Dirty Cop / Real Life

In this subpage, please limit examples to instances where the officer in question was actually convicted.

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Africa

South Africa

• Andre Stander, a South African police officer, became notorious for living a double life as a prolific bank robber. He robbed up to thirty banks before his arrest, some of which he committed while on his lunch break and later revisited as the investigating officer. His escape from prison and subsequent exploits led him to become the focus of an international manhunt, ending when he was killed by police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1984.
• Speaking of South Africa, its national police service (which was already unpopular because of previous violent acts such as the dragging death of Mido Macia and the Marikana massacre) has been plagued since 2018 with corruption scandal after corruption scandal, implicating multiple senior officers including the force's lieutenant-general—the second-most senior police official in the country!

Asia

Hong Kong

• The Hong Kong Police Force was long-considered a hopelessly corrupt organization with large numbers of street cops and supervisors being in the pockets of the triads in one way or another. The situation finally came to a head in the 1970s with the arrest and conviction of Peter Godber, a chief superintendent who accepted millions in bribes. Public outcry at seeing how such a senior official was corrupt led to the formation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption and a citywide sweep that revealed that corruption was so widespread that the Hong Kong government decided to offer blanket amnesty because properly pursuing all the cases would have left the city without a functional police force. The 1980s were spent completely overhauling the Hong Kong police and turning it into one of the best-regarded police forces in the world until the 2010s, when new scrutiny started revealing systemic problems within the force.

Europe

Finland

• For several years, the head of the Helsinki Police Anti-Drug Unit was Jari Aarnio, who was secretly conspiring with the Rogues Gallery gang to allow their drug shipments to come in, as well as extorting other underworld figures, and allegedly hiding evidence of a contract killing.

France

• Between 1986 and 1994, François Vérove—a member of the French Gendarmerie, then a motorcyclist in the Republican Guard, then an officer in the Paris police force—was living a double life as "Le Grêlé" (Pockmarked Man), a Serial Killer and rapist who murdered at least three people in and around Paris, one of the victims being an 11-year-old girl. In 2021, decades after the killings ended and two years after he had retired from the police, Vérove received a summons to submit a DNA sample for the Pockmarked Man investigation. He subsequently committed suicide via barbiturate overdose, leaving behind a note confessing to the murders.
• Michel Neyret of Lyon, France, started by paying informers with the drugs he seized before embezzling them for himself, selling them to earn money for both him and his wife. He also oftentimes gave confidential information to some of his friends in the mob. He was sentenced to four years of prison in 2016.
• Pierre Bonny was a French policeman known for his less-than-reglementary methods (such as negotiating with criminals to get evidence in the Stavisky case) until his dismissal in 1936 after his conviction for blackmail, came back on 1942 as a leader of the French branch of The Gestapo and was shot for treason on 1945.

Sweden

• Hurvamorden, the worst spree killing in Swedish history, was committed by a police officer named Tore Hedin, who had been assigned to investigate his own first murder a year previously.

