Token Good Cop

Det. Arnold Flass: (offers a cut of protection money) Don't suppose you want a taste. (Gordon shakes him off) I just keep offering, thinking maybe someday you'll get wise.
Det. Sgt. James Gordon: There's nothing wise in what you do, Flass.
Flass: Well, Jimbo, you don't take the taste, makes us guys nervous.
Gordon: I'm no rat! In a town this bent, who's there to rat to, anyway?

— Batman Begins

In fiction, it's rather common for law-enforcement agencies of all types to be composed entirely of bumbling idiots who end up getting caught in their own handcuffs, vicious thugs who'll beat you to within an inch of your life for jaywalking, or crooks who happen to have uniforms and badges. But occasionally, there's an exception to this rule. Enter the Token Good Cop.

Normally an ally of the protagonists, if not the protagonist themselves, the Token Good Cop is somehow immune to the malaise that has affected their colleagues, being genuinely committed to upholding the law, protecting innocents, and bringing criminals to justice. They tend to come in two forms: an idealistic rookie who isn't aware of the omnipresent corruption, and might join thinking they can change things, or a crusty old veteran who can remember the days before said corruption and/or has been personally wronged by criminals. Alternatively, there can be more than one Token Good Cop — a duo or small group of genuinely competent/heroic/sane law enforcement personnel are also valid examples.

At some point in the narrative, the Token Good Cop will often be faced with a major dilemma of the To Be Lawful or Good variety: continue to abide by the rules of the system that they know is horrendously flawed if not outright evil, or break the very laws they had sworn to defend in the name of justice? If they choose the latter, there's a good chance they might eventually leave the force, perhaps dramatically, and become a Private Detective^note Often of the hardboiled variety, or even a Vigilante Man, to carry on their work outside the rotten system. If they go with the former, they may become an Internal Reformist determined to do what good they can from their position, or fully give up on trying to maintain their principles, becoming a Fallen Hero. If they stand by the system when it's obviously an awful idea to do so, they might be Lawful Stupid.

Given that the existence of a Token Good Cop requires an entire law enforcement agency to be ineffectual, they tend to appear in Wretched Hives or any area ruled by a Small-Town Tyrant, Corrupt Politician or even The Empire. Why the police aren't doing their job properly, however, is commonly related to Real Life concerns and attitudes surrounding policing: back in The '70s, the Token Good Cop might be portrayed as a rule-breaking maverick who is actually able to get things done in the face of stifling bureaucracy, while in The '80s and The '90s it was more common for the cop to be the last honest man standing in the midst of an Urban Hellscape (such as The Big Rotten Apple) while their would-be colleagues are either hopelessly ineffectual or in league with the City Noir's rampant corruption. Following the rise to prominence of the Black Lives Matter Movement and concerns of racial justice in The New '10s, it's become more common to portray institutionally racist police departments who either blatantly target minorities or ignore the Rabid Cops who do, in which case the Token Good Cop, often a Minority Police Officer, is the only one willing to challenge this problem.

It's also possible for a Token Good Cop to exist in a Comedy, in which case much of the above does not apply unless it is parodied or Played for Laughs: instead, they're likely an exasperated Only Sane Man, who is often outright ignored by their worse-than-useless colleagues.

If the Token Good Cop is opposed to the heroes, they're probably a Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist. Likely to start out as a By-the-Book Cop, and might overlap with The Incorruptible and/or Always Gets His Man. See also The Last DJ, if the Token Good Cop's decision to stick to their principles is hindering their progress through the ranks, and compare and contrast Minion with an F in Evil, whose own innate lack of malice prevents them from effectively following through with their sinister master's orders. May provide a justification for The Main Characters Do Everything, given that the rest of the police department don't want/can't be trusted to help with a case. If the work is especially bleak, they may fall victim to Too Good for This Sinful Earth, or end up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope to become He Who Fights Monsters. Subtrope of Token Good Teammate and The Only One.

No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cowboy Bebop: This was Jet's backstory. He was a cop with a strong sense of justice and integrity, but unfortunately for him, virtually the entire rest of the force was on the Syndicate's payroll. This led to him getting ambushed by his own partner and losing his arm. Fed up with how things were and his inability to change them on his own, he quit the force to become a bounty hunter.
• Moriarty the Patriot: Lestrade is featured as an innately good cop genuinely trying to help people and unable to really handle the discovery that Scotland Yard is hopelessly corrupt. His friend Patterson was so jaded by the corruption at Scotland Yard that he worked for Professor Moriarty as his mole to keep the police in line.
• Psycho-Pass: Akane Tsunemori is the only inspector in the Public Safety Bureau who takes her job seriously and manages to keep her hue clear after several inspectors failed to do which led them to their demotions as enforcers or getting killed off. She's also the only character who knows how flawed the Sibyl System is and believes that the human factor is still needed in bringing justice. Her strong sense of justice is the reason the Sibyl System is interested in her because they value her input.

Comic Books

• Batman: This is Jim Gordon's consistent presentation throughout the franchise, being a brave, honest, and steadfast ally to the eponymous hero. Whilst presentations of the GCPD generally fall under some combination of so corrupt they're basically no different to a gang in their own right, or well-meaning overall but utterly incompetent, ineffectual against the real threats and just plain useless, Gordon is always the clear exception.
  • Batman: Year One showing Gordon's arrival in Gotham lays it out clearly, with him being the one honest cop in a city so dirty that everyone treated him as if he were corrupt for not getting with the program. Whilst he sincerely makes efforts to change things, eventually finds allies (in another new detective, Sarah Essen, and beat cop Merkel) and has some noticeable success, the sheer scale of the corruption leads to him coming around to supporting Batman.
  • Gotham Central noticeably focuses on Gordon's attempts to avert this, by creating the Major Crimes Unit to be filled with the few honest detectives and officers in the force, each member hand-selected by him in the hopes of bringing some integrity to the force. They still are regularly hampered by the large-scale incompetence and corruption, not to mention distrust sometimes to the point of direct sabotage, by the rest of the GCPD (and even a few of their own members didn't live up to expectations), but they're still a noticeable step up.
  • Batman: Gordon of Gotham:
    • In Gordon's Law, reports that at least one Dirty Cop was involved in a bloody heist leave Gordon isolated from his colleagues as he can't trust many of them, and even some he can trust (like Harvey Bullock) are hesitant to break the Blue Wall (although Bullock does apologize for this after seeing Gordon was right). Gordon is left investigating with the sole help of a nearby sheriff, an FBI agent, and (unbeknownst to him, as they're Working the Same Case rather than coordinating) Robbery Division Captain Danzien and Officer Bell (a mole he planted in the villains' group). And it turns out the FBI agent is crooked too.
    • In Gordon of Gotham, many of the Chicago cops a young James Gordon deals with are corrupt or tease Jim for his work ethic and do-gooder instincts, but one beat cop gives him a tip while saying some of them think he's getting a bad rap, and a Reasonable Authority Figure superior helps him start over after he gets run out of Chicago.
  • Batman: Earth One: Interestingly flipped on its head and played with in this Elseworlds. In a universe where Jim Gordon is just as corrupt and ineffectual as every other cop in the GCPD (because his wife was murdered and he's terrified his daughter will be next if he actively opposes corruption), it's actually Harvey Bullock who takes this role. Whilst an out-of-touch, smug outsider who comes to Gotham in order to boost his profile, Bullock is a genuinely honest and dedicated cop, who starts up proper investigations, even into the cases Gordon tells him to drop. His influence and support actually help Gordon regain his former backbone and allows him to grow into his more familiar role in the franchise as the series goes on, with his rise in the ranks seeing him able to bring about some real improvements to the GCPD.
  • Nightwing: Officer Rohrbach is among the few cops that Nightwing can actually count on until he joins the Blüdhaven police himself — at which point she introduces him to a circle of honest cops who actually do their job in secret from the rest of the force.
• Cinema Purgatorio: In Hushed Up, a slapstick shootout between cops and robbers gets all the bystanders killed with their reckless aiming. Only one cop shows anger and calls attention to this, which gets him shot at the end by another member of the force to cover it up.
• The Punisher:
  • Several versions of Frank Castle (such as in a What If? and on Earth-1610) have him be the only honest cop in his precinct, whose partner and superiors set him and his family up to die in an effort to stop his efforts, leading to his Start of Darkness as The Punisher.
  • Nearly every NYPD cop to appear in more than one issue of The Punisher MAX is corrupt, a weasely bureaucrat, or compromises their integrity by abetting Castle. Paul Budiansky, on the other hand, is only a Cowboy Cop during moments of absolute desperation and realizes that he and Frank are Not So Similar and not natural allies after the one time they come face to face.
• Sin City: The Basin City Police Department is staffed by crooked cops at the employ of mobsters and corrupt politicians. The sole exception seems to be Detective John Hartigan, in his story, "That Yellow Bastard," he's the only cop who goes after Roark Jr., a serial pedophile rapist who is protected from legal prosecution by his father, Senator Roark.
• Spawn: Brains and Brawn duo Twitch and Sam are useful and honest cops surrounded by bleakness and corruption that don’t stop at the door to their own precinct.

