtroom.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: For all her extreme anger issues, she still manages to be a very effective detective.
• Catchphrase: "What the hell?!" when someone does something foolish.
• Character Development:
  • While her default mood is still The Stoic, in Season 2 Diaz clearly smiles more often than in Season 1. The most notable example of this is in "The Pontiac Bandit Returns", where she becomes so elated over busting the Giggle Pig drug ring that her reaction surprises even herself. Her friendships with the other members of the squad have also grown stronger over the course of the series, particularly with Boyle (once he got over his crush on her), Jake and Holt.
  • Another development is being more open with others. The Rosa of the first several seasons practically had it be a Running Gag that her co-workers knew nothing about her outside of work, and that divulging personal information was outright painful. To that end, she would go to ridiculous extremes to make sure her co-workers knew absolutely nothing about her (once, when some of them came to her apartment for a bit, she moved the very next day). After her stay in prison, she starts reconnecting with her family, even having a regular game night with them, reaches out more as a friend inside the precinct, and feels comfortable enough to come out as bisexual to her co-workers after a road trip (although Boyle found out accidentally on said road trip).
• Closet Geek: She and her mother are huge fans of the soap opera Drake's Hollow. She's even able to rattle off stories, characters, events, and trivia effortlessly when quizzed by Dillman.
• .Consistent Clothing Style: Rosa always wears a leather jacket, which she pairs with black pants and boots.
• Coming-Out Story: She comes out as bisexual in Season 5 and slowly becomes more comfortable with her sexuality.
• Consummate Professional: Despite all appearances, she is very much this about her policework, to the point she gets enraged when someone behaves unprofessionally, lets their personal issues affect their judgment, or makes a small but critical mistake that could derail a case due to carelessness.
• Contralto of Strength: She has the deepest voice of all the female characters and is definitely one of the toughest and strongest cops in the precinct. Her actress affects a much lower voice to play her to emphasize this. Then again, knowing Rosa, it is very possible that she also affects a much lower voice in character, just to prevent anyone from knowing anything about her, even just what she naturally sounds like.
• Control Freak: It's subtle, and well-hidden beneath her blunt, tough and cool exterior, but a closer look reveals that practically everything Rosa does is about rigidly maintaining control over every aspect of her life. Her job and personality are centered around giving her power and authority over others. She stubbornly refuses the help of others even when she needs it rather than relinquishing any control over the situation. She keeps her personal life secret so that no one has information (and thus power) that they could potentially use over her. She keeps people at arm's length and her emotions tightly under control in order to maintain her relationships the way she wants them. She only dates certain guys (until Marcus) so that she is always the one to end things when the time comes, thus preventing a situation where someone else might have the power to control how the relationship progresses / ends. And so forth. The reason she's able to maintain an unflappable exterior is that she's usually in control; whenever something does go wrong, she tends to melt down quickly (she's almost reduced to tears when kids make fun of her instead of being intimidated by her, technology failing on her sends her into a violent tantrum, etc.).
• Cool Bike: Her preferred mode of transport.
• Cultured Badass: She's a classically-trained ballerina, attends a book club, and occasionally demonstrates an impressively wide knowledge base on topics like yoga, jewelry making, and interior design. She'll also break your arm in five seconds flat if you use any of those traits to make fun of her.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: She can get disturbingly creative when it comes to violence.
  Rosa: Next time I catch him shaving, I'm gonna punch him so hard in the mouth that he bites his own heart.
• Deadpan Snarker: Gives Holt a run for his money.
• Death Glare: Often used to cow perps, co-workers, or pretty much anyone into submission.
• Defector from Decadence: After realizing how screwed the police system is by protecting officers guilty of police brutality from facing justice, she quits the NYPD and becomes a PI to help victims of police brutality.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Diaz very slowly becomes less surly and standoffish and more willing to open up to the other main characters over the course of the show.
• Expansion Pack Past: Essentially a Running Gag for her at this point. Over the course of the series, we learn that before Rosa became a cop, she had gone to the American Ballet Academy for some time after attending Catholic school, been a competitive gymnast, attended medical school for three years, gone to business school, gotten a pilot's license, and lived in Osaka, Berlin, Macau, and Stockholm. She's also implied to be younger than Jake — who appears to have no backstory more complicated than "grew up, became a cop", and went to the police academy at the same time as her. See The Gadfly below for the alternative explanation.
• Fair Cop: Diaz is fairly easy on the eyes, but her surly attitude distances her from this trope a bit more. She does attract her own share of attention, however.
• The Gadfly: In a subtle way, she often lies about things for no reason in ways that are highly plausible. When stating that she rented her apartment under a false name and shell company, she also stated that her coworkers thought her name was Rosa Diaz even though we later see her family also refer to her by that name. This is also likely the real reason behind her Expansion Pack Past, as the medical skills she shows are also something a gymnast would have learned from injuries and the rest seems to be the fact that she is generally well read.
• Genius Bruiser: Rosa is the toughest of the squad and can kick plenty of ass. But she also went to medical school for three years as well as business school. And she managed to do all of that (as well as going to ballet academy and doing gymnastics competitively) before going to the police academy, which she attended at the same time as Jake, who she is younger than.
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: The reserved and aggressive Rosa is close friends with the jovial and fun-loving Jake.
• Good is Not Nice: She's strictly on the good side when it comes to morality and does care about bringing criminals to justice, but she's abrasive, violent, and extremely bad-tempered.
• Hairstyle Inertia: A flashback in "White Whale" taking place seven years earlier showed her with the same hairstyle back then.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Her Establishing Character Moment (which is also in the Title Sequence) has her snapping and smacking her computer. In general, Diaz tends to overreact with violence to anything that bothers her, and isn't afraid to use physical force on others. However, it's played for laughs in part because Diaz terrifies just about everyone and is clearly overreacting, and avoids Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male as she's just as violent when dealing with women who annoy her. She even threw her computer monitor through a window in the precinct over a Buzzfeed quiz.
  Rosa: I AM NOT A BLANCHE! [Smash!]
• Happy Place: Rosa is instructed to go to her "happy place" when she's nervous at the witness stand. Her happy place turns out to be... rather violent. See Nightmare Fetishist for more details.
• Hates Being Touched: When Hitchcock tries to tickle her to get her to smile, she quickly gets him into a wrist lock without even spilling a single drop of her morning coffee.
• Hates Small Talk:
  • She's visibly disturbed by the prospect of having to make small talk during a dinner with Holt and his husband.
    Kevin: Rosa, tell us about your family?
    Rosa: I... have one.
  • Said word-for-word in the fourth episode of the first season.
    Rosa: I hate small talk. Let's drink in silence.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Usually wears a leather jacket. Hell, for Thanksgiving she promises to wear her "formal leather jacket" ("it's the one without any blood on it").
• Heroes Love Dogs: Buys Charles a puppy named Arlo to cheer him up after his dog dies. When Charles refuses the puppy, Rosa ends up keeping him. We don't really see him again in the show after that, but Rosa mentions in Season 7 that she still has him.
  Rosa: I've only had Arlo for a day and a half, but already if anything ever happened to him, I'd kill everyone in this room and then myself.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: At one point, Jake asks the squad for advice on dealing with a tight-lipped suspect. Rosa suggests beating the information out of him. When Jake points out that that would be police brutality, Rosa's response is to smile and go, "Oh yeah, I guess it is. Haha."
• Hero with Bad Publicity: In the Season 4 finale, she is falsely convicted of robbing multiple banks, and everyone except the Nine-Nine believes it.
• Hidden Depths:
  • She has several unexpected hobbies and interests that seem totally at odds with her personality. She went to ballet school, was a gymnast^note which she considers to be her greatest shame, is in a book club, enjoys the idea of film festivals, finds the movie Something's Gotta Give hilarious, does yoga to keep herself centered, uses bolt cutters to make jewelry, loves Gilmore Girls, and was genuinely pissed at how the show ended. Most surprising of all, she was a model student at her Catholic school before transferring to the dance academy.
  • She has a soft spot for Boyle. In general, she comes across as surly and misanthropic, but she genuinely wants to connect with people on an emotional level and is fearful of the possibility she won't be able to maintain a long-term romantic relationship. After breaking up with Marcus, she cries, saying that if she couldn't maintain a relationship with a nice guy like him, she couldn't do so with anyone. She only seems stoic on the surface.
  • She apparently presents a completely different persona to her neighbors. As "Emily Goldfinch", she's cheerful and chatty. She also implies that "Rosa Diaz" might not be her real name (though it's ultimately negated when we meet her parents in Season 5 and they are very clearly referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Diaz).
  • On a more serious note, it's clear that being in prison is not easy on her, despite how tough she is.
  • Rosa also went to medical school for three years, went to business school, and has a pilot's license.
  • When the cast finally sees her apartment in Season 3, turns out she's really good at interior decorating.
    Terry: Why do you need a vase full of lemons?
    Rosa: The room needed a pop of color.
    Terry: Who are you?!
  • Social Justice is important to her enough that in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, she quits the force to become a private detective, feeling that she can't justify being in an organization that could let something like that happen, though she remains friends with her old coworkers at the 99.
• Honorary Aunt: She's Auntie Ro-Ro to Jake and Amy's son, Mac.
• Hypocritical Humor: She doesn't seem entirely aware of just how awful her temper is.
  Rosa: [to Holt and Jeffords] You think I have an anger problem? I don't. You are both dead to me.
• Ironic Name: You'd expect someone named after a flower or the pink color (Rosa is Spanish for both "rose" and "pink") to be dainty and feminine, and "Rosalita", the nickname her mother gives her, is the affectionate, cuter version of "rosa". Rosa is none of those things.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Rosa isn't the nicest person around, and tends to be rather blunt and insensitive with a generally aggressive and surly attitude. However, she's probably the nicest person in the precinct to Boyle. Despite him being an Abhorrent Admirer to her, she's still polite to him and turns him down in a mature and sensitive (for her) way. Likewise, as much as she likes to hide it, it's clear she does value the friendships she has with the other members of the precinct, and she is unfailingly loyal to them.
• Knight in Sour Armor: She's quick to assume the worst in others and has a pretty low opinion of humanity in general. That doesn't change the fact that Rosa, at her core, is a fundamentally good person who does everything she can to uphold the law.
• The Lad-ette: She is aggressive, tactless, sexually confident, loves violence and motorcycles, owns a ridiculous number and types of weapons which she stashes all over her home, work, and pretty much anywhere she spends significant time at, and is pretty much One of the Guys. Her drink of choice tends to be whiskey or beer and she scoffed at the idea of drinking Bellinis at her almost-wedding, claiming that a drink that's peach juice and champagne is for six-year-olds ^note Not that that stopped her from getting drunk off of said Bellinis, though she claimed that it was because she didn't know it was possible to get drunk off of champagne. Her perfect date: "Cheap dinner, watch basketball, bone down".
• Leaning on the Furniture: Rosa generally is seen leaning back in her chair with her feet propped on her desk, which fits her tough and cool demeanor.
• Like Brother and Sister: She has this dynamic with Jake. The two have no romantic chemistry and Jake feels weirded out while briefly pretending to be her boyfriend (though part of it was the surprise and the fact he was engaged to Amy), but he's easily her closest male friend and they have a lot of history working together as they were both in the police academy together.
  Jake: [to Rosa] Yes, this workplace is my family, was that not clear? Holt is my dad, you're my mean older sister...
• Like Parent, Like Child: She's a lot like her father in both personality and general outlook, and differs significantly from her much more upbeat and perky mom.
• Limited Wardrobe: She's usually only seen wearing a black or grey shirt with a black leather jacket and pants. Charles lampshades this.
  Charles: What do you need extra closet space for? You only have one outfit!
• Long Hair Is Feminine: Inverted. Of the show's three principal female characters (Amy, Gina, and herself), Rosa has the longest hair and never ties it back (unless she's on a really important case wherein having her hair loose would just be a distraction), while also being by far the most tomboyish.
• Love at First Sight: This seems to happen to her in "Jake & Amy" with a female limo driver. We actually never see or hear about that woman ever again.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Diaz is the Masculine Girl to both Terry's and Boyle's Feminine Boys. Rosa is a stoic, tough, and short-tempered Badass Biker Lad-ette who is Hell-Bent for Leather and loves gratuitous violence, while Terry is a motherly and nurturing Gentle Giant who is very in touch with his emotions and loves farmer's markets and painting, and Boyle is a sensitive Extreme Doormat foodie who played with dollhouses and read Nancy Drew books growing up and loves romantic comedies like 27 Dresses.
• Meaningful Name: She is both beautiful and quite thorny, especially around new people.
• Metalhead: She listens to Death Metal and, according to her actress, also regularly listens to Rage Against the Machine.
• Minor Living Alone: Rosa spent part of her high school years living alone after her parents kicked her out because she wound up in juvie after breaking into several houses.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: She can easily take on people over twice her size, even though she doesn't seem especially muscular.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Her idea of a "happy place"?
  Diaz: I'm in a cabin, in the middle of nowhere. Inside it's just me, and that stupid slimy defense attorney. And I'm beating the hell out of him. I break a dining table over his head. Then I rip off his arm and shove it where the sun don't shine. Then I reach down his throat — and shake his hand.
• No Social Skills: Her anger issues along with her stoicism and her lack of understanding of how emotions work make social situations very difficult for her.
• Not So Above It All: She usually acts too cool for dorky stuff that Amy is into, but in "Halloween IV", she declares that she's all-in for the heist this year, and is 100% ready and willing to go along with whatever nerdy thing Amy throws at her if it'll help them win. She even willingly makes references to The Babysitters Club, which delights Amy.
• Not So Stoic: On occasion. She bursts into tears after breaking up with Marcus, and she even joins in the dancing to celebrate with Jake after he wins his bet with Amy.
• Odd Friendship: She is a grumpy and aggressive badass while Jake is a friendly, hyperactive goofball. Despite this, they've been close friends ever since their police academy days and have an unshakeable trust in each other. Heck, they even have very specific trump cards they can pull on one another!
• Only Sane Woman:
  • Holt and Terry are this on a professional level, but Diaz is the one who takes care of the personal side. For all of her anger issues and being scary as hell, she is the one who regularly calls out her co-workers when they are being irrational (Boyle with still living in his ex's basement, Peralta's infatuation with Amy that goes nowhere, Santiago's need to win at everything, etc.) and also gives them solid advice and helps to make their situations better.
  • This said, her anger issues can easily put her on the other side of the trope as well:
    [On a co-worker who shaves at the desk he shares with Rosa]
    Boyle: Why don't you just ask him to stop shaving at his desk?
    Rosa: He denies even doing it; I don't know why. Next time I catch him shaving, I'm gonna punch him so hard in the mouth he bites his own heart.
    Boyle: ... Could that be why he denies doing it?
    Rosa: [as if this is a revelation] Oh yeah, you could be right, yeah.
• Perpetual Frowner:
  • She's nearly always seen scowling — so much so that when she does smile, it usually comes across as discomforting.
    Amy: Ugh, she never smiles. Is her mouth broken!?
  • At the end of "The Pontiac Bandit Returns", Rosa is so happy at the Giggle Pig bust that she's been smiling nonstop.
    Rosa: [grinning ear to ear] How do people do this with their face muscles normally?
• Pink Means Feminine: Played with more than once. In one cold opening, Rosa wears a pink blouse, and it's so unusual to see her not dressed in black that the others wonder if it's a white shirt that got bloodstains on it; somehow, she escapes being teased for it, and Charles takes the brunt. A straighter example in the suit she wears to court after she and Jake are arrested.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Jake. They knew each other from the police academy and trust each other without any hesitation, but they have shown no romantic interest in each other whatsoever. Rosa even calls Jake her closest friend in the world. They're so close that they can communicate via slight nods of the head... through writing.
  Amy: [confused] You want me to write [in a letter to Jake] that you nodded slightly?
  Rosa: He'll know what it means.
• Properly Paranoid: Subverted. No one knows her exact address, she hides ownership of her apartment through a maze of off-shore corporations, and is prepared to move away at a moment's notice. She also maintains several false identities and hints that "Rosa Diaz" might not be her real name. None of this is done because she's worried about attacks or repercussions due to her profession, however. She just really doesn't like sharing personal details with other people.
• Psychotic Smirk: A lot of the times when she's smiling, it's because of violent things about to happen or are currently happening, such as when the team is about to blow something up.
• Resign in Protest: The death of George Floyd led Rosa to quitting the force, as she didn't want to be part of a system oppressing people of color, even if she remains friends with the rest of the team.
• Renaissance Man: Of all people, she's implied to be this. Throwaway lines indicate that she went to medical, business, and dance school before joining the police academy, has a pilot's license, is an archer, does yoga, was a gymnast, knows a lot about interior design, and makes her own jewelry. Whew!
• Rugged Scar: Has a small scar on her brow, which fits in perfectly with her personality. Stephanie Beatriz got this scar in real life, reportedly from tripping on a Lego piece when she was about 10-years-old.
• Sarcastic Devotee: Trusts Jake implicitly, and is frequently willing to tell him information about her personal life that nobody else is privy to. That in no way stops her from snarking off at his quirks or calling him out when he screws up.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: From what little we've seen, Rosa's sister is her polar opposite in every way, being an irrepressibly enthusiastic and cheerful Happily Married mother with a fondness for pink cardigans.
• Signature Laugh: It's rare to get a laugh out of her, though Holt seems to be the best at it with his insults about Wuntch. When it does happen, her laugh sounds rather like a witch's cackle.
• Sour Supporter: She does in general trust Jake's decisions on the field, but does not hesitate to call him out if she thinks he's doing something stupid.
  Rosa: Hey, if Jake says the guy did it, that usually means the guy did it.
  Jake: Thank you. Everyone listen to Rosa.
  Rosa: No, I'm still furious at you.
  Jake: Okay, no one listen to Rosa, she is clearly an accomplice to this crime.
• Spicy Latina: Downplayed. She's a hot-tempered, strong-willed, sexually confident Latina badass who's not afraid to get physical, but she's more stoic and deadpan than the typical example. Her short temper is also not a result of her being overly emotional or passionate, but rather because she's usually in a really bad mood. Additionally, she has neither the sultriness nor the accent usually associated with this trope.
• The Stoic: Rosa finds emotions repulsive and is typically aggressively unreadable. She's mentioned wanting to weld her tear ducts shut, and claims that talking about feelings is for losers. In one episode, Holt's husband calls her (and his husband) "sociopaths" for thinking dumping her boyfriend through a text (and not even a good text — "It's over. We're done.") is a good idea.
  Rosa: It's very embarrassing having feelings.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: She's tall, has dark hair and dresses in dark clothing, and is quite the Deadpan Snarker.
• They're Called "Personal Issues" for a Reason: It's Not Hyperbole to say that Rosa would rather climb out a window than discuss feelings. She loathes telling people anything about herself. She'll mention personal details in the context of giving her opinion to other members of the precinct, but goes into crisis mode when faced with the prospect of a dinner party where she'll have to talk about her family extensively. She even once drank 5 shots to tell Jake her boyfriend's name even after admitting Jake is her closest friend.
  Rosa: [with visible effort] I have... two sisters. [pause] I have to leave this. [leaves the dinner table]
• Trolling Translator: She has purposefully mistranslated words in Spanish to Jake to mess with him. In "The Wednesday Incident," Jake mentions that she told him "el baboso"^note "the slug" means "the dagger," causing him to try to use it as a cool nickname for himself.
  Jake: It was very cruel. I referred to myself as El Baboso to several beautiful Latina ladies.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: With Santiago. She's the violent and grumpy Tomboy to Santiago's goody two shoes Girly Girl. She's also the Tomboy to Gina's high-maintenance, dance-loving Girly Girl.
• Tomboyish Voice: Especially after the first half of season 1, Rosa generally speaks in a very deep, gruff voice most of the time, emphasizing her Lad-ette nature.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Diaz may be an aggressive and surly take-no-crap Lad-ette, but she was a classical dancer and trained in ballet at the American Ballet Academy for some time, loves the series Gilmore Girls, performed in gymnastics, has a fondness for the romantic comedies of Nancy Meyers, and does yoga in her spare time.
• Trouser Space: She carries an impossible amount of weaponry (and the occasional plaque) in her skintight jeans.
• Twofer Token Minority: Rosa is female, Latina, and bisexual, making her a minority threefer.
• Unmanly Secret: Well, she's a woman, but Rosa nonetheless keeps her girly streak firmly under wraps, and does NOT like talking about it.
• The Unsmile: See Perpetual Frowner above.
• Vague Age: At one point, she's shown to be one of the people reacting to a siren that can supposedly only be heard by those under 35. Notably, Jake is shown as not being affected and it's been established he and Rosa met in the police academy. It's also been established Rosa is willing to take measures up to and including setting up multiple shell companies to protect her personal info, so who knows?
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Peralta and Santiago each. She can be pretty scathing towards them concerning their various quirks and foibles, but clearly likes them both a lot deep down.
• Vocal Evolution: Stephanie Beatriz played Rosa with a higher-pitched voice in early episodes before settling on a lower, throatier tone.
• When She Smiles: It's a very rare occurrence, but when she smiles, it's a thing of true beauty as Diaz is normally scowling or smirking sarcastically. But when she genuinely smiles it's like she's another person entirely. Trying to get her to smile for a Christmas photo takes up an entire subplot of one episode.
• Wrench Wench: Rosa fixes up old cars in her spare time and sells them to celebrities.