United Kingdom

• One possible inspiration for the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Robin Hood legend is Philip Marc, High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests in the time of King John. There is a specific clause in the Magna Carta demanding his removal, along with other officials and their relatives accused of corruption.
• Charles Hitchens, Undermarshal of London (what passed for top law enforcement official, a bought position) and leader of a gang called the Mathematicians. Jonathan Wild got a leg up when Hitchens recruited him to temporarily run his organisation after Hitchens got caught in a corruption scandal and got told by city officials to take a break for a few years, at which point Wild pretty much took over entirely by being more competent — at both the corruption (Hitchens was a bit too blatant at blackmailing, often appearing in person or sending signed letters, and a bit too greedy, driving away allies) and the actual thief-taking didn't even really do much of it against rival gangs.
• Jonathan Wild, a thief in London who posed as a public-spirited crimefighter entitled the "Thief-Taker General" in the early 1700s. While appearing on the side of the law, Wild ran a gang of thieves who robbed from wealthy households and would claim that his "thief takers" (bounty hunters) had "found" the stolen merchandise, and he would return it to its rightful owners for a reward. He would offer the police aid in finding the thieves who were actually rivals or members of his own gang who had refused to cooperate with his taking the largest cut. The harsh penalties for selling stolen goods allowed Wild to control his gang very effectively, as he would simply apprehend them as thieves. Thanks to his position of power, Wild held a virtual monopoly on crime in London. Legends arose surrounding the management of his "empire." Things fell apart for Wild in 1724, when London political life faced a crisis of public confidence. A wary public began to view authority figures with suspicion of corruption. After spending the year trying to eliminate a notorious housebreaker and regular jailbreaker (who was finally hanged in November), Wild was arrested in early 1725 trying to jailbreak one of his men. When it became clear to Wild's gang that their leader would not escape, they began to turn on him until all of his activities, including his grand scheme of running and then hanging thieves, became known. Additionally, evidence was offered as to Wild's frequent bribery of public officers. He was tried at the Old Bailey on May 15, 1725, on two indictments of privately stealing 50 yards of lace from Catherine Statham. He was convicted of the second charge, sentenced to death, and was hanged a week later on May 24th.
• Similar to the above, the Macdaniel affair had some thief takers led by Stephen Macdaniel fabricating false evidence against innocent men to collect the rewards for their convictions. This was to the point that they got these innocents wrongly hanged. Following the Wild scandal, this was in fact the main impetus for the British government to abolish thief-taking and set up a public police force.
• The notorious 1960s scandal surrounding the Metropolitan Police's Obscene Publications Squad, nicknamed the "Dirty Squad", who became notorious for persecuting hippies for making art depicting nudity while taking money from gangsters to allow illegal hard-core commercial porn to be openly sold all over Soho. The open hypocrisy was eventually too much for politicians, leading to a series of corruption inquiries and trials (warning: NSFW artwork reproduced on linked page) that exposed widespread corruption within many of the Met's specialist squads.
• This was by no means the first such scandal involving the Metropolitan Police: one of the biggest happened in the Victorian era, the so-called Turf Fraud Scandal, in which at least three of the force's highest-ranking detectives were convicted of taking money from confidence tricksters to protect them from arrest and prosecution.
• Derek Ridgewell, a British transport police officer jailed for seven years for conspiring with criminals to steal from the Royal Mail, was later found to have falsified evidence against numerous black suspects which led to their convictions, including the Oval Four and the Stockwell Six. Basically, he would approach young black men in railway stations, accuse them of theft, arrest them, and then lie on the stand to get them convicted. He would also have them charged with assaulting a police officer if they resisted.
• In the 2020s, the Metropolitan Police was hit by two scandals back-to-back. First was the murder of Sarah Everard by Met officer Wayne Couzens, which then emboldened a woman who had been raped by David Carrick to come forward, eventually leading to him being revealed to be a Serial Rapist who even his coworkers had nicknamed "the rapist". Both of them were convicted and received life sentences.

North America

Canada

• Benoît Roberge was a Montreal police investigator tasked with taking down the local chapter of the Hell's Angels, until he got too close to the motorcycle gang and was caught selling them information. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