Fan Works

• Chaos Effect: Original Character Yuri Gardner, Téa's older half-sister, seems to be the only detective in the Domino City Police who's not swayed by people with a lot of money and influence telling the police what crimes they can and can't investigate. She endures this for months after her sister's kidnapping upsets the balance of the city, up until the police chief, her own father, tries to murder the whistle-blower for refusing to change his story. Weeks later, when other cops try to make trouble for her by 'misplacing' a couple of bricks of cocaine in an inventory assigned to her, she finally gave them a piece of her mind and walked out. Fortunately, she found new employment shortly thereafter as Mai Valentine's bodyguard.
• Johanna Mason: They Will Never See Me Cry: Iberio is the only notable District 7 Peacekeeper who isn't a totalitarian brute.
• The Victors Project: Most of the Peacekeepers (even ones who end up joining the Rebels) are authoritarian thugs, prone to taking bribes, or have Yandere tendencies, but Tiberias Lockwood in District 4, Core in District 7, and Julius and Polina in District 10 have assimilated into their communities to varying degrees and get along well with various rebels without ever taking money from them.

Films — Animated

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney): Phoebus is the decent and honourable captain of Judge Frollo's guards, who initially dutifully follows orders, despite growing discomfort with Frollo's brutal persecution of the Romani. However, when Frollo orders him to burn down a house with an innocent family inside, he flat-out refuses, and starts openly opposing his former boss.
• Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes: Most of the beat cops and guards in the movie could be better at their jobs: between how Butch is preoccupied with trying to screw his partner out of the reward they’d get for solving the case, plenty of unnamed cops spend the movie unhesitatingly pursuing the innocent Red as a suspect, and Spike gets some The Guards Must Be Crazy failures. However, Spike's son and apprentice Tyke notices a robbery that Spike overlooks, and Droopy is a thorough and dedicated officer who captures two of the villains.