Lt. CDS. Terry Jeffords

Lt. CDS. Terrence Vincent "Terry" Jeffords

Played By: Terry Crews

"Why are you giving candy to a baby in the first place? Don't give candy to a baby! They can't brush their teeth!"

The supervisor of the Nine-Nine's detective squad. Although a physically strong and capable detective, his ability to do his job has been hampered by the recent birth of his twin daughters, which have left him neurotic about the dangers of his job and obsessed with the possibility of dying in the line of duty. He became a lieutenant in Season 6.

---

• '80s Hair: He used to sport a flat top in his early career, much to Jake's joy.
• Abusive Parents: It doesn't come up often, but "Terry Kitties" reveals his father was emotionally abusive. Fortunately, Terry hasn't continued the cycle with his own children — quite the opposite, in fact.
• Academic Athlete: Terry excelled in both college studies and college football, and has kept both his brain and his body in excellent shape.
• The Ace: During the NYPD v. FDNY football game, Fire Marshall Boone points out every play is to give Jeffords the ball. He challenges Peralta to score a touchdown... which he does by grabbing the ball and having Jeffords pick him up and carry him into the end zone, taking down everyone in the way. He was also apparently this as a cop before the birth of his daughters and subsequent breakdowns — Holt mentions at one point that he was the precinct's champion marksman, and his backstory and nickname as the "Ebony Falcon" implies that he was a bit of a super-cop before getting married and having kids.
• Action Dad: He has twin daughters. As of Season 3, he now has another baby daughter.
• Animal Motif: His nickname is the "ebony falcon" because he takes bad guys to jail and bad girls to bed.
• Berserk Button:
  • Cats. Though not because he actually hates the animals themselves. His old co-workers keep sending him a cat once a year to mock him over a ridiculous claim he made in stress 20 years ago.
  • Thanks to his former weight problems, calling him fat or even overestimating his current weight (a tight 240).
  • Messing with his yogurt in any way is a very VERY bad idea.
• Big Eater: He requires at least 10,000 calories a day to maintain muscle mass and, if unchecked, his eating habits can cause him to become morbidly obese.
• The Big Guy: He is, by far, the tallest and most muscular person in the Nine-Nine. He's so big, in fact, that a hospital ran out of anesthesia while trying to put him under for surgery. Played with in that he actually outranks the Five-Man Band's ostensible Leader and Lancer Peralta and Santiago, and Diaz is much more of a physical presence when it comes to dishing out violence.
• Big "WHY?!": Terry often lets these out when confronted with his co-workers' shenanigans.
• Black and Nerdy: As a child, he would dress up as a superhero and walk around his neighborhood trying to stand up for himself and the little guy no matter how badly bullies beat him up. He was inspired to become a cop when one scared away a gang of bullies that were ready to kick his ass. Also, he is a fan of fantasy novels and becomes a mess when he discovers that his favorite author is a bit of a jerk.
• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Terry confesses that he was raised by an angry, emotionally abusive father. Fortunately, he didn't follow his father's example and became a parent who nurtures and encourages his girls.
• Broken Pedestal: Learning his beloved childhood hero writer of the Skyfire series DC Parlov, who had inspired him to make something of himself, is a bit of a callous jerk who didn't even write the touching note Terry once got, upsets Terry a great deal.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: He's built like a brick wall and, while violence isn't his first solution to problems, is still capable of great physical feats, but he's an incredibly soft-hearted man who loves everyone in his precinct like his own children.
• Catchphrase: "Terry loves [X]."
• Centipede's Dilemma: Terry's alleged PTSD prevents him from using a gun properly, but he ends up pulling a perfect score on the same target when being annoyed by Gina.
• Characterization Marches On: In the first season, his most noticeable personality trait was that he'd developed a pathological fear of death due to the birth of his daughters and is subsequently unsuitable for the field despite being the most outwardly badass of the squad. However, he manages to overcome this over the course of the season, and is now back to being one of the most formidable people in the precinct. Notably, while the birth of his third child does stress him out significantly, his fear of going out into the field never returns.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Terry is always wearing a long-sleeved button-down rolled up to his elbows paired with a tie and suspenders.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Terry does a lot of weight training making him big and extremely strong, but he's neglected his cardiovascular fitness and his muscles have been a disadvantage to him several times. When figuring out if a suspect could have scaled a wall, Terry affirms that no one could climb it after trying to do it himself. Rosa, who has gymnastics training, does a series of Le Parkour moves and successfully gets over the wall. Terry figures after seeing her do it he could replicate it, but fails due to being heavier and not as nimble, which annoys him. In another episode, he hurts himself doing a basic Yoga pose in an attempt to one-up Boyle, who was trying to explain that proper yoga training takes years and that Terry is TOO musclebound to just jump right in.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: A intelligent and capable police officer, hampered only by his fear of dying on the job. He gets over this fear during Season 1, so the "crouching moron" part no longer applies to him.
• Cultured Badass: To a lesser extent than Holt, but he's able to speak knowledgeably about French New Wave cinema, among other topics. He's also a brilliant artist and is a skilled painter.
• Deadpan Snarker: Less so than Holt, Gina or Rosa, but given he is the Only Sane Man of the precinct most of the time, he often dishes out snarky comments towards his quirky colleagues. He gets snarkier during night shifts.
  [Rosa is very obviously sick but is in denial]
  Rosa: …That was allergies.
  Terry: No, that’s what killed the dinosaurs.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: He usually has control over it, but whenever he slips up, he's this. While briefly subsituting for Captain Holt, he closed Holt's office door in annoyance, which caused the entire room to collapse, including windows, blinds, roof tiles, lamps, wiring, and pipes! Another episode mentions that one of the reasons the preinct goes through so much glass is because Jefford's keeps forgetting his strength when closing windows and shatters them.
• Doting Parent: He adores his daughters. Gina even states his Twitter is mostly filled with photos of them.
• Dynamic Entry: Jeffords' return to the field is tackling a guy who already shot Boyle in the ass and had a gun trained on Peralta and Holt from offscreen.
• Emotional Bruiser: Terry is the biggest, toughest man in the main cast. He's also a huge softie, who wears his emotions on his sleeve.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Both Hitchcock and the Vulture have commented on Jefford's good looks. Subverted with Boyle, however, who unlike the rest of the precinct / known universe seems to find Jeffords quite physically unattractive, much to the bewilderment of Jeffords / everyone else.
• Fair Cop: He's a very attractive and muscular man who serves as the show's Mr. Fanservice, and he's an NYPD sergeant.
• Fan Boy: His childhood love of superheroes helped inspire him to join the force, and enjoys the Skyfire Cycle series of fantasy novels by DC Parlov.
• Following in Their Rescuer's Footsteps: When he was a kid, Jeffords wanted to be a superhero. When he tried to stand up to some bullies, he was saved by a police officer. He then decided to become a cop since they were the closest a person can get to being a superhero.
• Formerly Fat: Used to be fat before he lost it and replaced it with a lot of muscle. Liable to gain serious weight if he discovers a new food that he can't resist, e.g. Boyle's cacao nibs in Season 2. A flashback shows that he was a chubby kid who was mercilessly bullied by other kids.
• Genius Bruiser: Jeffords is a giant wall of muscle, and he's awesome in a fight. However, he's also highly intelligent and well-read, graduating from Syracuse with honors. He's also bilingual (although he is the first to admit that his Japanese is very rusty), a talented painter, and accomplished as both a detective and a leader in the squad.
• Gentle Giant: Easily the tallest and most muscular cast member but also the friendliest and sanest. This was particularly the case in his original early Season 1, when he was terrified of putting himself in danger because he had two small children to take care of. Even when he got over that fear (and proved that he was still more than capable in a fight), he's still sensitive and cautious, preferring to negotiate rather than resort to force.
• Gentle Touch vs. Firm Hand: The "gentle touch" to Holt's "firm hand".
• Good Parents: Terry's an excellent father, and loves his daughters above all else. Several episodes show that the main reason he's afraid of getting hurt on the job is because he doesn't want to leave them without a dad. He's also happy to do "girly" things for them, like makeovers or putting together a dollhouse.
• Happily Married: Very happy with his wife Sharon and he adores his daughters.
• The Heart: He's the most sensitive and mature one of the group, acting as the Team Mom, and is good at settling disagreements and keeping the group together.
• Height Angst: Played for laughs. He's both tall and very solidly built, but becomes insecure about his size when his even more massive brother-in-law visits.
• He's Back!: Jeffords returns to the field when he learns Holt's life is in danger. After tackling the perp from offscreen, he even exclaims "Terry's back!"
• Hidden Depths: Fan of foreign cinema and farmer's markets, learned to speak Japanese, and is secretly a talented artist. He also writes Madam Secretary fan-fiction, although he'd prefer to keep that one a secret.
• Intimidation Demonstration: Often crushes an object in his hand in order to intimidate someone. This includes a Magic 8-Ball and his own cell phone.
• In Touch with His Feminine Side: He doesn't have to dance after every touchdown he scores. He chooses to dance. He's also very emotional, nurturing to his subordinates, priding himself on being a "mama hen" to them, a devoted father to his children, a gifted artist, and a huge softie. Additionally, one of the reasons he was looking forward to flying first-class in "99" was so that he could watch Bridget Jones' Baby and sip mimosas. He's basically a huge, muscle-bound teddy bear of a man.
• I Was Young and Needed the Money: Did some catalogue modelling during his time in Japan.
  Terry: I was a starving student! Terry needed the yen!
• Lovable Coward: In Season 1, since he's had kids he's suddenly very afraid for his own well-being out of fear of leaving them fatherless. He more or less gets over the worst of it by the middle of the season, and by the end is back on active duty with the other detectives. Peralta notes that he's no longer the Ebony Falcon, who had no fear. He's now the Ebony Antelope, in Jake's words: "brave enough to drink from the watering hole, but wise enough to run from the lions."
• Lust Object: For Gina, she is very attracted to his physique.
• Manchild: He's normally one of the more mature and stable members of the precinct, but he becomes this in the first two episodes of Season 2. It's invoked on both occasions, however, since in the first episode he's actually been ordered to act like a seven-year-old by Holt as part of a drill (he still gets very in-character, however), and in the second episode he's regressed under the influence of not-quite-powerful-enough anesthetics.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: He's the Feminine Boy to Diaz's Masculine Girl. Terry is a motherly and nurturing Gentle Giant who is very in touch with his emotions and loves farmer's markets and painting, while Rosa is a tough and short-tempered Badass Biker Lad-ette who puts up a stoic front, is Hell-Bent for Leather and loves gratuitous violence.
• Moe Couplet: With Amy. Whereas he's massive and is ranked only behind Holt in authority, he has a soft, emotional center; Amy meanwhile is cute, petite, and a teacher's pet who happens to be a badass on the field. Together they bring out the best in each other with plenty of adorable moments.
• Muscle Angst: He's concerned about the possibility of losing muscle mass. In an episode where his brother-in-law was visiting, it was revealed he has additional angst due to the guy being even bigger, leading to Terry working out obsessively (including doing chin-ups in his sleep).
  Terry: I can feel my body starting to digest itself.
• Mr. Fanservice: The series draws a lot of attention to Terry Crews' giant muscles. Gina openly lusts after him. He also has been shirtless several times, and his costumes of choice whenever he needs to dress up don't have any shirts.
• Nice Guy: He's basically a kind-hearted softie when all is said and done.
• No Poker Face: Flexes his right pec (called "Eugene") whenever he has a good hand.
• Not So Above It All: Terry is one of the most mature, put-together members of the squad who prides himself on acting as a Mama Hen to the squad. That said, he named his twin daughters after the main characters of a buddy cop show and at one point angrily declares he will either die saving the president or he won't die at all.
  • Also, several episodes show that while he disapproves of letting inter-department rivalries get in the way of real police work, he's perfectly willing to join in once provoked enough.
• Number Two: As sergeant of the precinct, he's number two to the Captain, Holt. Terry is the first to defend Holt's accidental title of "dad" by Jake and he introduces the cast to Holt as well as teaches him how to improve his shooting. Terry also confides with Holt about his personal issues and Holt often names him as his replacement while he's away from the office. In the final episode, Holt puts Terry's name forward as his successor and is the first to congratulate him.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: He makes up excuses to stay at the station rather than return home when his brother-in-law is visiting him. Said brother-in-law, Zeke, is shown to act like a terrible guest and mocks Terry for leaving a family event to deal with a life or death situation while being unemployed and mooching off of him. Bonus points for said brother-in-law being played by Jamal Duff, one of maybe 5 people in the world who can make Terry Crews look small.
• Only Sane Employee: Commanding officer of the precinct's detective squad, he usually manages the detectives at a more personal level than Holt. "Operation: Broken Feather" and "The Party" both show that he knows the detectives well enough that he can actually use their insane tendencies to make them more effective.
• Only Sane Man: He's steadily become this for the precinct since getting over his anxiety issues in Season 1, frequently reacting to both the neurotic goofiness of his subordinates and Holt's off-the-planet robotic stoicism with bafflement and exasperation. That being said he's not without his own quirks, but by and large, they tend to be context-specific and the result of incredible stress, irritation or some kind of external source (such as medication) rather than fundamental parts of his character.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: He's usually either really gentle or really over-the-top panicky, so when he gets seriously stern, his team (including his boss) know they messed up.
• Pec Flex: He's been known to bust out on occasion, much to Gina's delight.
• Phrase Catcher: "Terry loves yogurt."
• Rank Up: He becomes a lieutenant in Season 6.
  • Eventually becomes the new captain of the Nine-Nine during the series finale.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Can be considered the manliest member of the precinct and is definitely the most physically active. At the same time, he's a loving family man who's openly affectionate towards his daughters.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Though not the highest authority in the office, he's the second-in-command and very fair to his subordinates.
• Red Baron: He was known as "the Ebony Falcon" before he got relegated to desk work.
• Scary Black Man: He zig-zags this trope — physically, he's quite muscular and imposing, and he does have a bit of a temper, but his temper is for a large part bluster, and when you get to know him personality-wise he's clearly a bit of a softie. However, when he gets really riled up, he does get pretty damn intimidating. He also enjoys invoking this trope by playing the Scary Black Man in lineups, but it pretty much falls flat because he just doesn't know how to force it.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: The shooting incident that got him sidelined before the start of the series. Also that time he had a spider on his head.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: The emotional, yogurt-loving Sensitive Team Mom to Holt's strict and stoic Manly Man.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: All around a very wholesome man, but when he's asked to be "Scary Terry"...
  Terry: Oh, I love being "Scary Terry", he says what "Regular Terry" is thinkin'...
  [flashback to a suspect line-up]
  "Scary Terry": THIS IS TAKING TOO LONG! I'M GONNA MISS THE FARMER'S MARKET!
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Not really, but he acted like this after the twins were born, which is why he compulsively avoids going into the field.
  Peralta: Is he seriously assigning me to the records room? Why do we even have a records room? The computer's been invented, right? I didn't dream it?
  Jeffords: You're lucky, man. I wish I could get assigned here full time. You could not be farther from the action.
• Shipper on Deck: He is very supportive of Jake and Amy's relationship, even dropping hints that Jake should propose (although he really shouldn't have couched his suggestion in a yogurt metaphor).
• The Soft-Hearted Warrior: He can be intimidating if he needs to be and he's quite a tank when dealing with criminals, but he's an absolute softie, a Team Mom to the rest of the squad, and a very doting father to his girls.
• Spiders Are Scary: Freaks out when Jake brings a tarantula to the office and all but runs for the elevator when the spider escapes from its cage. The last shot of the Cold Open is Terry shrieking in terror when he realizes the spider has crawled its way on top of his head.
• Team Dad: Mostly this is Holt's role, but he can sometimes slip into this, especially in 'The Party', when he has to wrangle his more childish co-workers. Terry sums up his own feelings about this trope in "The Vulture".
  Terry: I've been so worried about my own kids, I forgot about my stupid grown-up kids!
• Team Mom: While he has elements of Team Dad, he generally plays this role, being more nurturing to his subordinates. In "The Apartment" he even compares himself to a mother hen, with the precinct being his chicks.
  Jeffords: Jake, you know I love you like I love one of my daughters.
  Peralta: Really?
• The Tell: Terry's tell is that he involuntarily flexes his muscles. Sometimes it's his pecs, sometimes it's his butt.
• Theme Twin Naming: Jeffords named his twin daughters Cagney & Lacey.
• Third-Person Person:
  • Not an extreme example, but often refers to himself as "Terry" during exclamations.
  • In flashbacks to his childhood, he calls himself "Little Terry", apparently.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Terry looooves yogurt. He even gets super upset when the mango flavor of his favorite brand gets discontinued, to the point that he gives a eulogy for it.
• Trigger-Happy: Jeffords became so scared of getting killed on the job that he panicked and emptied his gun into a mannequin in a department store. At the start of the series, he is on desk duty because of this. In a subsequent episode, it turns out there was a second incident shortly afterward in which he emptied his gun into a piñata (this, of course, gives Jake the opportunity to grab some candy).
• Vague Age: While he looks young, and became a father for the first time recently, he states that he's proud of how his body looks for his age, and also feels time catching up to him in the later seasons, with exercise being harder and his eyesight diminishing. He claims he grew up in the golden age of disco, which was The '70s - that would put him in his late forties to mid-fifties when the show starts. Terry Crews was 45 when the first season was released.
• Your Favorite: Terry loooves yogurt, and his squad knows about it, so they occasionally try to influence him or downright bribe him with extra good yogurt, special flavors, a yogurt vending machine etc.