United States

• The LAPD's Rampart scandal, involving widespread corruption on the part of CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), the unit that the LAPD put together to combat the street gang violence that was going on in Los Angeles in The '90s. Over seventy police officers were implicated in misconduct, ranging from murdering suspects and planting weapons on them, to actively joining gangs like the Bloods, bank robbery, and other crimes. Essentially, what was intended to be an anti-gang task force became the most powerful criminal gang in the city. This went even further as the scandal led to the Police Chief, District Attorney, and the Mayor of Los Angeles all eventually being not re-appointed or re-elected (after allegations arose that the chief had tried to censor the lead investigators in the Rampart case, and one of these detectives resigned as a form of protest). Over 100 criminal convictions were also overturned as a result. This scandal is what inspired The Shield, mentioned above under Live-Action TV.
• Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were detectives with the Organized Crime Homicide Unit of the NYPD's Major Case Squad. They were also informants and assassins for The Mafia, murdering eight people on orders from the Lucchese crime family. Eppolito and Caracappa were given pay and responsibilities equivalent to "made men" in the Lucchese family, a status that they didn't officially qualify for on account of being police officers. Ironically, before he was caught, Eppolito had bit parts in a few movies including GoodFellas (where he played "Moe Black's brother, Fat Andy") and Lost Highway. He also had the audacity to publish an autobiography entitled Mafia Cop, in which he claimed to be an honest cop who fell under suspicion because several of his relatives had been mafiosi of the Gambino crime family, although this wound up biting Eppolito in the ass when the sister of one of his victims recognized him during a TV appearance promoting the book. Both Eppolito and Carapacca were convicted of murder, dying in prison while serving life sentences.
• Ron Previte was another example of a cop being on the mob's payroll and later became a made man for the Philly Mob despite the ban on inducting police officers. Prior to this, Previte already had a long rap sheet for extortion and bookmaking.
• Richard "Dick" Cain, a Chicago vice cop, an investigator for the U.S Attorney's office, and head of the Cook County Sheriff Department's Special Investigation Unit. He was also an enforcer and hitman for the Chicago Outfit and a personal friend of its boss, Sam Giancana. After being drummed out of law enforcement for perjury in the mid-1960s, he operated as a full-time gangster, became an FBI informant in order to undermine his mob rivals (much like Whitey Bulger would do years later), and was eventually assassinated when the Outfit bosses learned that he was plotting to kill them and take over.
• On the matter of Bulger, the reason he became so powerful was because of his relationship with his FBI handler John Connolly, who had been raised in the same South Boston neighborhood as Bulger and had known him since childhood. As Bulger's handler and The Consigliere, Connolly took whatever intelligence Bulger could provide on the Boston Mafia in exchange for aiding and abetting Bulger's violent takeover of the city's underworld. In 2008, Connolly was convicted of racketeering, obstruction of justice, and murder and is currently serving a forty-year prison sentence.
• "Big Tom" Brown, the Prohibition-era police chief of Saint Paul, Minnesota, not only looked the other way with regards to local speakeasies and brothels, but actively collaborated with violent criminals, including John Dillinger, Fred Barker, and local mob boss Leon Gleckman. It was partly because of his practice of making Saint Paul an open safe haven for fugitives that the FBI was established. While Brown wasn't convicted (and actually died a free man in 1959), he was kicked out of the department once his crimes were exposed at a public hearing.
• Antoinette Frank, a New Orleans patrol officer, encountered a local drug dealer named Rogers Lacaze and found herself madly in love with him. The two became partners in crime, pulling people over and robbing them in Frank's squad car. They eventually committed a violent robbery of a Vietnamese restaurant where Frank worked off-duty as a security guard, in which Lacaze shot and killed Richard William, another NOPD officer moonlighting as a security guard for the restaurant, while Frank shot two of the owners' family, and tried to kill a third before other police arrived. Frank was convicted for her role in the triple-murder and was sentenced to death. After she was sentenced, it came to light that she'd killed her father about a year before the robbery and buried his body under her house, but the authorities chose not to prosecute her since she was already on death row.
• The argument of "dirty cop" and police relations with minorities was a highlight of the coverage of the Michael Slager case in which Slager shot and killed Walter Scott. According to Slager, he attempted to write up Scott for a traffic charge, only for Scott to run. Somehow, Slager chased him down and hit him with his Taser, but felt "threatened" and was apparently forced to shoot and kill Scott in self-defense... at least according to his police report. However, a video captured by an eyewitness showed Slager shooting a fleeing, unarmed man in the back from nearly 20 ft away. Furthermore, one of the details uncertain in the video is a black object dropped near Scott and later picked up by Slager once other officers arrived, which some interpreted as an attempt to plant evidence. He was charged with murder after the video went viral, and the police department was apparently investigated for ignoring complaints against Slager going back to 2013. Slager's trial ended in a hung jury, after which he was charged with federal civil rights violations and pled guilty in return for state charges being dropped. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison for it.