Films — Live-Action

• 48 Hours: Noble Bigot with a Badge Jack may not be an exceptional cop or person, but he gets Character Development and does his job diligently, while in the sequel, his fellow prominent cops are two corrupt detectives and a Smug Snake Internal Affairs investigator.
• Abominable: The sheriff and most of his men ignore Preston and his claims that Bigfoot is killing his neighbors, but Deputy McBride accepts this may be more than a prank call, goes to investigate, and gets a Big Damn Heroes moment.
• Alita: Battle Angel: Iron City has no police force, leaving it to the Bounty Hunters to keep criminals off the street, but aside from Wide-Eyed Idealist Alita, her adoptive father, and, to a lesser extent McTeague, they only care about collecting paychecks, which leads them to let criminals who aren't wanted run free and pursue innocent people with prices on their heads.
• Attack On Darfur: The African Union peacekeepers are mostly unhappily bound by their orders not to defend villagers against the genocidal Janjaweed guerrillas, but Captain Tobakme eventually decides to Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! and tries to defend the village against overwhelming attackers.
• Batman (1989): Many Gotham cops moonlight as mob enforcers, but Commissioner Gordon is a dedicated public servant who is out to break up the mob.
• Beverly Hills Cop II: Captain Bogomil, Billy, and Taggart are the last LAPD investigators who haven't been replaced with political stooges by the new police chief.
• The Big Heat: Bannion is a homicide detective who is willing to defy the mob in a city where most cops are taking their money or are too afraid to stand up to them (The Don even has the commissioner assign police security to patrol his outside grounds). Most of Bannion's help in the second act comes from civilians and it is only at the end of the movie that Lieutenant works up enough courage and integrity to help him.
• Birds of Prey: Renee Montoya is a Gotham cop with a sharp eye for crime scene clues and an honorable drive to protect the city. However, her fellow cops are prone to either ignore her deductions or, if they do produce results, take all the credit for her accomplishments. Ultimately Renee comes to realize that she will never achieve justice or earn respect at the GCPD and quits the force, joining with her newfound vigilante friends to create the Birds of Prey.
• Blade Runner: The LAPD is full of officers who are fine with discriminating against or hunting down Replicants, but Punch-Clock Hero Deckard (who hates his job) and his Creepy Good assistant and eventual Secret-Keeper Gaff are exceptions.
• Brewster McCloud: Except for goofy but intrepid beat cop Johnson, the Houston Police Department is so incompetent that the city fathers have to bring in San Francisco PD's Lt. Frank Shaft (who the local cops don't extend much help to) to handle the murder investigation.
• Bright: Officer Nick Jakoby became the first-ever orc cop of the LAPD — bearing through the immense disapproval of his fellow orcs and the blatant bigotry and corruption of the LAPD itself — entirely because he always wanted to be a good cop who does right by everyone. Even facing immense mistreatment and challenges to his morals, he refuses to lose sight of his mission to protect the innocent and uphold justice as it's deserved, with many — from his jaded partner, Officer Ward, to orc gangster Dorghu — expressing admiration for how incorruptible Jakoby is in his heroic ideals.
• Child 44: Ministry of State Security official Demidov risks his career and life by investigating a series of child murders that his government won't acknowledge due to how it would taint their view of a Utopian communist society.
• Citizen X: Downplayed. Borakov is a driven investigator who is surrounded by lazy and cynical subordinates, although they become more dedicated and efficient as they become more invested in the case.
• Clockers: Minority Police Officer Andre is a rare cop who tries to guide and protect the neighborhood people instead of exploiting them or bullying them to solve crimes, although he is willing to dish out some Beware the Nice Ones beatings when pushed far enough.
• Cocaine Bear: Detective Bob is a determined and highly likable cop, which is less than can be said of his assistant Reba and Ranger Liz.
• Code of Silence: Downplayed. After Sergeant Cusack reports incompetent veteran cop Cragie for accidentally shooting a civilian, only his partner Dorata will lift a finger to help him with a major case for the next several scenes until Cragie's guilty partner shames the rest of the precinct into changing their minds.
• Cop Land: Freddy is the sheriff of a town inhabited by corrupt NYPD cops, who commute to work, and their families. He holds his actions to a higher standard than they do, while receiving no support except from his deputies (who both eventually Screw This, I'm Outta Here), an Internal Affairs cop, and local resident Figgsy, who has a corrupt past that he is trying to break free from.
• Dances with Wolves: While not normally working in a law enforcement role, seven soldiers are assigned to escort Dunbar to prison in the final act. Five of them abuse their prisoner and/or shoot harmless animals for much of the trip, but Lieutenant Elgin and an unnamed Sergeant Rock are brave professionals who hold the others at gunpoint to stop one beating.
• Downplayed in The Dark Knight Trilogy: James Gordon means well, but Gotham is such a hardcore Wretched Hive that he has done some really awful decisions to try and bring order to it:
  • In Batman Begins he is seemingly the one officer of the Gotham Police that has not sold out to the gangs, but he can't really do jack about it until Batman comes along. The visual dictionary states that his superiors stuck him with the blatantly crooked Detective Flass (who openly moonlights as a low-level enforcer for The Mafia) as a partner in order to keep him in check.
    Gordon: I'm no rat! In a town this bent, who's there to rat to anyway?
  • In The Dark Knight he is forced to have crooked cops in his task force just to have some personnel. When two of them inevitably sell out to the Joker and bring the death of Rachel Dawes and disfigurement of Harvey Dent, a very irate Dent, now turned into Two-Face comes gunning for them all (especially Gordon, who he had warned about doing that decision) in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • In The Dark Knight Rises, Gordon kept quiet about Harvey Dent having gone deranged thanks to the Joker and dying trying to kill Gordon's family so Gordon would really know how Rachel's death felt to him to create support for the Dent Act, which put enough criminals behind bars to bring Gotham to its all-time high level of tranquility. However, the guilt ate at him deep enough for him to write a speech denouncing the lie, that he kept in his pocket at all times waiting for the proper time to say it, and was retrieved by Bane and broadcasted publicly to put Gotham deeper into anarchy. Result: a big Broken Pedestal for Detective Blake.
• Demolition Man: Most cops are goofy pushovers due to how decades of Utopian society have robbed them of crimefighting experience. The only exceptions are intrepid and impressionable rookie Huxley and Zachary Lamb, who was a rookie cop during the bad old days and still remembers old-school policing, even if he is too old to do much himself. At Lamb's suggestion, Human Popsicle "old-fashioned cop" John Spartan is thawed out to deal with the return of an Ax-Crazy super-criminal.
• Downplayed in Die Hard — While he does have an Accidental Child-Killer Backstory, Al Powell is the only LAPD cop who is consistently helpful to McClane while acting as his Voice with an Internet Connection, and the only one willing to challenge the complacent Deputy Commissioner Robinson who only succeeds in getting his SWAT Team hurt or killed.
• Most street judges in Dredd are corrupt or ineffectual, but Judges Dredd (despite his Pay Evil unto Evil tendencies) and Anderson are powerful fighters who care about the people they are protecting.
• El Camino Christmas: Deputy Billy is a Clueless Deputy (and a weak-willed one) who was hired out of nepotism and struggles to do anything right for much of the film before getting some noticeable Character Development. His partner, Deputy Carl, is a bitter man who drinks on duty and picks needless fights before inadvertently triggering a hostage situation (although dialogue indicates that he is a Fallen Hero who once did good stuff like foil a robbery and protect a woman from her abusive partner). Their boss, Sheriff Fuller, is a sensible man who acts as a Reasonable Authority Figure and frontline leader throughout the hostage standoff.
• Exit Wounds: Cowboy Cop Boyd is transferred to a "shit hole" new precinct in the opening scene and comes to learn that it is full of corrupt and/or thuggish cops, with the only two named decent ones being his new partner George Clark and precinct Captain Mulcahy, a former Internal Affairs investigator, with even the headquarters captain he tries to call for backup being crooked (although Da Chief is an honest Badass Bureaucrat).
• Fantastic Beasts: Most magical law enforcers in both England and America are overly draconian or overlook serious threats, but Tina Goldstein in America and Theseus Scamander and Leta Lestrange in England are proactive about stopping threats and fair-minded in their views of complex situations.
• Fast Five: Elena Neves is the only honest cop in all of Rio for Hobbs and his Hero Antagonist team to ask for help in hunting the Toretto Caper Crew while also dealing with the cartel that wants them dead.
• First Blood: Sheriff Teasle and many of his prominent deputies are unnecessarily rough on Rambo after arresting him for vagrancy and/or during the manhunt after his escape, but Mitch and Lester seem professional and sympathetic while Shingleton and Balford are Punch Clock Villains.