Sgt. Amy Santiago

Sgt. Amy Santiago

Played By: Melissa Fumero

"Sergeant, why am I here? I'm always incredibly appropriate. In high school, I was voted 'Most Appropriate.'"

The supervisor of the Nine-Nine's uniformed officers. Extremely ambitious and competitive, she is a driven over-achiever determined to prove herself a better detective than the other members in the squad. She is Peralta's partner and later wife, with whom he shares a vitriolic, competitive but nevertheless solid friendship with the occasional hints of a deeper attraction which later turn into love. She deeply admires Holt and frequently tries to ingratiate herself with him to persuade him to act as her mentor — with often disastrous results for herself in the process.

---

• Abusive Parents: She seems to have a good relationship with her dad, but her mom openly plays favorites, ranking her children based on how proud they make her and even using that ranking to dictate where their photos get to be placed. She openly favors David over Amy. It's strongly implied that part of Amy's overcompetitive nature stems from this conditional favoritism.
• Action Girl: Capable of dropping perps twice her size.
• Action Mom: She and Jake have a son named Mac in the Season 7 finale.
• Actually Pretty Funny: For all her exasperation with Peralta's goofy antics and teasing, there are several moments where she is visibly trying not to crack up at them.
• Allegedly Dateless: She wasn't actually shown having much trouble getting dates, going on a fair number (before she became the Official Couple with Peralta). Nonetheless, her being a straitlaced and pedantic goody-two-shoes led to jokes from her colleagues that paint her as totally inexperienced in such departments.
  Peralta: Okay, so, you know the new medical examiner? I kinda had sex with her last night.
  Santiago: [scandalized] What?
  Peralta: Oh, sorry. I forgot who I was talking to. Sex is something that two adults do with their bodies when they’re attracted to each other.
  Diaz: He’s right, Santiago. Do you not know that?
  • Although this is briefly Inverted for laughs when her ex-boyfriend Teddy, clearly in revenge mode for having been dumped due to his boring personality, carries out an official evaluation of the 99th precinct in a later season. Captain Holt tells her that her libido has endangered them all.
• All-Loving Hero: Although she fully acknowledges that Wuntch was a horrible person, she feels no need to justify her sadness over the latter's death.
• Ambiguously Bi: In "Beach House", it's confirmed that she tends to get a bit lecherous after four drinks, but the only people we see her actually flirting with are Rosa and Gina.
• Ambition Is Evil: Averted. Amy is probably the most vocally ambitious member of the precinct, and makes no secret that she plans to be a captain herself one day. However, she's also an incredibly ethical person, to the point of being a goody two shoes, and has not done anything underhanded or 'evil' in order to secure her ambitions. Although her ambitions do at times end up making her look like an adorable Yes-Man.
• Badass Adorable: Is a sweet, caring, somewhat insecure young woman, who is truly still the teacher's pet at heart. She is also an awesome detective, who can defeat much bigger perps in a fight.
• Badass Bookworm: She is highly intelligent and loves learning new things, whether through seminars or documentaries. She is still completely capable of kicking lots of ass.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Played with. She loves bureaucracy, and she's extremely badass, as proven by how well she handles herself in sieges.
• Badass in a Nice Suit:
  • Almost always dresses in smart pantsuits, to go with her formal serious outlook and personality.
  • Parodied in "Undercover", when we see in flashback that she once came to work wearing the same outfit as Boyle.
    Santiago: How does it look better on you?! [stomps off, distraught]
  • Inverted when Gina intentionally wears one of Amy's suits in the precinct because by her logic it's too bland for anyone to notice her in it. It is and no one notices Gina during a crucial part of the episode.
• Battle Couple: She and Jake have no trouble chasing and taking down perps together.
• The B Grade: She's unsurprisingly extremely grade-conscious.
  Santiago: I haven't gotten an F since I failed recess in second grade! [mocking voice] "Teachers need a break too, Amy!"
• Berserk Button:
  • She finds her ex-boyfriend Teddy's obsession with pilsners really irritating.
• Birds of a Feather:
  • Non-romantic version. A large part of why she respects Holt so much is that he's just as strict on the rules as she is. Later episodes show he can be just as competitive as her as well.
  • Downplayed with Jake. While they are opposite in many ways, they're both hyper-competent geeks with daddy issues and the more time they spend together, the more they realize they have in common.
• Born in the Wrong Century: She seems to be this taste-wise; her home is furnished in such a way that her work colleagues, upon arriving for her Thanksgiving dinner, mistakenly assumed that she lived with her grandmother, and outside of the smart and professional pant-suits she wears for work she tends to favor dresses that sometimes look on the old-fashioned side.
• Blind Without 'Em: Revealed to be such in "48 Hours" when Peralta tries on her glasses (her contact lenses had dried up).
• Brainy Brunette: Santiago is a Book Smart brunette.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: She's a bundle of neuroses most of the time, but she's still very good at her job.
• Butt-Monkey: Not as bad as Boyle and definitely nowhere near as bad as Hitchcock and Scully, but Amy is the brunt of several jokes and insults due to her fastidious and neurotic personality.
• Calling the Old Man Out: After Holt insults Jake after already ruining Santiago and Jake's honeymoon, Santiago tears into Holt with a vengeance.
• Catchphrase: "C'mon, Amy" when she's disappointed with herself; "Oh, mama" when she's excited/aroused.
• Character Development: While she retains her admiration of Holt and deep desire for his approval, she gradually becomes less prone to humiliating herself in the name of gaining his favor, and is more willing to call him out when she thinks he's wrong.
• Characterization Marches On: Amy in the earlier episodes was played up as, in Terry's words in the pilot, "always trying to prove that she's tough," as the only woman in a house full of men. As the series progressed she became more well known for being obsessively nerdy and bookish and her competitiveness was shown to be a Shared Family Quirk instead of a gender thing.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Smokes "Shame Cigarettes", particularly when under stress.
• Clock King: Is absurdly precise when timing is involved. When she's barely more than a minute late to work in "Jake and Sophia", the rest of the precinct (including Holt) make a game of guessing why. Holt celebrates when his guess, "held up at the bank", proves correct.
• Competition Freak: Explained by Jeffords.
  Jeffords: She's got seven brothers, so she's always trying to prove she's tough.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Before her promotion to Sergeant she'd wear a dark blazer/suit paired with a contrasting button-down top.
• Crappy Holidays: She hates Halloween because she thinks it's an excuse for jerks to dress up in costume and cause trouble — so she's not pleased when forced to go undercover at a rave to bust some drug dealers.
• Dark and Troubled Past: In "He Said, She Said", she reveals that she transferred to the Nine-Nine because her old captain at the Six-Four sexually harassed her and assaulted her.
• Didn't Think This Through: To get around Holt's no gift policy, she left her present to him on his desk, in an unmarked package, on a random day in December, and wrote "Open now" with her wrong hand.
  Holt: BOMB! There's a bomb!
• Ditzy Genius: Very Book Smart and without doubt a brilliant detective. But also a complete teacher's pet (despite being an adult) and often lacks social awareness.
• Dork Knight: She's extremely socially awkward and dorkily enthusiastic about police work, but is also a very capable fighter.
• Endearingly Dorky: She's very dorky, but cute. Her attempts to kiss up to Holt often leave her looking like a teacher's pet. She tends to get goofy when she's extremely pleased about something (such as when Holt complimented her Thanksgiving toast and when Peralta admitted he thought she was a great detective). Her Happy Dance is hilariously bad, but her good mood makes up for it. Others are charmed by her despite thinking her lame, and Peralta even decides to propose to her after seeing her get worked up at a crossword.
• Fair Cop: Santiago is an attractive, competent detective. In the pilot, Jake randomly compliments her good looks when they are closing on the perp after the stakeout.
• Freudian Excuse: She's the youngest child and only daughter of a large family whose parents openly played favorites and rank their children based on what their accomplishments are at any given time.
• Geeky Turn-On: Often.
  • She sounds legitimately turned on when Jake tells her that he needs her to get super high-strung and make a travel itinerary to get them from the middle of nowhere in Texas to the main Precinct in New York before 10:00 am next day.
  • She gets turned on by Jake offering to quiz her.
  • Binders. Amy really loves her binders.
  • She gets very turned on when Jake dresses up as Melvin Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System.
  • She gets turned on by Jake describing barrels.
    Jake: So this is a brine barrel made by Jesiah Woldriff, who learned the craft from his father Josiah Woldrif, who in turn learned— You know what? This was a terrible idea, I'm sorry.
    Amy: Don't you dare stop.
    Jake: Oh, okay. Jesiah's cousin was a cooper, not a hooper...
    Amy: Oh, mama.
  • She's thrilled and turned on to learn that Jake started reading more.
    Jake: [on the phone] Oh, you're never gonna believe this. I've been reading.
    Amy: Reading? Like, books by real authors?
    Jake: I don't know, is Philip Roth a real author?
    Amy: Oh, my goodness! I wish you had gone to prison years ago. I'm kidding. Obviously, I'm not more attracted to you now than before.
  • She prints out a copy of Jake's perfect attendance record (from his high school) to use in the bedroom.
    Jake: Keep it in your pants, Santiago.
    Amy: Oh, that is exactly where this is going.
  • Similarly, she starts to get hot and bothered after learning the large amount of Volunteer Service Hours Jake actually completed while in school.
  • She was even momentarily attracted to Boyle when he managed to do paperwork for 20 minutes with a hand cramp.
  • She was also briefly attracted to Holt when the two were bragging about how fast they can speed read.
    Holt: I read the entire Urban Dictionary so I could converse with the other uniformed officers. Finished it in 47 minutes.
    Amy: I've never been so attracted to a gay man before. And I dated several in college.
• Go-Getter Girl: Always goes above and beyond what's asked of her.
• Green-Eyed Monster: She gets jealous of Peralta over how much he gets attention from Holt. Never mind that the attention Peralta usually gets from Holt is negative.
• Grew a Spine: Her desire to do everything the way her higher-ups would like is addressed In-Universe, serving as a major plot point in one episode where she's tasked to evaluate herself and her flaws. Eventually, she grows more openly assertive. This culminates in her giving an epic speech to Holt about how he ruined her honeymoon with Jake.
• Happily Married: She marries Jake in the Season 5 finale. In Season 6, they are very happy together, and have a child together in Season 7.
• Happy Dance: She tends to launch into incredibly goofy, dorky and uncoordinated happy dances whenever she's pleased about something.
• Heroic BSoD: She completely freezes up after finding out that Captain Holt is retiring and Terry has to carry her into the car before an undercover operation.
• I Can't Dance: When going undercover as a ballroom dancer.
  Peralta: How did you manage to step on both my feet... at the same time?
• I Have Brothers: Seven, in fact. This is the given reason for Santiago's competitive streak and desire to prove her toughness.
• Inane Blabbering: As part of her overall Endearingly Dorky personality, Amy tends to fall into meaningless ramble frequently.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: For all her tendency to get arrogant and competitive, she's a bundle of neuroses when it comes down to it.
• In Vino Veritas: Once she gets a couple drinks in her, she goes through a bevy of personalities. As follows:
  • One Drink Amy: A tad spacey.
  • Two Drink Amy: Loud Amy.
  • Three Drink Amy: Amy Dance Pants.
  • Four Drink Amy: Secretly perverted.
  • Five Drink Amy: Overconfident Amy.
  • Six Drink Amy: A sad downer.
  • Seven Drink Amy: Unknown.
  • Eight Drink Amy: A very bad equestrian.
  • Nine Drink Amy: Speaks French.
• Lady in a Power Suit: She is usually seen in a pantsuit, which fits her formal and professional temperament, as well as her ambitious nature.
• Lethal Chef: She apparently considers baking soda to be an appropriate substitute for salt. When she prepares a large Thanksgiving feast none of the dishes are deemed edible by her guests. In the same episode, it's mentioned she made brownies which Gina admitted she thought were erasers. Her cooking doesn't get better in Season 2, where her attempt at making her mother's Niçoise salad stinks up an entire subway car. Gina, after throwing the container out a window, says that she saw rats running away from it. In Season 3, she made baked ziti for Jake and Holt using a perp's recipe, though it soon turns out it was a code for a phone number meaning Amy actually used nine whole onions and seven cups of salt. It was of course inedible.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: The kind goody two shoes Light Feminine to Gina's narcissistic and mean-spirited Dark Feminine.
• Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: What we've seen of her personal life so far suggests she's this.
• Love Revelation Epiphany: Implied. According to Teddy, she got "confused" about her feelings when Peralta brought up his, and later dumps Teddy before getting with Jake.
• Minor Flaw, Major Breakup: She finds several of her boyfriend Teddy's habits increasingly irritating over the first half of Season 2, but his obsession with Pilsners really seems to get up her nose to the point of being what triggers her break-up with him. Played with, however, in that Teddy seems to feel that unresolved feelings for Jake may have played more of a part on Amy's side of things, and it's implied that he's not that far off.
• Mirror Character:
  • A Running Gag of the show is that people apparently consider Santiago to be "the female Hitchcock". Since Santiago is a driven, competent, attractive and professional go-getter and Hitchcock decidedly isn't on any of those counts, she is bewildered by this.
  • With Jake. Both are competitive and dedicated to their work, and both are rather childish and immature (albeit in different ways).
• Nerd Glasses: She normally wears contacts, but as revealed in "48 Hours", her actual glasses are beyond goofy.
• Nerds Love Tough Schoolwork: Just as much as an adult as what is implied from her childhood. Among other things, she gets positively gleeful at the notion of filling out paperwork, considers wading through incomprehensible bureaucracy to get a permit to be a "kick-ass assignment", and being quizzed is one of her turn-ons.
  Amy: [to a Permit Office clerk] Another day in paradise?
  Rosa: She actually means that. Please don't be offended.
• Nice Girl: Amy is a very sweet and caring person through and through.
• Nice to the Waiter: She treats her criminal informants very well, being friendly and encouraging to them when they talk and sending them handwritten thank-you notes for their help. In return, she gets some very handy tips from them.
  Amy: My snitches are the best.
• Nobody Calls Me "Chicken"!: In the pilot, when Terry is explaining her competitive streak to Holt, we cut to a shot of Santiago in the break room. Scully mentions the hot sauce she's pouring is hot. In response, she dumps half the bottle on her sandwich just to prove how tough she is. Naturally, it backfires on her since she is, predictably, not tough enough to cope with half a bottle of hot sauce.
• No Indoor Voice: A nervous tic of hers in stressful situations is to shout otherwise normal statements in a voice that is too loud for both the situation and the context of what she's saying. For example, when reporting back to Charles and Rosa after she and Jake have kissed as part of an undercover role:
  Charles: So, how was the restaurant?
  Amy: SUCH A NORMAL TIME.
• No Social Skills: She gets nervous, awkward and flustered easily, leading her to babble, stumble over her words, and do strange things out of sheer panic.
• Obsessed Are the Listmakers: Amy loves making lists and she has many, many binders from her various seminars and lectures. She has a laminated list of cruise itineraries for her romantic getaway with Jake and she's ready for "some nonstop totally scheduled fun". Her wedding binders and honeymoon binders are epic.
  Amy: All right, there are seven days until the wedding, so we are officially transitioning from the "Month of" binder to the "Week of" binder.
  Jake: My goodness. They're getting bigger.
  Amy: You should see the honeymoon binder.
  Jake: Ooh. Is there a tab for sex stuff?
  Amy: Several.
• Official Couple: She and Jake begin dating at the start of Season 3 and get married in the Season 5 finale.
• Oh, Crap!: In "The Bet", after producing a last-minute felony arrest that puts her ahead of Peralta:
  Santiago: Suck it, Peralta!
  Peralta: [unconcerned] Oh no.
  Santiago: [triumphant] That's right, "oh no"! [realizes; dawning horror] Oh no. You don't seem worried. Why don't you seem worried?!
• Opposites Attract: With Jake. When Teddy brings up that they have nothing in common, she outright tells him that she loves that about them.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Played for laughs when she feels this when the idea of sex between Holt (her boss) and his husband comes up.
  Rosa: Anyway, it's not about the math. They just haven't seen each other because of the night shift. They just need to bone.
  Amy: What!? Gross! Rosa! Those are our dads! I mean, that's not what I think, Captain Dad is just my boss!
• The Perfectionist: She describes herself as "a little OCD", by which she means "a little neat and ordered" (her behavior shows no signs of the actual disorder OCD).
  Peralta: What? No you're not. [he reaches out and slightly adjusts Santiago's shirt collar; Santiago freezes up] Boop!
  Santiago: ... I can leave it there.
  Peralta: Totally.
  Santiago: It doesn't bother me.
  Peralta: I know.
  [several agonized seconds later, Santiago readjusts her collar]
  Peralta: [triumphant] There it is.
• Pink Means Feminine: She's frequently seen wearing pink or blue, in contrast to Diaz, who usually wears black.
• Pregnant Badass:
  • Played With. She dons a fake pregnant belly as part of her cover in "Maximum Security", an episode in which her main concern is proving to Jake and the rest of the squad that she is just as badass as Rosa. She not only convinces them but the prisoner she's been sent in to spy on.
  • This trope also goes for Amy's actress, Melissa Fumero, who of course was really heavily pregnant when the episode was filmed and still got to participate in the more action-type scenes for the first time in half a season.
  • Becomes a legitimate one in Season 7, when a city-wide blackout leaves Captain Holt trapped in an elevator, and it is Amy who organizes the precinct and their response to the crisis, powering through like a true leader even after her water breaks.
• Prim and Proper Bun: Frequently wears her hair in this style, which perfectly suits her exceedingly meticulous and formal personality.
  Gina: Did you get on the cover of Hair-Pulled Back magazine?
• Professional Butt-Kisser: Just to Holt. She desperately wants his approval.
• Rank Up: Promoted to Sergeant in Season 5. She is further promoted to Chief in Season 8.
• Real Women Never Wear Dresses: She grapples with this trope, especially after she becomes a sergeant. She knows that being a badass, competent police officer and liking wedding dresses aren't mutually exclusive, but she's all too aware that, as a woman in a high-paying, powerful field which insecure people see as "male" and women don't tend to enter due to discrimination, she has to work twice as hard to gain the respect of her colleagues — and that women who display traditionally feminine interests tend to get even more crap.
• The Resenter: As mentioned above, she tends to get jealous of the attention Peralta gets from Holt. This also applies to her relationship with her brother, David.
• Self-Induced Allergic Reaction: In an attempt to suck up to him, she agrees to adopt Holt's puppies... but it's revealed she's terribly allergic to dogs when she tries to hold one.
• Shiksa Goddess: She's the primary love interest of Jake, who's Jewish.
• Shutting Up Now: From "Charges and Specs".
  Santiago: ... My name is Amy Santiago and I'm done talking.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: The more Jake behaves like a good guy, the more Santiago loves him. When she reads that he never skipped a day of school, she gets turned on. When she finds out he did a ton of community service, even more so.
• Smoking Is Cool: Inverted. Amy is rather straight-laced, nerdy, and a goody-goody... and is the only character with a cigarette habit, which she isn't proud of.
• Spicy Latina: Played with. Normally, she's a buttoned-up, dorky, and klutzy goody two shoes with a competitive streak and plenty of neuroses and insecurities, but when she's drunk, she's flirtatious, outgoing, and energetic.
  Santiago: Can you magically make everybody kind, sober, and fully dressed?
  Peralta: "Kind, Sober, and Fully Dressed." Good news, everyone! We found the name of Santiago´s sex tape!
• Sucks at Dancing: She's an awful dancer who thinks using her forearms gives her the edge in a dance competition with her brother (who's no better).
• Teacher's Pet:
  • She was apparently this as a little girl... or at least wanted to be this as a little girl, since it's implied that the teachers weren't overly fond of her, either ("Teachers need a break too, Amy!"). She also gloats loudly over everyone when assigned the code-name "Hall Monitor" in "Halloween II".
    Holt: Santiago, when I greet the Deputy Chief, I want you there by my side to make a good impression. No offense, but you are something of a teacher's pet.
    Santiago: [proudly] None taken! People love their pets.
    [Diaz gives her a withering stare]
  • Amy could be seen as a deconstruction of this trope. Her obsession with getting the approval of authority figures began with her parents arranging pictures of their children in order of who makes them proudest. She was sexually harassed by her first captain. Finally, when she found herself in a position of authority, she found a subordinate who was exactly like her to be extremely annoying.
• Technician Versus Performer: The Technician to Peralta's Performer.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Since Season 6, around after Gina's departure, Amy has become more spiteful in a lot of the plots such as relishing her own brother's arrest, putting divorce on the table if Jake did not have a child with her, and even berating him when he did not take photos on a crime in the precinct while she blew off a dentist appointment. ^note To be fair, the divorce threat was not spiteful so much as her being clear about something she wanted from marriage that would be a deal-breaker for her (and both she and Jake were shown to have miscommunicated with each other on that subject), and the dentist appointment was more Rule of Funny than anything else and Jake has a rebuttal for that, which sounds snarky, but is actually valid.
• Twofer Token Minority: Amy is female and Cuban.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: With Diaz, the violent and grumpy Tomboy to her goody two shoes Girly Girl.
• The Unfavorite:
  • Santiago sees herself as this with Holt, since he focuses most of his attention on Peralta while she desperately seeks his approval. However, it's subverted, as the truth is that he doesn't see much of a need to give her that much direct guidance since she's already a disciplined cop who does her paperwork perfectly; Peralta, on the other hand, is a perennial slacker and goofball who regularly flaunts procedure and decorum, and requires significant amounts of work. She comes to accept this and seems much more secure in his attention later in the series.
  • She actually is this with her mother, who constantly favors her brother David (though it's never stated where she stands in the hierarchy with the rest of her brothers).
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: Hinted at the end of "The Road Trip". She breaks up with Teddy, but Peralta remains with his girlfriend Sophia. Furthermore, Amy reluctantly confessed to possibly having feelings for Peralta before this.
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: In keeping with her over-competitive streak, she tends to strut and gloat whenever she gets an advantage over any of the others, Peralta especially. Not that Peralta's much better, mind.
• Uptight Loves Wild: Sweet, goody two shoes Amy eventually falls for the cocky, immature, rule-bending, wisecracking Jake.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Peralta. For all her eye-rolling and snark at his behavior, she clearly respects him and enjoys his company more than she lets on.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: In regards to her family and Holt.
• Will They or Won't They?: With Jake, who first realizes he's falling for her after calling off his plans for the worst date ever in order to finish a stakeout with her, and they have their first kiss while pretending to be an engaged couple while following a perp. Jake admits his feelings for her at the end of Season 1... just before going undercover with the Mafia. Their ongoing UST throughout Season 2 ultimately tanks Amy's relationship with Teddy, before the two of them finally get together in the uncertainty of what's going to happen to the Nine-Nine following Holt's departure back to Public Relations. They're officially a couple through Season 3 and beyond.
• Womanchild: While not as bad as Peralta, she's still pretty immature and childish in many ways — specifically, where Peralta is basically the class clown who never grew up, Santiago acts like she's still running for high school valedictorian.
  Jake: God, you must have been the worst fourth-grader ever.
  Amy: [smug] Joke's on you, I skipped fourth grade.
• Yes-Man: She tries to be this to Holt, but Holt constantly finds ways to call her on her bullshit.

Det. Charles Boyle

Det. Charles Boyle

Played By: Joe Lo Truglio

"You know, some jobs take brains, some jobs take muscles, some jobs take dainty little fingers. Did I ever tell you I had to wear a woman's wedding ring?"

A bumbling, awkward and eager-to-please detective in the unit with a tendency to say perverse things without intending to. Although clumsy and prone to accidents, he is a hard worker and succeeds through his willingness to 'grind' through his cases. He is good friends with and extremely supportive of Peralta. A 'foodie', he takes anything to do with cuisine deadly seriously.