• Baltimore police officers have been accused of this a few times since the death of Freddie Gray, who broke his back while in the back of a police van in 2015.
  • First was the Justice Department investigation into the Baltimore Police in the immediate aftermath, which concluded that a number of department policies were disproportionately targeting minorities, with one citation from the 164-page report standing out.
    In some cases, unconstitutional stops resulted from supervisory officers’ explicit instructions. During a ride-along with Justice Department officials, a BPD sergeant instructed a patrol officer to stop a group of young African-American males on a street corner, question them, and order them to disperse. When the officer protested that he had no valid reason to stop the group, the sergeant replied, “Then make something up.”
  • In the summer of 2017, a number of arrests were thrown out due to body-cam footage capturing officers planting drugs in people's cars and homes in order to "find" them during a search.
  • Then an entire task force was brought down thanks to corruption, which was eventually dramatized in the HBO miniseries We Own This City.
• Atlanta P.D. Officer James Burns was charged with the murder of Devaris Caine Rogers as well as assault with a deadly weapon and violation of the officer's oath. Burns responded to an off-duty police officer's call regarding suspicious activity around an apartment complex. He shot unarmed Rogers in the head. Chief Turner terminated Burns after an investigation declared excessive force.
• Charles Joseph "Joe" Gliniewicz of the Fox Lake, Illinois police force. When he initially turned up dead on September 1, 2015, he was thought to have been killed with his own .40-caliber service weapon by three unknown assailants. But two months of intense investigation led authorities to conclude that Gliniewicz had actually committed suicide because he found out that his long-term criminal activity faced imminent exposure from an internal financial audit that had been under his direct control. He had been embezzling and laundering money for about seven years from a youth program for prospective cops. He had even gone as far as to ask a prominent gang member to kill the town administrator who was conducting the audit, but the murder never took place. Further investigation discovered a litany of issues during Gliniewicz's career, including threatening an emergency dispatcher with a gun, allegations of sexual harassment, and numerous suspensions.
• Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was sentenced to 263 years in prison for raping thirteen black women in 2016.
• 1984 saw the entire Key West police department declared a criminal enterprise under RICO laws and a number of its officers were arrested on charges of running a protection racket for drug smugglers. At least twelve were convicted.
• Fellow officers at the LAPD didn't think much of traffic cop William Earnest Leasure, so much so that he was nicknamed "Mild Bill". The soft-spoken "Mild Bill" spent his off-hours running a criminal underworld that stole rich peoples' yachts and conducted contract killings. He got caught as a result of a sting that the Oakland Police Department was doing on one of his acquaintances, a paroled bank robber, and initially his boss and others thought it was all a cover for him to do undercover work in jail until the truth came out.
• Obviously, there are too many examples to count, but Al Capone's way of amassing control over the Chicago underworld and his bootlegging empire was to buy copious amounts of protection from the law, including paying off numerous cops on the beat, Prohibition agents, and even Chicago's mayor William Hale Thompson.
• One of the reasons that Prohibition failed was because the Republican-controlled Congress didn't believe in big government spending and wanted municipal police to enforce the Volstead Act. Most municipal police, and many county sheriffs, tended to turn a blind eye to bootlegging operations in their jurisdiction, either because they didn't think it was their responsibility to enforce federal laws, because they disagreed with Prohibition, or because the bootleggers paid them protection money.
• Henry Hubbard Jr. was a San Diego police officer with an exemplary record, whom no one suspected also was a serial rapist whom his department had been desperately trying to hunt down for months with no success. Naturally, he found it easy to evade capture by his colleagues initially, as he sat in on the briefings regarding the hunt. He was uncovered only when he'd failed in attacking Charisma Carpenter and two of her friends. Carpenter got away while he left crucial evidence behind, such as his police-issue flashlight. Hubbard was hunted down, identified, and convicted of the rapes, getting 56 years in prison. Carpenter was largely responsible for this, as she held onto the flashlight and turned it over to the police, something not many have known about the actress.
• In 1997, a group of NYPD officers brutalized and sexually assaulted Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. At least five cops ended up being convicted of involvement in the assault and/or attempting to cover it up.