• Four Brothers: Lieutenant Green is a fair and diligent cop while his partner Fowler is corrupt, and most of the other detectives who appear are fine with brutalizing suspects to try and close a big case.
• Freddy vs. Jason: Arguably deconstructed with newly hired deputy Scott Stubbs, who is the only member of the sheriff's department who puts much effort into finding the killer and protecting innocent suspects, while his coworkers are fine with trying to cover up everything that happens. However, the other cops have the Well-Intentioned Extremist goal of crushing belief in undead serial killer Freddy Krueger so he can't return to life, and Stubbs's actions have Nice Job Breaking It, Hero results.
• The French Connection: Simonson Da Chief and Mulderig's FBI partner Klien are the only cops who seem immune to Inter-Service Rivalry feuding and/or Police Brutality.
• Gorky Park: Chief Investigator Renko recognizes the flaws of the Soviet system and is a conscientious investigator, both traits that make him the exception rather than the rule (of his three allies in the Moscow Militia, one is murdered about a third of the way through the film and the others are a lot less nice than they appear).
• The Great Escape: Kramer is the only guard at the POW camp who is both willing to genuinely befriend the prisoners and good at foiling escape attempts.
• Green Book: Only one of the three cops in Mississippi shows much respect for suspects' rights and seems non-racist.
• The Guard: Mr. Vice Guy Gerry and his Decoy Protagonist Dead Partner (an eager By-the-Book Cop) are the only cops besides a visiting FBI agent who actively try to solve the murder and drug investigations, while their boss and most of his other men are taking bribes to let drugs get brought into the country. Interestingly, due to his fondness for drugs and prostitutes and friendship with the local IRA, Gerry views himself as the least honest cop in the area and is shocked to learn that so many of the others are actually worse than him.
• Halloween:
  • Sheriff Ben Meeker from the fourth and fifth movies is a, Downplayed example. He's a strong contender for the second-most competent and tough cop in the franchise (after Hawkins below), while his deputies and state police colleagues, while not entirely useless, tend to suffer Red Shirt fates, occasionally overlook something important, and impulsively abandon children in favour of going to fight a man breaking Michael out of jail (who easily kills said deputy and then abducts said kid).
  • Deputy Hawkins from Halloween (2018) and, despite his apparent death, its sequels is a Combat Pragmatist who takes the threat Michael poses very seriously, while his boss doesn't take Michael seriously until it's too late and Officers Francis and Richards are there to be Plucky Comic Relief.
• Hard Rain: The Halfway Plot Switch has the beleaguered Sheriff Collig, Deputy Kenny, and special Deputy Hank go full Lawman Gone Bad and try to kill anyone who stands between them and a bag of money. Deputy Phil is horrified by what's going on and while he's too frightened to oppose the others, he won't help them try to kill the leads, which ends up getting him shot.
• Hot Fuzz: For most of the film, Sgt. Angel is the sole officer of the Sanford PD taking his job — and a grisly string of deaths — seriously, with the rest of the department being too lazy and complacent to treat the deaths as anything more than accidents. This is largely due to the influence of Inspector Butterman, who is part of the conspiracy behind the deaths. Ultimately subverted in the end, when Angel and Butterman's son are able to convince the other bobbies to turn on their superior.
• The Hunting Party: The U.N. Peacekeepers are mostly fairly clueless and unhelpful throughout the reporters hunt for war criminal the Fox, but Boris does try to set them up with people who can help them better while hoping they succeed and seems to handle his other jobs well.
• In My Country: Among the many cops who confess to having committed brutal crimes for the apartheid, one stands out for asking for forgiveness from his victim rather than the court, with it also being stated that he refused orders to shoot a young boy once after watching the boy's mother be shot.
• L.A. Confidential: Downplayed with Bud, as he is willing to use excessive force to get results, but he disdains being used as muscle and genuinely wants to use his position for justice, especially against those who abuse women, in contrast to many of the other cops like Jack or Dudley who use their position for their own gain. He eventually works with Ed, one of the other relatively honest cops in the LAPD, to find the true culprit of the Nite Owl case and eventually uncover the corruption that was within the force.
• Ladyhawke: Since the disgrace and exile of Captain Ettiene Navarre, the Bishop of Aquila's guards have become quite nasty in their enforcement of the laws. When Navarre returns, one of the guards who previously served under him won’t fight him and respectfully addresses Navarre as if he is still Captain. This promptly gets the guard killed by Marquet the new Captain , after which the other guards, even the ones who knew Navarre, oppose him more sternly for the rest of the film, until the climax, when a large group of their remaining number let him pass for his confrontation with Marquet and the Bishop.
• Last Man Standing (1996): Sheriff Galt, his deputy, the nearest Border Patrol officer, and the local Mexican cops all do jobs for one or both of the local bootlegging gangs (although Galt gets a Heel–Face Turn). Texas Ranger Pickett, while realistic enough to know that he can't just blot out organized crime, isn't personally corrupt and, as the gang war gets bloodier and Hickey kills the dirty Border Patrol officer, issues an ultimatum that if one or both gangs hasn't left the area or been wiped out in ten days, then he'll bring in a Posse to wipe them both out.
• Les Misérables (1998): Captain Beauvis is the only member of the Gendarme who provides Valjean much help in his philanthropic endeavors and flight from the law rather than unhesitatingly enforcing the draconian laws of the period.
• Flashbacks in Lone Star (1996) show Buddy Deeds as a brave deputy who is fed up with how Sheriff Wade is a racist murderer and extortionist and the other deputy, Hollis, is too spineless to stop him. Buddy engages in some corruption of his own after becoming sheriff, but is very much A Lighter Shade of Black.
• Lock Up: Most of the prison guards are sadistic authoritarians who will follow the warden's orders to turn peaceful prisoners' lives into nightmares over an old vendetta, but Captain Messner is tough but fair and Ernie is surprisingly soft-hearted.
• The Love Bug: Most of the cops in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo follow the lead of the impressive-looking but ineffective inspector, who only starts showing competence when he is revealed as the Big Bad and is working against the heroes, but his assistant Fontenoy has many keen insights and Reasonable Authority Figure moments that help the heroes. As a bonus, since Fontenoy hero-worships the inspector, he keeps beaming with pride every time he does something that is the correct decision but leaves the inspector in a fix due to his own failures.
• Mystery Road: The investigation Aboriginal detective Jay Swan conducts into the drug-related murders of teenaged girls from his old neighborhood makes it clear that all of the prominent street cops (The Coroner and his assistant seem alright) are apathetic bigots, unorthodox with their methods (the Cowboy Cop who saves his life in the climax appears to have endangered it beforehand), involved in the drug ring, or some combination of the three.
• Osmosis Jones: Osmosis Jones is a white blood cell cop who is good at both recognizing and battling threats. Many of his coworkers ... aren't (although the sentient cold medication pill Drix proves helpful).
• Outland (1981): O'Neil has a large staff of deputies to combat the drug ring with ... except two are corrupt, and the rest are Dirty Cowards.
  O'Neil: My men are shit.
• Outlaw: Officer Lewis is stuck babysitting witnesses and doing desk work due to not engaging in the same corruption as his superiors, which eventually drives him to feed information to a Vigilante Militia.
• The Pink Panther:
  • In the original continuity, Inspector Cloueseau is an accident-prone Clueless Detective, his boss Dreyfus is a hammy, Ax-Crazy Butt-Monkey, and most of the Spear Carrier uniformed cops provide some bumbling slapstick, but Beleaguered Assistant Francois is competent enough in his Mr. Exposition role. Clouseau's assistant from A Shot in the Dark is very practical and conscientious, but, as revealed in a later film, he takes early retirement rather than keep working with Clouseau.
  • Clouseau's assistant in the reboot duology, Gilbert Ponton, is a Cloudcuckoolander's Minder with some good fighting and observational skills, while Clouseau is a Genius Ditz who normally puts an emphasis on the Ditz and Dreyfus and his staff vaingloriously pursue the wrong leads.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: While the British Navy is technically a military organization, it spends the film engaged in increasingly brutal anti-piracy operations on behalf of corporate interests, with Tragic Villain Northington, Punch-Clock Villain Groves, and Those Two Guys Murtogg and Mullroy being the only ones who the narrative portrays as anything besides uncomplicated murderers.
• Red Hill: Shane is a rookie cop whose First Day from Hell involves helping his rougher superiors combat a vengeful escaped convict. Shane ends up trying to arrest his own boss (the others are already dead) after learning that he, his older deputies, and some friends provoked the convict's wrath by killing his wife and framing him for it.
• Red Riding:
  • Deconstructed by Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunt in "1980". Brought in as a "squeaky clean" outsider in response to public backlash to the West Yorkshire Police's failure to catch the Ripper. Hunt is a genuinely honest, warm but authoritative man with a strong sense of justice, who quickly discovers evidence of a conspiracy involving corporate corruption, child abuse, and murder, which the local police are heavily complicit (if not active members) in. But his underestimation of the scale of the corruption and utter belief in good triumphing over evil spell his doom. He ends up finding all the evidence he needs to expose the conspiracy, but is murdered by DCS John Nolan, the man he believed he was his closest ally, having never suspected he was also corrupt.
  • Detective Inspector (later Chief Superintendent) Maurice Jacobs is a downplayed version particularly in "1983" (which says a lot about just how bad the other officers are). Whilst heavily complicit in the corruption, and party to several brutal acts of murder and torture himself, unlike all the other officers its made clear that he only joined due to knowing that if he didn't Bill Molloy would have murdered him, with it being clear the guilt of his actions is weighing heavily upon him and revealing he did try to assist Eddie Dunford and Hunt in their efforts to expose the corruption, only to be stampeded each time by his fear of reprisal. Finally making a stand in the climax he saves BJ from the ringleader of the conspiracy, Reverend Martin Laws, putting an end to the evil man, then assists John Piggot in saving Laws' final living victim.
• Red State: Deputy Pete and Agent Brooks are the only prominent members of the sheriff's department and ATF to never display any kind of ruthless agenda while investigating or besieging Cooper's church/cult/militia. Unfortunately, both are killed early on and things get worse and worse.
• The Ref: The police chief may be a professional Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist, but his subordinates are all incredible idiots who accidentally destroy a surveillance tape while trying to rewind it.
• Renfield: The abrasiveness and/or ineptitude of all the other cops at her precinct drives Rebecca Quincey crazy even before she begins to realize most, if not all, of them are corrupt.
• Safety Patrol: The safety patrol is made up of thieves and bullies until Wide-Eyed Idealist Scout joins, and it turns out he was only accepted to be their scapegoat.
• Shanghai Knights: The London constabulary refuses to believe Lord Rathbone is evil and deter the protagonists at several points, but Inspector Doyle, while a bit too trusting, is quite friendly with Chon and Roy, helps them when he can, and has some useful Sherlock Scan tendencies.
• Sherlock Holmes (2009): Holmes tends to view Inspector Lestrade and his men are useless or threatening (depending on whether they are investigating the same case or investigating him), but Constable Clark is a smart officer who is friends with Holmes. This is ultimately downplayed in the climax, and that of the sequel, where Lestrade and his men do become surprisingly helpful.
• The Sidney Lumet films Serpico and Prince of the City both dramatize the true stories of a lone cop informing on massive corruption that surrounds him and being alienated from much of the force as a result (although the protagonist of the later film has been involved in plenty of corruption himself before getting tired of it and some of the targets of his investigation are more morally grey by 1970s and 80s standards).
• Sleepers: Notes and the other senior guards at the reformatory frequently beat and rape the boys, but one Bit Character guard intervenes with one of their efforts to mistreat the kids early on. Unfortunately, he works in another part of the prison and isn’t in a position to help that often.
• Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod is the only cop in New York who uses scientific methods to investigate crimes fairly and logically rather than using brute force and superstition, which gets him Reassigned to Antarctica.
• Some Guy Who Kills People: Sheriff Fuller may be a thorough and dedicated investigator, but his three deputies are bunglers who only ever do anything useful by accident.
• Spotlight: Most of the Boston PD who know about the sex abuse have spent decades covering it up without much apparent introspection, although one rookie cop shows shock at this going on in the opening scene, and another officer cooperates with the media exposé into the scandal (albeit hesitantly).
• Street Kings: The murdered Detective Washington was trying to bring an end to police corruption at his old haunt, while his former teammates are prone to Cowboy Cop antics like extrajudicial executions, and all of them besides Ludlow are deeply corrupt and are working with several bad cops outside of the team. Internal Affairs cop Briggs and Diskant, who help Ludlow investigate Washington's death, have good intentions but are also willing to abet a lot of lawbreaking to close the case.
• Super Troopers: All of the state troopers besides Captain O'Hagen enjoy pranking motorists in ways that range from childish to sadistic (although Thorny and Foster get the occasional straight man moment compared to the others), and all of the town cops besides Ursula are dimwitted bullies and drug traffickers.
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: While they get a nuanced Grey-and-Gray Morality treatment and try to do their jobs well, the rank-and-file of the local cops are bigots who aren't above Police Brutality. The terminally-ill Chief Willoughby is a Reasonable Authority Figure, as is his successor, out-of-towner Chief Abercombie. They are both more insightful and rule-abiding than their subordinates.
• Training Day: Detective trainee Hoyt has a strong moral compass and is The Determinator, while Detective Alonzo Harris, his four-man team for drug raids, and their three superiors are all far more brutal and dishonest than most of the criminals they go after.
• Touch of Evil: Captain Quinlan's favorite strategy for solving cases is planting evidence, and his boss and subordinates think the world of him and are hesitant to help Special Prosecutor Vargas investigate him, but the earnest Sergeant Menzies (who Quinlan constantly uses as an Unwitting Pawn to find the evidence he plants) agrees to wear a wire to bust Quinlan after being convinced of his guilt.
• Unforgiven: Downplayed with Deputy Clyde Ledbetter; Sheriff Little Daggett may mean well but is a misogynistic bully, while two of his deputies have some bumbling or cowardly moments, and another is competent but seems unbothered by Bill's ruthlessness. Clyde is a competent ally to have in a fight and seems to like the idea of using corporal punishment on two men who hurt a prostitute while briefly looking uncomfortable at how Bill is willing to viciously beat bounty hunters coming to avenge the woman's injury. However, Clyde never stops Little Bill from beating up anyone, and one man dies from such a beating.
• The Untouchables: When Treasury agent Elliot Ness seeks allies on the Chicago Police Department to go after Al Capone, the only people he can find are veteran Irish Cop Malone and an academy trainee who Capone hasn't had a chance to corrupt yet.
• Uprising: Many of the Jewish policemen in the Warsaw Ghetto are firmly in Les Collaborateurs territory, but one of them begins helping La Résistance (even assassinating his boss) after seeing how, whatever good intentions some of the policemen have, what they are doing boils down to contributing to genocide and stuffing their own pockets along the way.
• V for Vendetta: England has become a Police State full of cops who are either sadistic thugs or involved in invasive surveillance, but Inspector Finch and his assistant Dominic are smart detectives who find it harder and harder to ignore how rotten their society is.
• The Wolfman (2010): Local constable Nye is a brave, intelligent, decent guy, while Inspector Aberline and the other Scotland Yard officials spend months overlooking important evidence and suspects and take a while to get past being Agent Scullys.
• Wonka: The Chief of Police is an imbecilic Dirty Cop while the meaningfully named Officer Affable is the only person to dislike or question some of his more suspicious actions. While the Chief accepts bribes from the chocolate cartel and uses physical violence against their enemies, such as Wonka, Affable leaves Wonka a little bit of rent money after confiscating his earnings for the day and has his boss arrested when the truth of his corruption comes out.
• Vigilante: The cops, while burdened by Obstructive Vigilantism, are helpless at protecting people from the many criminals of the neighborhood, with one of Nick's vigilantes being a cop who was fired for actually taking risks to try and bust criminals. Officer Gibbons stands out as a decent cop who does his job on the streets in an effective way while also trying to talk the vigilantes down. In a sad twist, he is murdered by hoodlums who think Rabid Cops committed the vigilante killings.
• West Side Story (2021): Officer Krupke is this thanks to his Adaptational Personality Change. Rather than the bigoted Jerkass he is in the stage musical, here he's an honest cop who looks out for the entire neighborhood and genuinely wants to help both the Jets and the Sharks avoid lives of crime and imprisonment. Meanwhile, his boss Lt. Schrank is still a Bigot with a Badge, wanting to lock up as many gang members (especially the Sharks) as possible to keep crime down until the area is gentrified and he can be in charge of a relatively crime-free neighborhood.
• Z: Most of the cops in the movies are allied with the right-wing thugs and help cover up their persecution and assassination of their political enemies with gusto, but one beat cop does a good job of investigating the case until his superiors threaten him into stopping. Even then, he eventually tells the Magistrate investigating the case what happened.