---

• Abhorrent Admirer: To Rosa for the first half of Season 1. Unlike most examples, she turns him down definitively but politely and isn't mean to him. Well, isn't very mean. She's still Rosa, after all.
• Action Dad: He's a veteran cop and the adoptive father of Nikolaj as well.
• Accidental Innuendo: In-Universe, to the point of Running Gag. Boyle has very little idea that the things he says can have sexual connotations. For example, he calls his wedding invitations "STDs" for "Save the Date"s.
  • This is further lampshaded in "The Therapist", where after seeing one he finally starts to recognize when he's making unconscious innuendos.
• Always Someone Better: Insits, in spite of anyone's attempt to corect him, that he's this to Terry.
• Ambiguously Bi: He describes Peralta and Diaz to be his "fantasy threesome". He's also had several innuendos with Peralta over the course of the series.
• Amusing Injuries: He gets shot in the butt.
• Animal Nemesis: Boyle quickly develops a one-sided rivalry with Lieutenant Peanut Butter the horse after it is rewarded a medal of valor at the same time as him.
• Bad Liar: On top of having easily recognizable tells — including suddenly speaking in a posh, refined manner — Boyle seems incapable of lying his way out when under the stress of a friend or colleague interrogating or accusing him.
  Gina: You tried both pies, you know mine's better, but you're too scared to tell Rosa because you're into her.
  Boyle: Wh, what? [through a nervous laugh] That is not true, okay? I-I-I don't- I don't- I don't even LIKE food!
  Gina: What?
  Boyle: Who's Rosa?! Y-you're the scared one! [storms out]
• Berserk Button: Other officers suspecting him of or themselves being incompetent at their jobs really seems to tick him off; he gets vocally annoyed with Jake for slacking off on the job as his secondary officer in "M.E. Time", Amy and Rosa's refusal to take him seriously over his suspicions of Marvin Miller's guilt in "The Wednesday Incident" really gets him worked up, and he loses his cool with Scully and Hitchcock's incompetence very quickly in "Sabotage". This is likely because Boyle, as Jeffords points out in the pilot, is not naturally gifted at his job and so works very hard in order to excel at it.
  • Veganism is a deal-breaker for an uber-foodie like Boyle.
• Beware the Nice Ones: A variant on this — most of the time you couldn't ask for a nicer person, but step even slightly away from what he considers to be acceptable (which doesn't always gel with anyone else's idea of acceptable behavior), and he can get downright mean and petty. His collegues have learned to tread lightly around certain topics around him.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Boyle may be utterly pathetic and constantly stepped on by life, but that does not mean he isn't a very competent police officer and occassional man of action. After all, he is the only other member of the squad other than Holt to have been awarded a Medal for Valor.
• Big Eater: A variant. Boyle is an ardent foodie and quality is a lot more important to him than quantity. He is, in fact, a bit of a food snob — and his palate is rather more advanced than most people's. But he is truly passionate about food, and when he gets the opportunity he'll gorge himself.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: When Boyle accidentally exposes himself, Jake refers to him as "the greatest showman", and he's surprisingly popular with the ladies. Gina refers to him as "not horrible".
• Birds of a Feather:
  • His attraction to Vivian, who's also a foodie and also has a tendency to move too fast in relationships.
  • Same with Genevieve. They are both foodies that love dogs and have a tendency of sharing too much.
• Boring, but Practical: Compared to the other detectives, Charles tends to focus on the job and keep drama to the side while on a case. In "Dillman", this is what lets him prove the glitter-bomb case as while Jake and the others were caught up in one-upping Dillman, Charles worked the case in the background and solved it.
• Brutal Honesty: In "The Bet", he starts dropping "truth-bombs" on everyone thanks to a dose of particularly strong pain medication.
• Butt-Monkey: Often picked on by pretty much everyone but Scully and Hitchcock. Unlike the other two, however, Boyle is reasonably competent and most of the teasing he receives is fairly good-natured.
• Camp Straight: He is in a long-term relationship with Genevieve, but loves theatre, acting, and cooking, alongside some campy mannerisms.
• Character Development: It's subtle, but he starts becoming a bit less of a doormat in Season 2, and is more likely to stand up for himself (albeit not incredibly successfully) than just passively accept his poor treatment. He also loses his crush on Rosa after coming across Vivian and hasn't looked back since.
  • Also on the subtle side, he does become better at investigative reasoning. In the early seasons, he was mostly following the leads his partners (often Jake) discovered, and provided support when needed. However, while he's still Dumb, but Diligent in comparison to them, he's more able to keep up with them later on, to the point that he figures out that John Kelly's putting in place a stingray operation along with Jake and Holt, which Kelly remarks on.
    Kelly: You guys are good! I just love how you ping-pong off each other.
• The Chew Toy: If anyone is going to get his face shoved into gelato, shot in the butt, or accidentally stomp on his own muffin while banging his head into a counter, it is Charles Boyle.
• The Chosen One: In Season 8, he proves himself to be the "One True Boyle" by opening the lid to the Boyle family grandmother dough (their ancestral sourdough starter), which had been sealed shut for generations.
• Competition Freak: Squash brings out the beast in Charles. Back when he was in college, he had a winning streak of 27-0 and was known as "Squash's Unhinged Lunatic".
• Consistent Clothing Style: Charles favors short-sleeved work shirts and ties.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Charles gets easily threatened if it seems like someone may challenge his status as Jake's best friend. He even taunts Terry when Jake names Boyle his Best Man, even though Terry was happy for him.
• Creepy Good: Played for laughs. He's a genuinely kind-hearted, friendly, and gentle man who just wants to be loved and tries his hardest to help out in any situation. He's also incredibly socially inept, has no boundaries or internal filter whatsoever, and seems determined to find the creepiest way possible to express his thoughts on any given subject.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Despite his cowardly demeanor when it comes to just about all his interpersonal skills, he's still a veteran cop who's more than capable of rising to the occasion in a dangerous situation.
• Deconstruction: Charles is a deconstruction of shippers eager to see their favorite characters get together. Other characters start telling him to cool it and Jake and Amy outright say that his creepy attitude put them off so much that it delayed the start of their relationship by years.
• Determinator: How he solves cases. Not through intelligence or luck, just working very, very hard.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Although Boyle is a fairly nice guy, the trope is deconstructed with him; his poorly-concealed yearning for Diaz makes him the subject of scorn and disapproval from his workmates and Diaz herself bluntly points out that he's making things awkward and should move on to find someone else.
  • He appears to have moved on to a fellow foodie who it turns out is just as dogged as he is.
  • Lampshaded in "The Apartment" where, after having fun together playing a prank on another co-worker, Boyle apologizes to Diaz for his clingy and weird behavior towards her throughout the season.
• Drama Queen: Not to the extent of Gina, but Charles does have a tendency to get dramatically offended and make a big deal out of even the smallest of insults. Luckily he's far better at realizing when he's being unreasonable, though it might take him a while... and with one or two exceptions, such as Lieutenant Peanut Butter, he generally doesn't carry grudges for long.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Early on, nobody took Boyle seriously as a detective. However, Character Development on everyone's part causes them to grow out of this before the first season was up.
• Dumb, but Diligent: Charles is presented this way to the new precinct captain, Captain Holt. Sgt. Jeffords gives each major member of the squad a quick description (that coincidentally is illustrated by the members' actions at that moment.) For Boyle, Jeffords remarks that he's clumsy and accident-prone (and manages to hurt himself several times just getting something from a cupboard at that moment), but is successful at closing cases because he's the most determined "grinder" in the precinct. This gets proven later in the season. When Jake Peralta, arguably the best (and most immature) detective in the precinct, is having a string of bad luck, he keeps desperately trying to change cases until he gets an easy one to solve in order to "get the mojo back." Eventually, Holt has a talk with Peralta where he says that Peralta has become so obsessed with his "bad luck" and so anxious to solve a case that Peralta is trying to toss each case he gets the first time he encounters any difficulty. By comparison, Holt says, Boyle may not have Peralta's gifts or arrest record, but Boyle never goes into the kind of slump Peralta is in because Boyle just keeps working away on a case until it's done, no matter what.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite his utter lack of self-confidence, even Boyle looks down on Scully and Hitchcock.
• Extreme Doormat: To everybody, though especially to Jake, his ex-wife (and her new fiancé), and Vivian. He willingly high-fives Jake over jokes at his own expense, lives in his ex-wife's new boyfriend's basement and is just grateful that the rent is low and he's allowed into the nicer areas of the house when they're away on expensive vacations, and was willing to quit his job and move to Canada just to avoid a confrontation that might upset his new fiancée.
  • Interestingly, Rosa is probably the least guilty of anyone of taking advantage of this trait, since she makes a point of treating him with kindness and respect even while attempting to convince him that nothing will ever happen between them.
  • He lampshades this in "Thanksgiving", acknowledging that he's a compulsive people pleaser and that "it's a serious problem".
• Flanderization: Initially he was depicted as dorky and slightly pathetic, but relatively normal compared to the wacky characters of the squad. By the season midpoint, he was the most consistently weird major character.
  • Likewise, in the first season, he's a sentimental and affectionate man whose behaviors sometimes veer towards the effeminate. By Season 2, his effeminacy becomes one of his defining traits, and nearly every conversation he has is laden with Accidental Innuendos.
  • His loyalty to and admiration for Jake really gets ramped up over the course of the series too. By the finale of season 5, Boyle is obsessed with his best bud, even going as far as to urge Amy to get pregnant "to give the world more Jake."
• Foreign Queasine: Being a huge foodie, Charles will constantly recommend the most obscure ethnic restaurants and make a beeline for the gnarliest thing on the menu. Some of the tamest examples are when he deals with a breakup by compulsively snacking on Japanese octopus balls, and when he recommends a Hungarian restaurant on the strength of their "platter of a thousand sausages" (which cause nonstop dumps, according to Jake).
• Fourth-Date Marriage: With Vivian — they meet at Kevin's party and get it on from there. They're engaged in an exceedingly short amount of time. Ultimately subverted, however, since they ultimately break up after failing to negotiate a satisfactory resolution to Vivian's desire to move to Ottawa for her career versus Boyle's desire to remain in New York.
• Freudian Excuse: Implied; his panicked reaction when Peralta and Terry try to force him to choose between them suggests that he has extremely combative and dysfunctional parents who often force him to choose between them ("This is just like Christmas dinner at my parents' house — why do they have separate dining rooms?!") which may be the source of his eager-to-please nature, and his constant yearning for Diaz is implied to have something to do with his divorce.
• Good Is Bad And Bad Is Good: He was raised in a family that sees all their unusual and undesirable Shared Family Quirks as normal and socially acceptable. As a result, he thinks his one handsome, athletic and successful cousin Milton is the loser of his family, genuinely believes himself to be better looking than Terry because of his "Gross muscles" and thinks it's weird when Jake wants to do romantic things with just Amy.
• Good Parents: He's a good dad to his adopted son, Nikolaj. He goes on the warpath to find a toy he always wanted, and will talk his co-workers' ears off about him if he isn't cut off. He also tries to learn some Latvian, since it's Nikolaj's first language.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Due to his low self-esteem and being raised as a Boyle, he gets jealous very easily. When Peralta gets back from his undercover assignment in "Undercover", Boyle over-casually asks if he made "a mafia best friend" while he was working undercover. The closest Jake can think of is some guy called Derek who he did a couple of jobs with and barely knows. Boyle nevertheless spends the rest of the episode reacting like a jealous lover. Or when Peralta meets his old partner, Boyle is openly jealous.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Downplayed for Boyle. He's not physically gifted, and he isn't as clever as Peralta or Santiago, but he closes cases by working harder than everyone else. Jeffords describes him as a "grinder."
• Has a Type: All the women he is paired with over the series, except Rosa, are redheads. His long-term partner, Genevieve, is also a redhead.
• Hero-Worshipper: He genuinely seems to view Peralta as "the greatest man who ever lived." Jake tends to either ignore it or be creeped out by it.
• Heroes Love Dogs: He loves dogs and has had three dogs over the course of the series.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Jake, which appears to be one-sided at first. Over the course of the series, Jake learns to treat Boyle better and by the later seasons, it's clear they both treasure their friendship.
• Historical Character's Fictional Relative: Implied. In one episode he mentions a cousin named Susan who didn't realize she could sing until she was in her forties.
• Honorary Uncle: To Mac, Jake and Amy's son.
• Hopeless Suitor: To Rosa, who has a boyfriend and consistently rebuffs his advances, although she does care about him. He eventually gets over his infatuation with her and they become fairly close friends and confidants.
• Idiot Hero: Has absolutely No Social Skills, and is outright stated by Terry to not be the brightest. However, he works harder than anyone else at the Ninty-Nine, and instinctively took a bullet for another officer.
• Informed Attribute: Characters occasionally mention Boyle's height as if he is extraordinarily short. His actor, Joe Lo Truglio is 5'7", below the average but not substantially so.
• In Touch with His Feminine Side: Vehemently insisted as a child that "Grandma bought [the dollhouse] for both" him and his sister, loves movies like 27 Dresses, is freely affectionate with his friends, and is a fan of Nancy Drew. He apparently also has professional-level calligraphy skills.
• I Reject Your Reality: When it comes to Terry he seems unable to admit that Terry would be considered stronger and more attractive than him by other people, with the show going back and forth on whether it's just denial or because Boyle actually is as strong as Terry but in different ways. Also like other members of the Boyle family, he seems to be unaware of how strange they are in how they act and treat each other.
• Kavorka Man: Played with. His weird, gross intimate habits reliably Squick out his friends, but they serve him surprisingly well romantically. Combine with his surprising confidence, he's one of the most romantically successful members of the precinct.
• Last-Name Basis: Zig-zagged; more often than not, his friends call him Charles, but it's not uncommon for them to refer to him as Boyle. The only one who always calls him Boyle is Holt, his captain.
• Likes Older Women: In addition to his relationship with Vivian, he also mentions that he lost his virginity to a woman in her fifties and had sex with his college friend's grandmother.
• Manchild: He's incredibly insecure, immature and throws tantrums/gets sulky whenever someone calls him out or Jake shows any other man the slightest bit of attention.
• Manipulative Bastard: Despite being an Idiot Hero Butt-Monkey manchild, he has a surprisingly cunning manipulative side. Usually Gina is on the receiving end of his manipulations and nine out of ten times, he is the victor. In The Golden Child, he also manipulates Terry, Holt and a perp into believing he messed up his attempts to make him talk and gets the info he needs out of him anyway.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: The Feminine Boy to Diaz's Masculine Girl. Boyle is a sensitive Extreme Doormat foodie who played with dollhouses and read Nancy Drew books growing up and loves romantic comedies like 27 Dresses, while Rosa is a tough and short-tempered Badass Biker Lad-ette who is Hell-Bent for Leather and loves gratuitous violence.
• Nice Guy: Most of the time. Boyle is extremely likable and friendly; he even gets along well with his ex-wife's new boyfriend (who was also his landlord and, as is revealed in Season 3, was his divorce attorney before he hooked up with his ex-wife).
• No Social Skills: He has a tendency to blurt out whatever thoughts go through his head regardless of how weird or creepy they come across.
• Obsessed with Food: He's a known foodie and he spends a lot of episodes talking about good food.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Bizarrely, he's close friends with Hercules, his ex-wife's new husband. Even though he and his ex-wife are not Amicable Exes in any sense of the term, and Hercules was Charles' divorce lawyer (which led to Charles getting screwed over). Even so, Charles asserts that Hercules is a genuinely nice guy, and even asks that Jake leave him out of it when Jake and Charles have to take on Eleanor.
  • Once Boyle gets over his crush on her, Diaz is probably his closest friend after Jake, and certainly she's often a better friend than Jake.
• Papa Wolf: To his son, Nicolaj. In "Captain Latvia", he goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge of sorts to find a toy that his son has always wanted. He acts completely out-of-character. Shows how much his son's happiness means to him.
• Parental Neglect: A downplayed example; on the whole, he gets on very well with and shares lots in common with his father Lynn, but Lynn has made it quite clear on several occasions that Charles is lower down on his list of priorities than perhaps is appropriate for a father to position his son.
• Pinocchio Nose: He starts talking like a 19th-century British gentleman when he's lying or trying to conceal something.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Rosa. It's especially clear in "Johnny and Dora" "Paranoia" and "The Overmining".
• The Pollyanna: Charles is always very upbeat. When he responds with anger or sadness, it's serious business indeed.
• Rank Up: Socially, if not professionally: with all the rest of the main cast moving on in different directions in the last season, he becomes the most senior detective at the 99 (after Hitchcock and Scully, but, you know) and is seen as the coolest guy in the office by his new squadmates. Terry, who was promoted to captain, relies on his as his Number Two, which has been established as Charles's favorite position to be in.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: At times, he screams at an unnaturally high pitch.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: The Sensitive Guy to Jake's Manly Man. Jake is cocky, athletic, and wants to be seen as an Action Hero, while Charles is a clingy Extreme Doormat who likes cooking.
• Serious Business: Boyle is a huge foodie and takes anything to do with food incredibly seriously.
• Shipper on Deck: He's the first to point out that Peralta might have feelings for Santiago, as well as pushing Peralta to make his feelings known for her. If there was any lingering doubt that he ships Jake/Amy hard, his reaction when learning that they kissed as part of their undercover roles in "Johnny and Dora" can only be described as a squeegasm. He's also incredibly eager for them to start a family. In general, at times he seems more besotted with and devoted to Jake and Amy's relationship than Jake and Amy themselves. It's deconstructed as it is shown how annoying he can be for it, and Jake points out that him shipping them the first time they met made it take far longer for them to get together.
• Shot in the Ass: In "Christmas", when Taking the Bullet for Rosa.
• Stalker without a Crush: He keeps the clothes of his friends and co-workers and follows Jake using an app.
• Supreme Chef: As befitting a foodie, he's a great cook. Usually, his tastes are too weird for others to enjoy, even if he prepares it correctly, but if he makes something (relatively) normal, it turns out great — his "deconstructed" meatball sub in "Bad Beat", for instance, is incredible, according to Amy.
• Taking the Bullet: Boyle saves Rosa's life by diving in front of her and taking two in the butt. One HELL of a jump.
• The Team Normal: He doesn’t have Terry’s strength, Rosa’s athleticism, Jake’s intuition or Amy’s intelligence, but he’s still a great detective through sheer persistence.
• Too Much Information: Tends to over-share with his colleagues whenever he's in a relationship that's going well.
  Boyle: Jake, I gotta tell ya; the engaged life is amazing. Especially sexually.
  Peralta: [uncomfortable] Well, I don't wanna pry...
  Boyle: [cheerfully] Oh, you're not prying; I want you to know this.
• Unlucky Everydude: As the Butt-Monkey who actually has to work hard to become a competent detective, he's this.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: Inverted. When he gets shot in the line of Duty, he takes medication that removes his filters and makes him uninhibited around others. Rosa fears that Charles would admit his feelings for her and ruin their friendship but Charles doesn't do it and explains himself. He wasn't motivated by love, he was just doing what any cop would do by saving his partner or a civilian.
• Yes-Man: Especially with Rosa and Peralta. He admits in "Thanksgiving" that he's a compulsive people-pleaser and that "it's a serious problem."
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo: The things Boyle finds unattractive and unappealing are things that most people would be pretty game for. Most prominently, he finds large muscles to be extremely ugly and unattractive, to the point that he regularly comments on how ugly he finds Terry and the 'black sheep' of his family is the one who's a hot, successful snowboarder, and Boyle is embarrassed to call him family.