• Len Davis of the New Orleans Police Department was known for his unconventional policing style, causing both complaints against him and a Medal of Merit in 1993. He ended up being sentenced to death in 1996 after conspiring with a drug dealer to kill a witness of him beating suspects.
• The murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD):
  • Derek Chauvin of the MPD will go down as the cop whose killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, culminated in international backlash towards aggressive policing. During Memorial Day weekend, Chauvin killed Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly 9 minutes. Subsequent investigations revealed that Chauvin had a long history of misconduct like pepper spraying crowds at night clubs, avoiding taxes, and attending the "Killology" seminars that taught police how to shoot people more efficiently; the "Killology" courses are noteworthy as Chauvin attended them with the aid of police unions even though they are banned by both the Minneapolis Police Chief and Mayor. Chauvin would be found guilty of murder in the second and third degrees, as well as manslaughter in the second degree, and received 22.5 years of prison time. He then pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the death of Floyd as well as the beating of a teenage boy. He was also charged with evading taxes along with his now ex-wife, which they pled guilty to in March 2023.
  • MPD officers Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and J. Alexander Kueng were also convicted for their parts in Floyd's death, for helping Chauvin restrain him and denying him medical care. They were all convicted of federal civil rights violations on February 24, 2022. Thomas Lane pleaded guilty to a state manslaughter charge on May 18, 2022 followed by Kueng on October 24, 2022. Tou Thou was convicted by bench trial on May 2, 2023 and was sentenced August 7.
  • The Floyd episode led to more serious scrutiny toward the MPD in general, culminating in a damning Justice Department report released in June 2023 which catalogued numerous instances of excessive force, racial discrimination, disability discrimination, violation of free speech rights, and pervasive coverups of officer misconduct on the part of both the department and the city. The Minneapolis City Council had voted in 2020 to dismantle and replace the MPD entirely, only for the plan to be put on ice when the mayor vetoed the idea.
• Chicago police detective Jon Burge was plagued throughout his career with accusations of obtaining confessions through Cold-Blooded Torture, to the point that he was sacked from the force in 1993, although a trial for allegedly torturing two suspected Cop Killers failed to reach a verdict. A review following his termination found that Burge had used torture to obtain numerous convictions, some in death penalty cases, but he could not be charged because of the Statute of Limitations. He was instead convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying on the stand about whether or not he had tortured suspects.
• Serial Killer Cops take this trope to its absolute extreme:
  • Gerard Schaefer is possibly the worst case here, being imprisoned in 1973 for two murders committed while he was a sheriff's deputy. However, it's suspected he killed more than thirty people.
  • Joseph James DeAngelo probably gives Schaefer a run for his dubious money, being the notorious "Golden State Killer" who committed 13 murders, 51 rapes, and 120 burglaries across California between 1974 and 1986, with the first five years of his crime spree overlapping with his career as a police officer in the cities of Exeter and Auburn.
• As detailed in the documentary Trial 4, this formed a large part of the overturning of Sean Ellis's conviction for murdering officer John Mulligan in a Miscarriage of Justice. The three main investigators, officers John Brazil, Ken Acerra and Walter Robinson, were later jailed for using their position to rob drug dealers under the pretext of raids. This was initially deemed not to be relevant to the case. Then Ellis's defence team uncovered evidence that Mulligan had also participated in the robberies, raising the possibility that his accomplices had wanted to close the case as quickly as possible to prevent their crimes from coming to light. They also uncovered two other potential leads ignored by police implicating other people in murdering Mulligan in retaliation for his abusing his position for sex. This, and questions over the reliability of witnesses, was enough to get Ellis's conviction overturned.

Oceania

Australia

• Roger "The Dodger" Rogerson, formerly one of the most decorated officers in the New South Wales Police Force, has become synonymous with this trope in Australia. Over the course of his career (and afterward) Rogerson was accused of police brutality, drug trafficking, fabricating confessions, at least two murders, and attempting to kill a fellow police officer who refused a bribe to bury evidence in a case against him. Despite his infamy, he enjoyed a measure of celebrity thanks to his exploits. He and fellow cop Glen McNamara were convicted of the murder of a Sydney college student that was allegedly the result of a drug deal gone wrong in 2016.
• Terry Lewis, former commissioner of the Queensland Police, lost his knighthood after a judicial inquiry implicated him in acts of forgery, perjury, and accepting $700,000 in bribes in exchange for protecting criminal rackets. He was sentenced to a total of ten-and-a-half years in prison.

South America

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