Literature

• 1632: In the Grantville Gazette short story "Tortured Souls," Judge Pieter Freihofer is assigned to investigate the murder of Geri McKinney because her fellow up-timers want her murder solved but won't tolerate a tortured confession and Pieter is one of the only investigator/magistrates in the city who generally avoid torture, as he prefers to get the suspects to incriminate themselves. However, Pieter's Bit Character fellow Judge Fassbinder (who refuses to use torture at all) might be a straighter example of the trope as, despite his intelligence and good intentions, Pieter did once torture and execute an innocent man due to a Frame-Up.
• Accidental Detectives: Sheriff Leroy from Madness at Moonshiner's Bay has only broken the rules once in his decades in law enforcement, to try and save his brother from prison, and is a Broken Ace due to the guilt from that, while his old FBI partner (who he helps catch) and deputies are the story's villains.
• Alex Verus: Caldera is the token honest Keeper, the only one who doesn't play politics, bend the rules, or serve ulterior motives. However, when forced To Be Lawful or Good, she chooses Lawful over and over again, ultimately resulting in her death when Verus stops giving her second chances. Illmarin is also noteworthy as a Keeper who is always respectful towards independent mages and even non-mage members of the magical community like Luna; Alex is genuinely upset that he is one of the casualties in taking down Vihaela.
• Black Tide Rising: In the short story "Up on the Roof," Ceyonne's father, Jerome, is the last surviving cop in East Chicago to remain on duty, still trying to help people besides his loved ones in the last few days where society is still in the Just Before the End stage.
• The Books of Ember: Many of the guards are thugs for the mayor, but Barton Snode seems dim but honest and excited about his job (albeit only in the book).
• In the Carl Hiaasen Shared Universe, Detective Al Garcia in the early books is a brave, open-minded, public-spirited detective whose named superiors and fellow detectives are often political stooges or Dirty Cops, making it refreshing when he finally has a Reasonable Authority Figure boss in Strip Tease.
• Cassie Dewell: In The Highway, Cassie is the only intelligent cop in the local sheriff's department besides the crime scene techs and Cody (who is a great detective but an evidence-planting Cowboy Cop), a situation that is made worse by the sheriff's corruption. Larry Olson was also a pretty good investigator, but he got murdered in the previous book.
• Downplayed in The Dresden Files, regarding Harry's Friend on the Force, Detective Lieutenant Karrin Murphy. The other cops in the Chicago Police Department aren't corrupt or incompetent in the traditional sense, they just don't believe in the supernatural and so treat Special Investigations as a dumping ground for officers they don't like, and generally act like Obstructive Bureaucrats in the paranormal cases it's meant to investigate. Murph takes the job seriously, hence her relationship with Harry (who is listed in the phone book under "Wizard"; the rest of the department thinks he's a Con Artist), which unfortunately leads to her first getting demoted to sergeant, then fired altogether after several rounds of Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!.
• The semi-autobiographical Erich Kulka book Escape from Auschwitz characterizes Viktor Pestek as a rare guard at the death camp who sympathizes with the prisoners due to a combination of his religious beliefs, an Androcles' Lion moment in his past where people the Reich deemed subhuman spared his life after a battle, being mistreated by the other guards for being an ethnic German born outside the country, and eventually falling in love with a prisoner. He refuses to beat the prisoners and eventually progresses to helping several prisoners try to escape.
• Fatherland: In the Bad Future where Hitler won, Xavier March is the only detective in Berlin who isn't a Nazi stooge through and through.
• Fun Jungle: The FunJungle animal park is big enough to be incorporated as its own city, and its security guards function as a police force and investigate a lot of poaching and other animal-related crimes. However, most of them only applied for the job after being rejected by real police forces, and it shows. Chief Hoenekker, the head of security from book three onward, is a tough professional (especially once he gradually learns to avoid making Not Now, Kiddo judgments), but "no matter how competent and qualified Hoenekker was, his security force was equally incompetent and unqualified." Large Marge and Kevin get the occasional Big Damn Heroes moment but are overage klutzes who cause more problems than they solve, Buck and Athmani start out as approachable professionals but gradually start butting heads with main characters and are both involved in criminal conspiracies, and the other guards are nonentities who make Marge and Kevin look good.
• Garden Of The Beasts: Willi Kohl is seemingly the only senior detective left in the 1936 Berlin police force who has avoided falling under the sway of Nazism and continues to diligently investigate homicides without regard to whether the victims are people the state views as undesirables or whose murders they genuinely want to be solved. He works hard to impart both his politics and his observation skills to his latest trainee, only to learn that the man is a Nazi who has been using him while pretending to share his views. This blow and the discovery of just how rotten the state is cause Kohl to accept that the Nazi Regime is Beyond Redemption and that it is time for his family to seek political asylum elsewhere.
• Guards! Guards!: At the start of the book, the three remaining men of the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch are Nobby Nobbs, a debatably human kleptomaniac, Fred Colon, a Fat Idiot who goes out of his way to avoid trouble and spends as much time as possible doing absolutely nothing, and Sam Vimes, who's actually a really good cop, but at this point is a booze-soaked derelict who crossed the Despair Event Horizon long ago. The addition of Carrot Ironfoundersson, a human raised by dwarves who is too bull-headed to bribe or cajole and too strong to fight, shocks them out of their complacency and leads to them becoming the heroes of the book, especially Vimes, who would begin his journey to becoming The Paragon for police officers across the Disc.
• Harry Potter: Despite their esteemed reputation and Cool Old Lady boss (Amelia Bones), the Department of Magical Law Enforcement Aurors, besides Tonks and Kingsley, display little obvious talent and never provide much help against the villains (whose return they take a while even to believe happened). Arthur Weasely, who works in a joke division of the Department, displays twice the intelligence, integrity, and magical skills as prominent Aurors like Dawlish and Scrimgeour.
• The Hate U Give: Given how the story revolves around the shooting of an unnamed black teenager by a cop who goes unpunished, the police force doesn't come out shining, but Starr's uncle is a cop who seeks to arrest people who are genuinely endangering the neighborhood while also being outraged by the shooting.
• Honor Harrington:
  • The Solarian League Gendarmerie is disproportionality represented by people involved in Evil Colonialist activities or Head-in-the-Sand Management internal bureaucracy, but Criminal Investigation Division head Simeon Gaddis, intelligence analysis expert Weng Zhing-hwan, and a few of their close peers are apolitical "actual working cop[s]" who work hard to investigate potential threats and are willing to defy their sleazy superiors.
  • In Cauldron of Ghosts, Mesan cop Lieutenant Ferguson frustrates both his subordinates (save Kayla Barrett) and superiors alike with his refusal to callously trample the rights and end the lives of the police state planet's freed slaves and their descendants. By To End in Fire, most of the veteran Mesan cops have been killed or fired, with a few moderates like Kayla being kept around on a reformed force they feel a lot better about serving.
  Kayla: Uniformed goons is what I remember us being mostly.
  Jake Abrams: I expect you're right. But we did do some actual police work, and part of the reason we got along with each other is because none of us liked the rough stuff and we tried to keep it down as much as we could.
  • In Shadow of Victory, among the many dictatorial regimes propped up by the Solarian League, Filip Malý from the Chotěbořian Public Safety Force is the bodyguard of a reform candidate and secretly part of La Résistance, along with his bodyguard charge.