Gina Linetti

Regina "Gina" Linetti

Played By: Chelsea Peretti

"Gina Linetti. The human form of the 100 emoji."

The precinct's civilian administrative support. She's extremely sarcastic, possesses a tendency to troll and bully her co-workers, and at times appears to exist within her own very strange universe. Outside of the precinct, she's a member of an amateur dance group.

---

• Abhorrent Admirer: Gina fills this role to Terry sometimes, whose body she quite openly appreciates. Not that he hates her or anything — he's just a Happily Married man who doesn't always appreciate how... erm... vocal Gina can be about it.
• Action Survivor: Gina is nowhere near a capable fighter (which is reasonable, since she's a civilian), but the fact that she manages to not die given how often she wanders into active crime situations (especially given how batshit crazy she is) says a lot about her.
• Afraid of Doctors: "Afraid" is not the right word, but Gina embraces holistic and spiritual healing to the point of dismissing most modern medicine.
• Alpha Bitch: She is basically a high school teen princess-bully who never grew out of it.
• Ambiguously Bi: Offers to teach Amy how to kiss very eagerly. Also, while arguing that Bad Boys (1995) is the best cop film ever made, she cites it having "A hot cup of Téa Leoni" as one of the reasons for its greatness. When Rosa comes out as bisexual in Season 5, Gina tells her that in another lifetime, the two of them would have made a "hot-ass couple."
• Attention Whore: Has always been this but taken to the very extreme once Season 3 began (i.e. riding in on a horse to the precinct on her birthday or considering her name a "state of mind").
• Bad Influencer: Gina is an online celebrity who leaves the Nine Nine in order to be a professional influencer. By her own admission, she's also a compulsive liar and prankster who was name-checked in her teacher's suicide note. Her online fame does have good results, though, like saving the Nine Nine in Season 4.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Gina is quite clever and fairly often she has insights that surprise others. Because she's lazy, arrogant, and has never entirely grown out of her Alpha Bitch stage, she frequently decides that learning something new is beneath her, but when she's actually motivated to do or learn something, she often picks it up really well or succeeds beyond reasonable expectations.
• Brutal Honesty: Her blunt remarks are often insults.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: She may be a narcissistic Cloudcuckoolander, but she is still surprisingly efficient at her job. See the entry for The Cuckoolander Was Right. She's also a successful social media magnate, despite being a selfish narcissist.
• The Bus Came Back: After having been absent since the Season 4 finale, she finally returns in "Game Night", the hundredth episode of the series.
  • And again in the finale.
• Car Fu: How she manages to defeat Figgis.
  Gina: Young Jeezy, take the wheel!
• Character Development: Much like the rest of the squad, she goes from a borderline sociopathic Alpha Bitch to a kinder and dedicated friend who's still a massive troll and gadfly.
• Childhood Friends: She and Jake are friends since childhood. They usually get along.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Constantly seems divorced from reality.
    Holt: So, Gina, civilian administrators, like yourself, often have their ear to the ground. What do Santiago and Peralta have riding on this bet of theirs?
    Gina: I will tell you, on six conditions. Number one: you let me use your office to practice m' dance moves. Second...
    Holt: How 'bout this: if you tell me...
    Gina: Mhm?
    Holt: ...I won't have you suspended... without pay.
    Gina: Oh, that sounds great. The deal is, if Amy gets more arrests, Jake has to give her his car. It's an old Mustang and is pretty sweet. If he gets more arrests, she has to go on a date with him. He guarantees it will end in sex. I bet on at least some over-the-clothes action, at the very least, some touching...
    Holt: That's enough, Gina.
    Gina: [undeterred] I could see him showing up in a silk robe...
    Holt: That's enough, Gina. Thank you.
  • Believes that psychiatrists are just people who weren't smart enough to become psychics.
  • In the episode "Sal's Pizza", Gina gets paired with Jeffords to find a new IT guy for the department. During her interviews, she's her typical strange self-grilling one applicant on what his favorite Jay-Z song is, deliberately startling another by tossing her water on him, and grosses out another by flossing right in front of her. Although she turns out to have good reasons for this: she grilled one guy because some of the less savvy detectives would ask the same tech questions over and over again, she startled another because a police precinct (especially one with Rosa Diaz working in it) is a scary place, and grossed out the last applicant because a police precinct can see some gross stuff. She then taps a much better choice for the job.
  • As it turns out, Gina displays an in-universe psychological condition that had heretofore only been considered a theory and never seen in an actual human.
    Gina: [speaking to a group of psychologists eagerly taking notes] All men are at least 30% attracted to me.
    [jump cut to a larger group of psychologists surrounding Gina]
    Gina: My mother cried the day I was born because she knew she would never be better than me!
    [jump cut to an even larger group of psychologists surrounding Gina]
    Gina: At any given moment I’m thinking about one thing: Richard Dreyfuss hunkered over eatin' dog food.
    Psychologist: Complete overlap of ego and id. It's been theorized but I never thought I'd see it.
    Gina: I'm exquisite!
• Collector of the Strange: A whole rack of lycra bodysuits.
• Comedic Sociopath: Takes pictures while Boyle's coat is on fire.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right:
  • At the end of 'Sal's Pizza', she has good reasons for all of her actions — she grilled the first applicant because some of the less savvy detectives (i.e. Scully and Hitchcock) would ask the same tech questions over and over again, she startled the second because he'd be working with Rosa, and grossed out the last applicant because a police precinct can see some pretty gross stuff. She then taps a much better choice for the job: the teenage hacker they'd just arrested, since he already hacked the system and thus knew its weak points, and he'd want a job to afford an apartment so he could get away from his mother, who was the one who sold him out.
  • She also pegged Holt for being gay as soon as she saw him.
• Deadpan Snarker: She's perpetually snarky towards all her colleagues.
  Amy: I found a mistake in one of the Captain's old cases and he asked me to work it with him. As partners. We're taking our relationship to the next level.
  Gina: From awkward underling to awkward colleague. This is a real ugly duckling story.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: She refers to doing this "so people wouldn't know how smart she is" and could control them. When Terry complains about not being able to score higher than 70% on his practice lieutenant's exam, Gina says it's a good thing:
  Gina: C-. The perfect grade. You pass, but you're still hot.
• Disappeared Dad: Like Jake, her parents are divorced and her mother raised her alone. Unlike Jake, Gina's father has never even been mentioned.
• Does Not Like Spam: Gina has mentioned more than once that she considers soup in general to be an awful food.
• Drives Like Crazy: A justified example in early Season 4: she doesn't know how to drive stick, so an injured Holt shifts gears and she does the rest. It ends up saving the day when the two hit Figgis' car, preventing his escape.
• Drama Queen: If she encounters any slight difficulty or criticism, she'll make a huge deal of it and play the martyr to a ridiculous degree.
• Easily Forgiven: As part of her Karma Houdini status, even when Gina is called out for her actions, such as being the true Tattler (an effect which ruined Jake's senior year of high school), the rest of the team will usually let her off the hook.
• Everyone Has Standards: Played for Laughs. When Gina says a certain title on a plaque is worse than segregation, Holt and Terry shake their heads and she apologizes.
• Former Teen Rebel: Apparently, she was one of the "at-risk" kids targeted by the Junior Police Program.
• The Gadfly: Constantly trolls her co-workers. An excellent (if subtle example) occurs when she accompanies Holt and Jeffords to the firing range. The reason she makes up for wanting to go is because the police precinct in her area is awful... and she lives in the 99's area.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Gina turns out to be more mature than Jake when it comes to finances and surprisingly thrifty. She's already saved enough money to buy his grandmother's apartment for a real estate opportunity and offers to rent it to Jake so he doesn't have to move out when it goes co-op.
  • In "Halloween II", Gina reveals that she's been going to night school in order to complete her bachelor's degree and ended up neglecting her beloved dance troupe in the process.
• It's All About Me: As far as Gina's concerned, the entire universe revolves around her and exists to benefit her personally.
• Jerkass Has a Point: She was right about Rosa not returning Boyle's feelings, he should have listened to her and stopped trying a lot sooner than he did.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Gina is an unrepentant bully, particularly to Boyle and Santiago (and Scully and Hitchcock, but then everyone looks down on them) and she is downright predatory towards Terry despite him being Happily Married and unwelcoming of her advances. Her sense of humor also is often rather snide and cutting. However, she has been shown to have a slightly kinder side from sometimes which only really comes out around Jake or maybe Holt. By Season 5, the Heart of Gold shines through much more — she's still The Prankster, but she's much less mean to the squad and her Pet the Dog moments with Jake, Charles, and Holt are much more common.
• Karma Houdini: She never faces any kind of serious or lasting comeuppance for her mean-spirited actions towards the other characters. Particularly noticeable since some of her bullying towards Amy and Charles alone would be grounds for dismissal, if not at least some disciplinary actions, in any halfway functional workplace, alongside her borderline sexual harassment of Terry. That said, whenever she clashes with Boyle, 9 out of 10 times, Boyle is the one who comes out on the top, thanks to a hidden cunning manipulative side he has, he generally makes her believe that she has won, then reveals his true objectives. In another episode, she accompanies Rosa to babysit Cagney and Lacey… it doesn't end well for either of them.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • In the pilot, she makes a list of demands for Holt when he asks her a question. As soon as Holt makes an offer to not have her suspended without pay, she instantly accepts it and gives him the information.
  • She takes great pleasure in uncovering and exposing Holt and Jeffords' efficiency scheme in "Operation: Broken Feather", but recognizes when her gloating has gone just a little too far:
    Holt: Okay, message received. Jeffords and I will get right to work.
    Gina: Great! That will be all. Thank you.
    Holt: [coldly] Get the hell out of my chair.
    Gina: [instantly capitulating] Alright, I pushed it a little bit on that one. Ohh-kay. Bye. [scurries quickly out of Holt's office]
  • When Holt and Jeffords make it clear that they are deeply unimpressed by her melodramatic comparison between being left out of the annual "Greatest Detective-Slash-Genius Competition" and segregation, she immediately walks it back.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: The narcissistic and vain Dark Feminine to Santiago's dorky goody two shoes Light Feminine.
• The Load: When she's put into a dangerous spot, she more often than not becomes a liability. And she usually exacerbates the problem by being, well, herself.
• Manchild: She's an immature narcissistic high school Alpha Bitch that never grew up.
• Meaningful Name: Most likely a coincidence, but her full first name, Regina, brings to mind another Alpha Bitch—Regina George of Mean Girls. In Season 4, she is even hit by a bus in a manner similar to Regina George. In addition, 'Regina' means 'queen', which is very appropriate given that she has an extraordinarily high opinion of herself.
• Morality Pet:
  • So far, the only person we've seen who she genuinely seems to love and care about over herself is her mother.
  • She does have a genuine soft spot for her childhood friend, Jake. She can be nice to Terry, but only because she has a crush on him. She also really does respect Holt... as much as Gina can respect someone, anyway.
• Narcissist: Jake might have an ego, but Gina truly believes that the world revolves around her and that everyone in her vicinity should make allowances to make her life easier.
  • Jeffords explains to Holt he was able to distract her by putting a mirror on the desk:
    Terry: She's like a cockatiel sir, fascinated by her own reflection.
  • According to Rosa, a significant part of Gina's day involves checking herself in every reflective surface in the station. That includes Amy's lips.
    Rosa: What kind of urgent matter could Gina possibly attend to? She's already checked herself out in every reflective surface around the precinct.
    Amy: Including my lip gloss! She says she looked better when I frowned!
• No Social Skills: Gina's fundamental narcissism means that she's usually utterly disinterested in the people she's interacting with to begin with.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: At least some of her apparent ditziness is a façade intended to leave people open to manipulation — for good or for ill. Apparently, she used to fake her report cards to give herself worse grades.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • In "The Ebony Falcon", Gina's apartment gets broken into, and while for the most part, she remains her snarky self, Holt knows Gina's more scared than she lets on. Santiago and Diaz finally understand how bad it is when Gina stays at work late:
    Gina: Uh, you know me, I love working. Can't tear me away from my work. I just love requisitions, and corporate records, and just... you know, message from people for Holt.
  • When asked to help prevent Wuntch from forcing Holt to leave the Nine-Nine, Gina shows how devoted she is to the task at hand by willingly shutting off her phone.
• Pet the Dog: Every so often.
  • When revealing her and Boyle's casual relationship in "The Mole", she admits to Boyle that despite her vocal disgust over their hook-ups, she did have fun with him.
  • She takes care of the melancholy "Six-Drink" Amy in "Beach House" when no one else is around.
  • Despite her intense hatred and horror of the prospect of Charles' dad marrying her mother, she throws herself whole-heartedly into making sure they have a perfect wedding day. She also does grant consent to the marriage, since Lynn wouldn't propose without getting Gina's "okay" first, meaning she could've stopped the whole thing from happening. But she didn't. Why? Because she wants her mother to be happy.
  • She's genuinely distraught at the idea of Holt leaving the Nine-Nine. When he's forced out at the end of Season 2, Gina's response is to immediately and without any hesitation stand up and walk out after him, determined to stay with Holt no matter what. Given Gina's general disregard for authority, it says a lot about how much she respects him as a captain.
  • After she accidentally destroys the 140-year-old "Boyle mother dough" that was given to her in the will of Great-Nana Boyle and gets banished from the circle of Boyle cousins, she's more than happy with it. But when she finds out how much Charles got hurt as he was banished as well, she made a new mother dough for the family, promises to take care of it, and even allows the cousins access to her apartment to get to the mother dough all so that Charles can get back in the family.
  • In "The Tattler", she reveals that, in high school, she spread a false rumor about Jake so that the crowd of bad kids he'd been running with would oust him from their clique, thereby saving Jake's chances of eventually becoming a cop. Jake is touched by this.
• Phoneaholic Teenager: She's an adult version of this. She's perpetually on her phone, constantly checking social media or playing games. In one Cold Open, the rest of the precinct has a competition to see who can get her to look away from her phone. Charles' greeting, Jake's midmorning dance party, Amy's informing her of George W. Bush's death (to which Gina responds, "Who dat?"), and even Rosa's blowing an air horn in her ear couldn't get her to look up from her phone.
  Holt: You left your phone on your desk and I assumed you were dead!
  Gina: Uh, I would clearly be buried with my phone.
• The Prankster: She generally enjoys messing with people for her own amusement. Gina's goal for her and Jake's twentieth high school reunion is to see how many lies she can get away with just to confuse their former classmates.
  Rosa: Gina's a rascal.
• Proud Beauty: She's very fashion-conscious and worships her own beauty to the point that she can be distracted by her own reflection.
• Put on a Bus: After the birth of her daughter her appearances became quite sporadic with her being on maternity leave for the first half of Season 5. She was Commuting on a Bus for a handful of special guest appearances in Season 6 but this trope went into full effect in Season 7 onwards with her fading out of the show entirely.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Chelsea Peretti's real-life pregnancy is written into the final episodes of Season 4 as her having a baby with Black Sheep Boyle Cousin Milton, and Gina is Written-In Absence as being on maternity leave at the start of Season 5.
• Really Gets Around: Her psychic predicted she would have a "sensuous encounter" with a guy named Mark. Gilligan Cut to a bar...
  Gina: [very drunk] Is anyone here named Mark?!
  [three guys raise their hands]
  Gina: [pointing at one of them] You're good.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Generally, given her narcissism and over-inflated opinion of herself coupled with the fact that she is, basically, a secretary-slash-personal assistant. In a specific sense, however, she's convinced that she's inherently superior to the trained police officers around her at police work and that it's only through her generosity that she's not running the precinct. The one time we actually see her contribute to a case, however, (when an old classmate of hers is arrested and says he'll only talk to her) she completely messes it up, and it's only when Rosa bonds with the suspect by griping over how self-obsessed and narcissistic Gina is that the cops get anywhere.
• Sticky Fingers: Terry has to specifically ask Rosa to make sure Gina doesn't steal anything at Holt's birthday party. Unfortunately, Gina's already stolen a bagful of hats and scarves. It's later revealed she's also stolen a drawerful of silverware as well as a clock that doesn't belong to Holt or his husband.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker:
  • In "Charges and Specs", Gina decides that the English language is no longer sufficient to "capture the depth and complexity of my thoughts" and so begins describing Emojis to express herself. This leads to nonsense sentences like "The fact you have him on trial is cat doing Home Alone face!" and "Our friendship is little boy holding little girl's hand!" (She uses emoji-speak again in "Boyle-Linetti Wedding.")
  • This exchange from "Into The Woods":
    Gina: Hey, sport. You look a little D in the D. D for "down in dumps", respectively.
    Amy: Probably easier to just not abbreviate if you have to explain it.
    Gina: Agree to D.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The dance-loving, fashionable Girly Girl to Rosa's badass Hot Tempered Tomboy.
• Too Much Information: Gina to Holt about the probable outcome of Peralta and Santiago's date if he wins their bet. See Cloudcuckoolander, above, for sordid detail.
• Took a Level in Badass: A small one starting in Season 4. She's nowhere near an Action Girl (even calling her an Action Survivor is generous), but she also becomes a lot more useful when she's in danger.
• Took a Level in Kindness: After The Bus Came Back in Season 5, she occasionally starts to show her gentler side to the group while still being a Troll if she can get away with it.
• Undying Loyalty: She gradually grows into this for Holt and the squad, and has had it for Jake since they were kids (not that he was aware of it at the time). Subverted towards Jake once she leaves the Nine-Nine as she effectively ghosts him.
• Written-In Absence: She's on maternity leave in the first half of Season 5, to coincide with the birth of Chelsea Peretti and Jordan Peele's real-life son.