• The Hunger Games: Most Peacekeepers are uniformed enforcers for a President Evil, and while the regular District 12 Peacekeepers are more easygoing about enforcing unjust regulations, this is at least partially for their own comfort. Head District 12 Peacekeeper Cray is still an exploitative Dirty Old Man, and Darius and Purnia are the only two to openly risk their necks and intervene when Cray's brutal replacement flogs Gale within an inch of his life.
• Incompetence: In a future where no one can be fired or denied a promotion on the grounds of incompetence, Sergeant Salieri is the only featured street cop anywhere in the European Union who is neither a Rabid Cop, a complete moron, or both (although his gung-ho boss Zucchio is ultimately the Non-Protagonist Resolver despite being an Inspector Javert for most of the book).
• Jack Reacher:
  • In Killing Floor, half of the local eight officers are dirty and two have minimal involvement in the plot, leaving only Detective Finlay and Officer Roscoe to provide Knight Errant Reacher much aid throughout the story.
  • In 61 Hours, Police Chief Holland and his number two Peterson are skilled cops who work well with Reacher, and while many other cops have moments of professionalism and skill, every last one of them gets lured away from guarding an important witness by what Reacher views as an obvious distraction. And then there's the suspicion that a Dirty Cop is on the force, although that turns out to be a Forced into Evil but still willing to kill Holland, leaving Peterson as the token good, or at least above average, cop on the force.
• Joe Pickett: Deputy Mike Reed is the only Saddlestring field officer who is neither a Trigger-Happy brute nor corrupt in books 3-12. Once he is elected sheriff in book 13, things finally start improving.
• Mexican Rurales and their predecessor groups enforcing the law near the border in the J.A. Johnstone Western Shared Universe tend to be uniformed criminals who often got their jobs by Trading Bars for Stripes in the most negative sense possible. However, occasionally an honest Ensign Newbie will show up, such as in The First Mountain Man: Preacher's Fortune or Luke Jensen: Bounty Hunter: Dead Shot. The officer in the latter book (who is hunting Dangerous Deserters and whose men also seem like decent guys) fares better than the one in the former book, who is shot by his men when they defect to join the outlaws.
• Killing Time: The police chief of Winston is one of its most corrupt citizens and a large percentage of his uniformed officers are members of the Wycza Family, who were hired due to their corrupt councilman relative and do little work and/or act as his enforcers. Detective Hal Ganz is the highest-ranking honest cop in town (and is sent to investigate who is trying to kill Tim specifically to prove to Tim that the case is being treated seriously), but he has a mild case of Good Is Dumb.
• The eponymous location in King City is full of classist cops who ignore the Wrong Side of the Tracks (with the chief of police being a bigot to boot and all-around Hate Sink) and everyone in the major crimes unit besides Tom Wade (who acted as a mole for the FBI) just got arrested for taking bribes. The humiliated chief spitefully assigns Wade to the Wrong Side of the Tracks as a Uriah Gambit, where, rather than despair, he works to protect the locals and bring back the dignity they have lost after being failed by the force for so long, an endeavor that his two rookie subordinates also gradually get invested in.
• In the Jack Campbell short story "Kyrie Eleison", the Watch is a group of people among the stranded tribe of shipwreck survivor descendants. The Watch provides security and enforces the rules for the tyrannical ruling class of the group. When another spaceship finally arrives to rescue them, but its crew feels disinclined to take the tyrants to safety as quickly as their victims, said victims do vouch for a few more people, including a solitary member of the Watch who they call a good man.
• The Last Days of Krypton: Commissioner Zod is a Corrupt Bureaucrat who doesn't take long to start Putting on the Reich, and while few of the guards assigned to him are evil or ill-intentioned at the start, they follow bad orders when they're threatened and are easily awed by Zod, which leads to Jumping Off the Slippery Slope. Bur-Al, the fourth-in-command of Zod's department, is prepared to report Zod for stealing technology earmarked for destruction and refuses to let Zod bribe or persuade him otherwise. Unfortunately, he's also Too Dumb to Live, and confronting Zod about this in private gets him murdered.
• In The Last Policeman Trilogy, Henry, Trish, and Culverson are grounded, professional, hard-working cops even in the face of an approaching asteroid strike that will kill most of humanity, while many of their coworkers are nervous wrecks or see no need to show much restraint and professionalism in the face of the end.
• The Lost Stars: Most Internal Security Service "snakes" are rabid fascists who neither give nor receive mercy under any circumstances, but, as General Drakon notes, "[t]he snakes wouldn't occasionally execute one of their own if they didn't sometimes let someone with a tiny bit of humanity through the cracks of their selection system." Four snakes assist the initial stages of the Midway Revolution before assuming new lives under false identities, and two others are taken alive by mutinying crew in Imperfect Sword, which Kaptain Diaz doubts would have happened unless "they weren't bad, for snakes."
• Nero Wolfe: While the NYPD cops may butt heads with Wolfe a lot, they are competent and likable at the end of the day (save Commissioner Hombart, Lieutenant Rowcliff, and the odd guest character). However, the country cops in Westchester County tend to be more unpleasant and/or unreliable, save Chief of Detectives Ben Dykes, a quiet professional who occasionally displays keen thinking.
• The Pillars of Reality: Most legionaries and mechanics assigned to prison transport duty are picked because they will be brutal to their charges. Conscript Nico from the prequel trilogy is a notable exception, which leads to a You Will Be Spared moment during a jailbreak and his Mook–Face Turn.
• Refugee: Most of the Cuban cops shown in the 1994 scenes brutally break up a protest, but Luis and his girlfriend are draftees who want to defect, and Luis is shown stopping another cop from hitting someone during the protest.
• 'Salem's Lot: The town constable has a cowardly streak, and his deputy is of the clueless variety, but county Sheriff McCaslin is a thoughtful and brave presence throughout the vampire infestation. The little of it he is alive to witness, anyway.
• Slaughter of Eagles: Deputy Forbis is the only decent lawman of the steadily growing town of Phoenix, Arizona, being a polite but firm professional lawman who experienced a Passed-Over Promotion due to his youth in favor of a man who turned out to be a brutal outlaw who fired another crook as his other deputy.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Jacelyn Bywater's rigid honesty makes him an anomaly amongst the thugs and graft-takers of the King's Landing City Watch.
• Star Wars Legends
  • In the second book of the The Han Solo Adventures, Fiolla is a rare honest Corporate Sector cop who is trying to stop a slave ring.
  • In the X-Wing Series, Corran Horn's Back Story is that he was a cop who was forced to go on the run with three colleagues due to their insistence in pursuing pirates and other criminals instead of the Rebel Alliance.
• True Grit: Downplayed. The unseen LT Quinn is the only marshal in the territory who always brings his prisoners in alive. This is exactly why the revenge-seeking Mattie declines to ask for his help and instead teams up with Cowboy Cop and former Civil War marauder Rooster Cogburn (who, to his credit, does make offers of mercy to a few outlaws throughout the story and once brought in a man alive even though the guy killed his partner).
• The Twilight Saga: Most of the Volturi who enforce the laws governing vampire society enjoy using their authority to kill with impunity or build up their power base under the guise of meting out justice. However, Marcus would prefer to enforce the rules fairly and without needless executions. Former member Eleazar also genuinely believed in stability while being unhappy with the ruthless parts of their job, which led to him leaving the Volturi for a Vegetarian Vampire lifestyle.
• At the beginning of Under the Dome, Chester's Mill has a solid police force with a couple of bad apples, but over the book, most of the good or so-so cops (Duke, Linda, Jackie, Stacey, Rupe, and Trent) die, quit, or are outside of the dome, while the worst ones gain more power and plenty of Black Shirt new officers are hired. By the last act, Henry Morrison is the only veteran officer left with both intelligence and a good conscience (although he has a high opinion of one new officer, Pamela Chen), and the corrupt Selectman Rennie is planning to fire him at the earliest chance.