Dets. Norm Scully and Michael Hitchcock

Dets. Norm Scully and Michael Hitchcock

That's Scully on the left and Hitchcock on the right.

Played By: Joel McKinnon Miller and Dirk Blocker, Alan Ritchson (younger Scully) and Wyatt Nash (younger Hitchcock)

"Not to brag, but Scully and I have a combined total of fourteen arrests."

Two extremely incompetent veteran detectives in the unit, with a combined fifty years of experience. They make good coffee. After thirty years this is apparently the only reason they're still on the force.

---

Tropes that apply to both of them

• Abhorrent Admirer: Hitchcock is this to pretty much any woman he comes across. Scully to a lesser extent, usually to Gina, but he's usually a bit more polite about it.
• Ascended Extra: They were initially background characters with occasional lines to show that they were complete lummoxes in contrast to the main characters. They became more and more prominent as the first season progressed and even get involved in the team's antics outside the office.
• Big Eater: Mostly Scully, but both of them have shown noticeable talent in chowing down on anything and everything edible. And quite a few things that aren't edible at all.
• Brick Joke: Hitchock nicknames their pair "Flattop and the Freak" in 5x24, which made Jake wince in second-hand embarrassment and seemed to directly follow up a joke earlier in the episode. 6x02 reveals they've actually had these nicknames since they were successful studs in the '80s, much less weird in this context.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Even more so than Peralta — at least when it comes to the lazy part. It's revealed that they were great detectives earlier in their careers (before they stopped caring). When they actually care about a case (or when food is involved), they're still capable of acting like actual detectives. The rest of the time, their only objective is to avoid any and all work.
• Butt-Monkey: Both are described in the first episode by Jeffords as "basically worthless, but they make good coffee", and almost every episode they appear in sees them live down to that description in some way, shape or form.
• Clueless Detective: Both of them are seemingly completely worthless at their jobs.
• A Day in the Limelight: They get more and more side stories as the series goes on, both individually and as a duo, but in "House Mouses", they're actually instrumental in a major drug bust... albeit after getting themselves (and Jake and Terry) caught in the first place. They finally get their own episode, titled "Hitchcock & Scully", in Season 6.
• Dirty Old Man: Hitchcock in spades — he seems to be under the mistaken impression that the women in the station (and some of the men) are interested in him physically. To his credit, he never seems to act on it, it's just the way his mind works. Less so Scully, although when he thinks he's having yet another heart attack, he does pull a Dying Declaration of Love on Gina.
  Scully: If I don’t make it, tell Gina I love her...!
• The Ditz: Both of them seem barely aware of their surroundings or what's going on at the best of times.
• Divergent Character Evolution: At the start of the series, the only real way of telling them apart was to say that Scully's the fatter one with the flat-top and sweater-vest, while Hitchcock is bald. From their initial (lack of) characterization as "basically useless, but they make good coffee", and despite both being incompetent cops who've largely aged into obsolescence and are mostly kept around to do paperwork, there are a few noticeable differences between them which have been revealed over time:
  • Between the two of them, Scully is at least marginally more competent (or less incompetent): he's a genuinely talented amateur opera singer, he speaks a little French, and if either one of the two is going to contribute something meaningful to the conversation, it's usually Scully. On the other hand, he's got a whole host of health problems (Gina having once said that over 70% of his body has died) and he apparently does very poorly under pressure, to the point where Hitchcock basically does his whole annual performance evaluation (a self-evaluation) for him.
  • Hitchcock comes across as largely oblivious to his own faults: he’s aware he’s seen as uncool around the office, but has a surprising amount of (completely unwarranted) self-confidence about his abilities as a detective, desirability as a man, the amount of hair he has, etc. He's more likely than Scully to chime in and volunteer bad ideas or inappropriate, gross, often disturbing information about himself: admitting he has an STD with a hint of pride when the rest of the detectives are talking about Charles abbreviating ‘Save The Date’ on his wedding invitations, being turned on by the thought of Rosa really needing to 'go' during the gang's trip to Florida, or being overjoyed at the death of his ex-wife:
    Hitchcock: No more alimony, baby!
  • They also have different superpowers, as revealed in "House Mouses": when they're held captive by drug runners, Hitchcock scoots the office chair he's strapped to up a series of stairs in a matter of seconds (offscreen), and Scully manages to panic-sweat his way free of his duct tape bonds.
  • In general, Scully is marginally smarter, but Hitchcock is more physical: Hitchcock is at least in good enough shape to give Charles a run for his money in a fight (admittedly not a high bar), and while he doesn't exactly do much better than Scully during the paintball games in "Tactical Village" or "Windbreaker City", Terry doesn't discount him entirely from the very beginning, either.
  • Hitchcock is much more of a pervert than Scully, cheating on his (now ex) wife, having a relationship with someone so young, Holt thought she was his daughter, openly watching a lot of porn, and frequently making gross comments towards his female co-workers. Scully, meanwhile, has only shown interest in two women (three, if we count Gina, towards whom, he occasionally shows signs of attaction): his wife, who left him, and a woman he meets later at Cop Con, whom he treats very kindly. Case in point, when allowing questions about her bisexuality, Rosa willingly takes a question from Scully, who simply asks if she knows Anne Heche (which she does, surprisingly enough), but point-blank refuses to let Hitchcock even get a word out.
    Hitchcock: Smart. It was not tasteful.
  • Scully is, in general, less jerkish than Hitchcock; perhaps because he's marginally less oblivious, he has more of a conscience and is more likely to say or do something nice for someone else, coming across more as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. He does, however, have a hotter temper, and is prone to childish tantrums when upset or annoyed, with often surprising venom.
  • Both of them love food, but Scully is much more of an Extreme Omnivore. Scully willingly ate bagels that Hitchcock had licked (whereas Hitchcock assumed that this would've stopped him), Scully was the only one in the Jimmy Jab games who could stomach month-old Chinese food, and Hitchcock did a Spit Take when he drank cement by mistake, but Scully kept drinking.
  • Hitchcock tends to get physically injured (often resulting in him bleeding), whereas Scully suffers from medical conditions and heart attacks.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Both Jake and Charles scream "meow!" when they saw a picture of them in their younger years.
• Extreme Omnivore: Both show a tendency to eat anything available, regardless of putrescence or being alive; Scully once enthusiastically continued eating rancid Chinese food just because it was free (although he subsequently came down with food poisoning, and Hitchcock once inexplicably swallowed his own goldfish. They also both enthusiastically consume dairy despite both being lactose intolerant.
• Fair for Its Day: In-Universe. They're from the same era as Jimmy Brogan and all the cops Holt had to deal with throughout his career. Despite this, they never show the slightest problem with serving under a black, gay commanding officer, nor do they ever show racial, sexual, or other kinds of prejudice (even Hitchcock's general sexual grossness is never targeted at anyone) and tend to be as disgusted as the rest of the squad when presented with actual prejudice. Either they always had a 'live and let live' mentality, or they managed to change with the times.
• Fat Idiot: Both of them can fall into this trap when they're being especially oblivious.
• Fat Slob: Always, as there are numerous jokes about them being extremely messy.
• Foil:
  • They're this to Boyle. Hitchcock, Scully, and Boyle are all socially awkward weirdos who aren't among the smartest or most naturally talented of the squad. However, while Hitchcock and Scully are both unpleasant slackers, Boyle is both a very kind man, and genuinely intelligent underneath the weirdness. The biggest difference, however, is that Boyle responds to his lack of natural aptitude by working his ass off. No wonder being compared to Hitchcock and Scully is a Berserk Button for him.
  • Hitchcok & Scully reveals that they were essentially the Peralta and Boyle of their generation. While both are Formerly Fit and no longer the action heroes they were in the 80s due to having pretty much given up on doing any real work, Scully is far more useful than Hitchock which is comparable to how, when it comes to police work at least, Jake is Brilliant, but Lazy while Boyle is Dumb, but Diligent.
• Forgot Flanders Could Do That: While they are almost always presented as lazy buffoons, Scully and Hitchcock have on rare occasions been shown doing useful police work.
• Formerly Fit: Before getting addicted to chicken wings, cocaine, and aging 35 years, they were the "office studs" who frequently attended the gym. When Jake and Charles saw their ohoto from the '80s, they couldn't believe they were the same people.
  Jake: No offense, guys, what the hell happened to you?
  Scully: Are you body shaming us?
  Jake: No, I'm personality-shaming you. You were so alert and cool and job-doing.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Both of them. Their staggering incompetence is enough that even Captain Holt hates them, and is openly relieved whenever some accident befalls them to get them out of the way. Scully gets the least of it due to being nicer. From "Captain Peralta":
  Jake: Also, we'd like to take Scully with us.
  Captain Holt: Well, perfect. I do you a favor; you do me one too.
• Functional Addict: It's heavily implied that they were this back when they used to do cocaine. They didn't become completely lazy and useless until after they quit drugs.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Mostly because everyone else hates them, but they've been partners and best friends for over thirty years. Their genuine closeness and loyalty are one of their more consistently endearing qualities, to the point that them having any sort of argument or disagreement is enough to throw everyone off.
• Hidden Depths: They display the occasional flash of insight to show that there is a reason why they became detectives. They're able to deduce that there is a hidden bathroom in the precinct just by observing Boyle, and Hitchcock, of all people, goes on a hot streak when Jake falls into a slump.
  • Scully appears to be quite a good opera singer (if prone to annoying his co-workers by bursting into song with little prompting). Hitchcock seems to at least appreciate his talent.
  • Scully turns out to be a very efficient puzzle solver. He manages to reassemble half a page of a shredded document (from a small mountain of shredded paper, it must be noted) in seconds when it took Amy and Terry hours just to get three words.
  • Hitchcock's lack of real hidden depths is lampshaded in "The Party" when Scully is told to talk about opera, and Hitchcock is told to say absolutely nothing.
  • Scully's demonstrated a pick-pocketing ability and he also speaks fairly fluent French (after having been left behind at the Louvre as a child and learning the language out of necessity because his parents didn't realize he was missing until they were back in the US).
  • Hitchcock actually has the highest case closure rate in the precinct, with Terry pointing out that the man was a detective during the '80s when New York was basically The Purge come to life.
  • Hitchcock is also surprisingly 'woke' about Terry being harassed by a police officer for being black in "Moo Moo".
  • "Hitchcock & Scully" definitively reveals that they were good detectives back in the '80s, before gluttony took its toll on them.
  • When push comes to shove, they will throw themselves into danger to protect others — the key example being when they shielded a witness from a mobster's bullets. Luckily the tubs of wing sauce they strapped to their torsos made decent bulletproof vests.
  • They're surprisingly up-to-date on immigration issues and find the system to be utterly screwed-up. Amy and Rosa are both surprised and impressed when they find out that not taking down a witness' name or contact information wasn't one of their usual screw-ups, but them protecting the witness, since he's undocumented and could risk deportation if he testifies.
• Hypocrite: Took down Gio Costa in The '80s for trafficking cocaine, during the time in their lives when they were themselves doing massive amounts of cocaine. Overlaps with Necessarily Evil since it's implied doing cocaine was the only reason they ever got any work done.
• Insufferable Imbecile: Other than being incompetent and clueless dimwits, they are both selfish and usually unpleasant. This makes the others' hatred and mistreatment of them usually deserved.
• I Was Quite a Looker: The "Hitchcock & Scully" episode reveals that were quite buff and handsome in The '80s.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The "Jerk" part is probably the main reason nobody likes them, not their complete incompetence. They steal people's food, weasel their way out of work quite regularly, have an over-inflated sense of self-importance, aren't above bullying other squad members if they happen to have something over them, and it's shown that they could be decent detectives if they actually bothered to try, and they know it. Fortunately, the rest of the squad has no problem knocking them down a couple of pegs daily. They also both occasionally show that they have some redeeming qualities and aren't complete jerks.
  • Of the two, Scully is more likely to show a softer side. Best illustrated when the team declares their loyalty and support of Holt: Scully does so immediately alongside the rest of the 99, while Hitchcock has to be shamed into it.
  • In "Hitchcock & Scully", they are revealed to have been secretly protecting an NYPD informant for decades, after their captain refused to put her into witness protection; later, they instinctively jump in front of her to keep her from being shot by her murderous husband.
  • In "Admiral Peralta", it initially looks like they've been their usual incompetent selves and forgot to take contact information for a key witness in an important case. It later transpires they deliberately omitted it at the request of the witness due to them being undocumented, making them unable to testify without ICE getting involved. When this costs them the case, they're both willing to take whatever punishment comes their way rather than sell out a stranger.
  • In "Lights Out", they scrounge together enough supplies to redecorate a room in the station so Amy will have a safe place to give birth during a city-wide emergency.
• Last-Name Basis:
  • As part of being The Friend Nobody Likes. To the point where Rosa (admittedly half-delirious on cold medicine at the time) doesn't even recognize Hitchcock's first name (it's Michael) when she answers his phone for him. All the other main characters are on a First-Name Basis, barring the occasional shouted last name from bosses Terry and Holt, the latter of whom, as captain, is on more of a Full-Name Basis.
  • When the detectives are picking names out of a hat, to chose who gets the new car, Hitchcock angrily accuses Terry of filling the hat with fake names, because he doesn't recognize the name "Norm", Scully's first name.
• Lazy Bum: Both of them. They happily stay in the office as they hate to move around.
• The Load: They contribute nearly nothing. Lampshaded during a training simulation in "Tactical Village".
  Terry: Scully, I want you to do nothing. Just stand next to me and say, "Yes, Sarge."
  Scully: Okay, Sarge.
  Terry: C'mon, man.
• Mistaken for Gay: Some of Holt and Kevin's friends mistake them for a gay couple.
• No Social Skills: Hitchcock and Scully just seem to live in their own strange, not-very-bright little world.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: It's implied, from time to time, that they're actually more competent than they let on, but play up their reputation to avoid work; they already did plenty of investigations in the 70s and 80s, and now much prefer to sit at a desk. It also allows them to play off rule-breaking as honest mistakes (such as allowing an informant to escape with a bag of cash after she was denied witness protection).
  Scully: You know us, we're dum-dums.
• Obsessed with Food: They are always eating. Though unlike Boyle, they eat junk and fast food. Pretty much the only time they act like real cops is when food is involved, at which point they display genuine observation, investigative and crisis-management skills.
  Scully: What do you have in the pastry box, sir? Brownies?
  Hitchcock: No, you hold brownies from the side, he's holding it from the bottom.
  Scully: True. Maybe it's a cheesecake.
  Hitchcock: But there's no condensation on the box. It's room temperature.
  Scully: Look at the finger spread, tensing in the shoulders. He's supporting something dense.
  Both: It's a pie!
• Offscreen Teleportation: In the Season 6 episode "The Bimbo" they reveal that they can apparently do this when food is involved, as they were both able to attend two simultaneous lunches that were miles apart.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The flashback to their takedown of Gio Costa looked like something out of an action-packed cop show, rather than the workplace comedy this show actually is.
• Pet the Dog:
  • They can sometimes be persuaded to lend a hand, especially Scully. Even when they screw up (which is usually), they are often genuinely trying to help.
  • More than one episode demonstrates that they're both willing to stick their necks out to protect civilians, even in situations where the NYPD will not and they have to bend the rules to do it.
• Police Are Useless: The straightest examples on the entire show. Neither of them contributes very much and are pretty much kept around for their coffee. Peralta even said that Hitchcock is still a Detective Grade 3^note the entry-level detective rank in the NYPD despite the length of his service.
• Promoted to Opening Titles:
  • Starting from the second season, Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller have "Starring" credits appearing in the first act after the title sequence.
  • Beginning with the sixth season, Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller join the rest of the cast in the opening credit sequence.
• Really Fond of Sleeping: It appears that their only skills and interests are eating, sitting and sleeping. They have a special fondness for a rather old couch in the break room and when the precinct gets a new one, they immediately try to make it as shabby (and as comfortable) as the old one. They have a secret nap room (soundproof for maximum privacy). Scully can also fall asleep at will while sitting by his desk.
• Retcon: They were initially portrayed as being complete humps who've been that way since the 1970s. Season 6 retcons this to say that they were handsome and athletic supercops until 1986, when a chance encounter with a bucket of chicken wings turned them into complete gluttons. Hints were dropped throughout the entire series that they are capable of being good detectives when motivated and were much better at their jobs in The '70s and The '80s (Hitchcock even possessed the precinct arrest record).
• Retired Badass: Not technically retired, but flashbacks show that they were total badasses in The '80s. Those days are long gone.
  • Hitchcock has finally retired by Season 8, though the badass part was long gone by then. Except, the Grand Finale reveals he hadn't and it was just a part of his plan to win the Halloween heist. In the epilogue he is back at the precinct.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  • When their old captain refused to put their informant in witness protection, they stole a duffle bag full of money from evidence to help her disappear.
  • They "forgot" to write down the contact information for a witness to protect him from being deported.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Scully is the naïve and awkward Sensitive Guy, Hitchcock is the confident and perverted Manly Man. In "Cop-Con", Scully says he would like to be more "fearless" like Hitchcock when it comes to the ladies.
• Straw Loser: They make Charles look cool in comparison. Charles may be a bumbling and awkward Butt-Monkey, but he's clearly more liked and respected than them. In one episode, Hitchcock even wants Charles to help him to be "cool".
  Charles: I don't know how to make you cool. I'm not even that cool myself. I mean, sure, I have a pizza stone.
  Hitchcock: You have cool friends. Like Jake. I just wanna be part of a conversation where Jake uses my name and nobody insults me.
  Charles: Damn it! You ask too much.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman:
  • When Holt's pie is stolen, he turns to them for help (after deducing they couldn't have stolen it because the theft was well thought out).
  • When Rosa wanted to find out if Pimento was cheating on her, Hitchcock had all the surveillance equipment she needed. It seems that Hitchcock knows everything about covert surveillance and untraceable communication. Holt has ordered the squad to never ask how.
• Those Two Guys: They're practically inseparable, to the point where they show up to their self-evaluations together, and Hitchcock once called himself Scully by accident. Heck, the very fact that on this page they not only share a folder, but tropes that apply to both of them far outnumber the ones that are exclusive to one or the other.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: Compare their 1986 sting to bring down Gio Costa with their attempt at an undercover operation in "House Mouses".
• Tuckerization: The former gets his first name and the latter his last name from producer/writer Norm Hiscock. Likewise, the former gets his last name and the latter his first name from producer/writer Mike Scully.
• Ultimate Job Security: By all rights, they probably should have been fired quite some time ago.
• The Watson: One or both can usually be counted on to not know what's going on, allowing someone else to fill them in.

Tropes that apply to Scully

• Affectionate Nickname: He calls Jake "Jakey".
• Brick Joke: In Season 1, no one could tell if Kelly was his dog or his wife, years later in Season 7 it turned out both his wife and his dog were named Kelly.
• Companion Cube:
  • Scully's reaction when the 9-9’s old vending machine is being carted away is to act like he's losing the love of his life, complete with Hitchcock telling him he needs to be strong for her.
    Jake: Couldn't you take Scully instead?
    Scully: Yes! Take me to the land of vending machines.
  • His reaction when the precinct's new vending machine bursts into flames after Jake has the bright idea of christening it with a bottle of champagne:
    Scully: No! It should have been me! IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MEEEEEEEE— [Smash to Black]
• Endearingly Dorky: Although a bit of a jerk at times, Scully is in generally a sweet, awkward man, which earns him the affection of his Distaff Counterpart, Cindy in Cop Con.
• Expansion Pack Past: A Running Gag is that Scully has many interesting stories about his life, like becoming fluent in French after being left behind in the Lourve, and his father being a POW — but characters always cut him off and tell him that nobody cares.
• Hairstyle Inertia: Even as a young man in The '80s he had his iconic flat top.
• Hidden Depths: Secretly a kind-hearted opera singer. When he's in full formal uniform, you also get a look at his medals and awards. Not only is he surprisingly more decorated than Hitchcock, it turns out, he was one of the officers who received an award for responding to the 9/11 attacks (an honor also held by Terry and Holt), and he also has one for having helped deliver a baby.
• Hollywood Heart Attack: Quite prone to them. He's so used to it at this point he just calls them 'Oopsies'.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Since his wife left him, he was worried he was going to die alone, and just wanted to find someone that would love him for him. Thanks to Gina and Amy, he was able to get a kiss from Cindy, who is awkward like him.
• Innocently Insensitive: One of the differences between him and Hitchcock is that Scully will far more often slip into this. While he does have his moments of genuine jerkishness, he is often sincerely well-meaning but his awkwardness and Skewed Priorities (as well as a general inability to grasp that not everyone shares those priorities) means that he can get quite offensive without meaning to.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Downplayed. Scully will every so often show that despite being a lazy, selfish social misfit, he's really quite soft-hearted. He gets far more Pet the Dog moments than Hitchcock does and seems more amiable as a rule, which is why he is treated better than Hitchcock, who is flat out ignored. He's even gone against the entire Nine-Nine and called them out in disgust over their single-minded desire to win a Christmas caroling competition over the MTA, pointing out that Christmas carols are meant to spread joy and not used to settle petty rivalries.
• Made of Iron: With 4 unheard-of kinds of diabetes, a heart so swollen it's the size of a giraffe's and various other medical maladies, he should have been in the ground years ago.
• Manchild: Or, as Jake once described him, "some strange giant baby." He's shy and weirdly innocent for a New York cop, and unlike Hitchcock, his obliviousness seems more like naivete rather than pure ego.
• Nausea Fuel: In-universe, Scully has a lot of problems with his body and openly and spontaneously informs others about them, much to their disgust.
  Scully: [shows Jake the sole of his foot, which looks swollen and has an orange discoloration]
  Jake: I don't see anything.
  Scully: That's because it's all wart.
  Jake: [spits out his sandwich, gagging]
  • Scully's feet smell so bad even Hitchcock gets involved in destroying Scully's shoes... using the precinct's bomb disposal equipment.
• Permanent Elected Official: In "Jake and Sophia", it turns out that Scully is the precinct's union representative mainly because no one else wants the job, and he only takes it because the annual meetings provide a party sub. True to form, he's hopeless at the job.
  Rosa: He's been our rep for twelve years and he still pronounces 'union' as 'onion'.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: There are some situations where Scully is useful, which causes him to get less flak overall than Hitchcock. Peralta brought him along on one of his investigations due to his relative fluency in French, and his puzzle-solving skills allowed him to reassemble a shredded document in vastly less time than it would have taken Amy and Rosa.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: In Cop-Con, Gina and Amy help Scully talk to Cindy, a woman he likes, and he gets a kiss from her by the end of the episode and is later said to be dating her.

Tropes that apply to Hitchcock

• Casanova Wannabe: As a Dirty Old Man, Scully bringing up a time he asked out a breastfeeding mother.
  • Kinda justified, as in the past he was quite the dashing ladies' man. After Wing Sluts though...
• Catchphrase: "No doy!" on the rare occasion that someone praises his detective skills.
• Characterization Marches On: In the earlier episodes, he lacked his perverted tendencies, being unable to even recognize a penis.
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Anything that Hitchcock thinks is a good idea 'by definition' requires reconsideration.
• Dirty Old Man: He lusts after women a fraction of his age, uses any excuse to go into the women's bathroom, and hits on every woman in sight no matter how inappropriate the situation.
• Drives Like Crazy: When Hitchcock drives, it's harrowing enough to make Rosa scream in terror... along with Hitchcock himself.
  Hitchcock: I have nothing to live for, and I drive like it.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: Subverted; he doesn't think so. It's a tattoo of himself on his left bicep... with a gun in his mouth. He insists he's blowing smoke off the barrel — it's cool!
  Terry: The barrel is in your mouth! That was a suicide, man!
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • He's rude, has said some rather politically incorrect things, and doesn't seem to care who he offends (assuming he even notices). However, he always stops well short of actual prejudice. He admits his question about Rosa's sexuality was "not tasteful," but he doesn't care that she and Holt are bisexual and gay, respectively, and he's willing to stick his neck out to protect an undocumented immigrant from getting deported. He's an insensitive jerk most of the time, but he's not a bigot.
  • He is also not racist and called out Scully when he didn't understand that Terry was racially profiled.
  Hitchcock: He got stopped for being black, get woke Scully!
• Fan Disservice: Hitchcock taking his shirt off at the slightest excuse.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: While he and Scully are this to the Nine-Nine, Hitchcock plays this trope much straighter than Scully due to his much more unabashed sleaziness and lechery. The other detectives can at least tolerate and be friendly towards Scully because Scully's much nicer and more respectful but with Hitchcock they're visibly less patient.
• Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: In The '80s he was a Long-Haired Pretty Boy.
• The Klutz: Constantly spills stuff on his shirt, and regularly gets into the most inane accidents, like swallowing his own goldfish.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: He was this and a hunk in The '80s.
• Prematurely Bald: He apparently went bald at fifteen. Retconned in Season 6 when we see his younger, 30-something self and he still had a full head of hair.
• Serial Spouse: Hitchcock has six ex-wives and was even married multiple times to one of them.
• Small Name, Big Ego: While Scully seems to have a more realistic understanding of his place on the pecking order (and appropriately low self-confidence), Hitchcock seems convinced that he's a lot brighter and cooler than he is, and appears to view himself as Peralta's best friend-in-waiting.
• Token Evil Teammate: To the Nine-Nine. He's much more of a jerk, pervert, and politically incorrect.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Implied, as Scully is noticeably a jerk when around Hitchcock, compared to a Jerk with a Heart of Gold when alone.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: One of the running gags of the show is that Hitchcock goes looking for reasons to take off his shirt.

---