Live-Action TV

• 1-800-Missing: The Ridgeport, Connecticut PD from "Cop Out" are revealed to all be dirty, with Chief Jack Sanderson being their ringleader. Under Sanderson, the PD regularly skim cash and goods off the cities port ranging into millions, as well as beating into silence or flat out murdering any witnesses. Sanderson ensures the corruption by killing any officers who don't get with the program or forcing them to kill others so he has them in his pocket. However, Deputy Chief Paula Deinecher is still honest and tries her best to expose Sanderson's corruption, to the point of recruiting an ally from the Boston PD to go undercover to find the evidence to bring him down. Sanderson has her murdered for this, but Paula's actions still lead to the FBI uncovering the corruption.
• The Andy Griffith Show: Andy is an intelligent peacekeeper and crime solver, while Barney Fife is perhaps the most notorious Clueless Deputy of twentieth-century pop culture, the various townspeople who are occasionally deputized for emergencies (Otis, Floyd, Gomer, Goober, Howard, etc.) have more enthusiasm than skill, and many of the out-of-town cops can be unfairly condescending.
• Angel: Much of the LAPD is in the pocket of corrupt forces, prone to Rabid Cop methods, or suffering from Weirdness Censor, but Kate tries to be a Friend on the Force to Angel, which leads to her becoming a massive Knight in Sour Armor and eventually losing her job.
• Babylon 5: Mr. Garibaldi has this as part of his backstory (and to a lesser extent, during the main series when a distressingly large number of his Earthforce security subordinates are willing to fall in line with Black Shirts despite his urging them not to). Prior to coming to B5, he was in security on Europa. The way he describes it, half the force was on the take and the rest didn't give a damn. "Ever try to uphold the law when nobody cares?" Eventually, the stress and frustration begins leading him to drink heavily. He says he began to make progress, but the criminal elements targeted him specifically, leading to an incident where a good friend of his was killed and Garibaldi was pinned with the blame, leading to his dismissal, and crawling into the bottle for a long time.
• Barry: A curious example, as she is introduced first and we only get to see the scale of the others' problems in comparison later, but Detective Janice Moss is presented as the only reliably honest and competent member of the LAPD. Her partner Detective Loach is a perpetual sadsack who can be a competent detective but is revealed to be shamelessly corrupt and murderously selfish; Detective Dunn is well-meaning but ineffectual; Detective Simmer is a lazy moron who refuses to actually work; and Chief Krauss is a gullible fool who has absolutely no idea what he's doing. The rest of the LAPD is regularly presented as cartoonishly incompetent, such as a SWAT team mistaking the unarmed, helpless patrons at a restaurant for gangsters and viciously beating them senseless.
• Batman (1966): As actual deputized members of the police force rather than their usual clear-cut vigilante selves, Batman and Robin stand out as the sole hope of Gotham City against any criminal threat. While Commissioner Gordon and Chief O'Hara occasionally manage to do something relatively useful and proactive, generally, they are paralyzed without Batman and Robin to help them, and most of their subordinates make them look like the Caped Crusaders. Perhaps the only three Gotham street-level cops shown actually accomplishing something besides halting the occasional Villain: Exit, Stage Left are Policewoman Mooney (who infiltrates Catwoman's gang in one episode, although she eventually ends up as a Damsel in Distress) and a pair of courtroom bailiffs who hold a dozen henchmen at gunpoint and keep them from joining the melee in "The Joke's on Catwoman."
• Better Call Saul: For the way he describes it, Mike's son Matty seems to have been the only uncorrupt cop in all of Mike's Philadelphia precinct, and truly cared about doing his job and upholding the law. This ultimately got him killed when Hoffman and Fenske arranged for his death because they were worried he would report their embezzlement and bribery. In "Five-O", Mike ends up describing how crushed he was having to try to convince Matty to take their bribe to save Matty's own life and reveal to him that his idolized father was just as dirty as the rest of them.
• Most FBI agents and police detectives in Blade: The Series are working for the vampires or buy into The Masquerade, but Agent Collins diligently investigates what the vampires are up to and briefly gets help from another agent or two and police detective Gibbs.
• Bodies (2023): DCI Callahan might be one of the few people in the 1941 storyline who is not in some way corrupt. Given that he exists in a City Noir, this goes about as well for him as you might expect.
• Broken: In this 2017 drama, the trope is interestingly played with following the wrongful police shooting of vulnerable paranoid schizophrenic Vernon Oyenusi:
  • During a particularly bad episode Vernon took his mother hostage at knife point convinced he needed to protect her. PC Andrew Powell was in the process of talking him down, when PC Dawn Morris barged in and pointlessly maced the poor teenager, causing him to run screaming at the firearms officers who shot him dead. Afterwards the entire team moves to cover it up and starts putting pressure on Powell to lie at the inquest, with his superior Chief Inspector McDonald making it clear if he doesn't he'll end his career and even PC Ian Wakefield, whom Powell believed was honest and his best mate, pushing him to lie. Their efforts even scare Powell's wife and friend into trying to convince him to lie fearing the retaliation he'll suffer otherwise. Despite it all seemingly breaking him, when it comes to the inquest Powell still gives an honest recollection, ensuring Dawn will be held to account deciding he's content to suffer if it means justice for Vernon.
  • Sergeant Dennis Kindcaid, the leader of the firearms officers, despite being the one who actually shot Vernon is likewise presented as an honest cop who did everything by the book and only fired cause he sincerely believed that Vernon was about to attack them with a knife (due to him being unable to see Dawn macing him) with him practically begging Vernon to stop beforehand. Notably he's the only officer who isn't involved in (or even aware of) the conspiracy to protect Dawn and gives a sincere apology at the inquest to Vernon's mother.
• The Cape: The opening scene shows Vince Faraday working in a precinct with plenty of corrupt colleagues whom he has to watch out for, and his only reliable coworker being murdered in short order. The police force has become so corrupt that private security companies are being hired to replace them, with Vince happily jumping ship to work for them and get away from his corrupt fellow detectives. Unfortunately, his new employer is the mastermind behind all the local crime and Vince ends up surrounded by corrupt coworkers yet again before being framed for their crimes and faking his death.
• El Caso: The upstanding and rule-abiding Miguel Montenegro is probably the White Sheep of the police force, especially as it's 1966 and the Francoist regime is still in full effect.
• The Chosen Tv Series: Most members of the Roman garrisons enforce harsh rules and tax levies, but Gaius gradually develops an Odd Friendship with Jesus's ministry, and (as of early season 4) Atticus tends to observe them and their believers with interest rather than hostility.
• Dark:
  • At least for the members of the 2019 police, that we are presented with, Charlotte Doppler fulfills this role. Wöller is a Yes-Man and secretly works with Aleksander Tiedemann and Ulrich has strong Rabid Cop tendencies and his sanity goes haywire once his son disappears. Charlotte on the other hand comes very close to figuring out what is actually happening.
  • Season 2 then introduces the federal agent Clausen who at first appears to be at least competent, but turns out to have ulterior motives and no problems with rulebreaking.
• Deputy Enos Strate in The Dukes of Hazzard is the lone honest cop in the whole county, working for the corrupt Boss Hogg and the corrupt and bumbling Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane. More than once, he's referred to as the only real law in Hazzard and when the Dukes need help from the authorities it's Enos they go to.
• The Expanse: Miller, his boss, and most of the other Belter cops are corrupt cynics whom Miller's Naïve Newcomer partner Havelock eventually calls out for representing the worst aspects of policing, although Miller gradually gets a Heel–Face Turn and two other cops, Muss and Semi, eventually show some reliability.
• While Fargo often has multiple competent cops per season, there's often at least one police organization with only one competent member.
  • In Fargo: Season One, after Reasonable Authority Figure Vern is murdered in the pilot, Molly ends up being an Ignored Expert while the new chief and the other officers buy various lies from the villains.
  • In Fargo: Season Two, Sue Lutz is the only one of the South Dakota State Police troopers to come across as neither an idiot or a jerk, making practical discussions to conversations and lasting a while in a shootout.
  • In Fargo: Season Three, Clueless Deputy Donny and Jerkass Sheriff Dammick cause Only Sane Man Gloria more headaches than some of the criminals she's out to arrest.
  • U.S. Marshal Deafy Wickware in Fargo: Season Four is probably more honest than any two of the Kansas City cops he interacts with, although he's also a Bigot with a Badge who screws up an arrest in a big way. His main local contact man, Detective Odis Weff, is corrupt and does some bad things, but is unhappy about it and is non-racist and a better cop than Deafy in other respects.
• Many cops in The Good Guys are Lawful Stupid (with the odd Dirty Cop thrown in) and disregard some correct hunches of Dan Stark (who avoids this trope himself, despite his heroic instincts and keen nose for crime, due to being an occasional pervert with no grasp of the roles forensic and surveillance technology or Due Process play in modern policing). Dan's partner Jack, while not quite as smart as he thinks he is, tries to rein in Dan's worst excesses, hear out his theories, and support him in a fight. By the last quarter of the show, the same can be said of eager forensics tech Samantha and a post-Defrosting the Ice Queen Lieutenant Ruiz.
• Gotham: Zigzaged over the course of the series. In season one Jim Gordon is the only By-the-Book Cop in the entire GCPD, willing to challenge its pervasive corruption — the other halfway decent cops are burned out (like Harvey Bullock), self-righteous and willing to bend or ignore the rules to their advantage (like Montoya and Allen) or else powerless to do anything about the corruption (like Captain Essen). However, Gordon is confronted with just how screwed Gotham really is, and over time he resorts to immoral if not illegal actions just to bring about some actual changes, eventually leaving temporarily in season three. He later rejoins after realising that acting outside the law was corrupting him even further and attempts to return to his former principles, but he is still more willing to resort to dirty actions (such as keeping relationships with the more friendly gangsters like Barbara and Penguin) than he was before. Discussed in Season Four when he points out to Bullock that a large portion of his reputation as the honest cop who can save the GCPD is built on a lie (with his recent rise to captain being part of a plot by Sofia Falcone), only for Bullock to point out that he's still better than all the alternatives.
• In Gotham Knights, most of the GCPD are corrupt and/or brutish towards the heroes, except for Sgt. Apone, whom Cullen befriends during his various trips to infiltrate the precinct. He even gives Cullen a hug after the Gotham Knights help defend the precinct from the Court of Owls in the finale.
• Hemlock Grove: Sheriff Sworn is a compassionate and professional investigator while investigating the werewolf attacks, while his deputies can be abrasive, and his Fish & Wildlife contact is secretly part of an Ambiguously Evil Creature-Hunter Organization. Sadly, this goes out the window after the monster targets Sworn’s daughters, and he becomes a lot less stable as a result.
• One Human Target episode has the head of a police bodyguard detail call in Chance and his crowd for help because all of his subordinates are plotting to assassinate their charge.
• Joan of Arcadia: The series begins with Will Girardi being transferred to Arcadia, Maryland to serve as the town's new Chief of Police. He soon learns that the police department is miserably corrupt, with local politicians deliberately interfering with investigations, officers being blatantly racist and allowing crime to happen for the right price, and the few genuinely caring cops left becoming Jaded Washouts as a result. Despite repeated roadblocks, though, Will never stops trying to do the right thing; he eventually exposes the rampant corruption of Arcadia and forces the department to be disbanded—the far more honest and judicious county sheriff's office takes over law enforcement, with Will as Chief of Detectives.
• Krypton: Many of the Sagitari who enforce the laws of Kandor City are well-versed in Police Brutality against the lower classes (whom they show constant disdain for), but Lyta tries to be an Internal Reformist, her mother and Dev-Em improve their behavior after Heel Realizations, and a handful of minor Sagitari troopers (like Tai-Un, Thur, and Pline) seem like decent people who do their jobs well and without malice.
• The Last Ship: Many cops enforcing nationwide quarantines against The Virus either fail in their jobs or are too ruthlessly Darwinian, but Thorwald and several of his Baltimore PD colleagues are efficient but humane in their duties before forming La Résistance when their boss starts killing uninfected survivors without useful skills to conserve resources.
• The Mentalist: The core California Bureau of Investigation team puts up with a lot of Manipulative Bastard Sociopathic Hero behavior toward suspects from their consultant Jane (although not always happily and generally with a I Did What I Had to Do feeling), and many of their colleagues are corrupt or are speculated to have murdered or maimed criminals who got under their skin in the past (although Bosco and LaRoche doing so has made them more determined to follow the rules in the aftermath of those events). Ray Haffner, while not a perfect person. may be the only recurring street-level CBI agent to abide by the rules throughout all of his screentime working for the organization.
• New Tricks: The episode "Last Man Standing" reveals that Gerry was this earlier in his career. Back when he first joined the CID in the early eighties, he discovered that the rest of the unit were on the take for the vicious Chapman family and confided in his governor DCI Martin Ackroyd who tasked him with watching the others but really also worked for the Chapman's, having Gerry abducted and dragged before the sadistic Dominic Chapman. When beatings and threats failed to deter Gerry, Ackroyd threatened to go after Gerry's newborn daughter unless he got with the program. Thus Gerry used his contacts to convince the underworld that Ackroyd was about to blow the whistle on the corruption, making clear to Ackroyd that his only option was to run. Unfortunately, Ackroyd foolishly tried to work things out and the sadistic gangster beat him to death. Apart from Gerry, there was only one other honest detective in the unit, and even he was aware of but willing to overlook the corruption.
• No Ordinary Family: While only two cops at the precinct where Jim works as a sketch artists are corrupt, most of the others are stiff-necked or overconfident, with only Detective Cho making Jim welcome from the start while also being a decent fighter and investigator. Sadly, she's killed in the second episode. Detective Cordero, the most prominent cop in the series, starts out hostile toward Jim but is smart enough and thaws out a lot after Jim saves his life, only to die in his first appearance after befriending Jim.
• Only Murders in the Building: The police are shown to be outright villainous — Kreps is working with Poppy/Becky in the conspiracy to kill Bunny in Season 2 — or not very competent, such as Detective Biswas. The sole exception is Detective Williams, who becomes fond of the trio against her better judgment, and goes above and beyond to help them (such as sending them Tim's phone) because she's aware there's something iffy going on with the police investigation.
• Perry Mason (2020): The 1930s LAPD aren't presented in a positive light, with it being common knowledge the vast majority of the force is corrupt, brutal, racist, and only interested in making quick arrests. Detective Gene Holcomb almost openly takes bribes and makes it clear his only interest in solving cases is to advance his career, whilst his partner Detective Joe Ennis is a smug, sadistic brute who is actually responsible for a child kidnapping and commits multiple murders to cover up his involvement. Even Pete admits that back when he was a Vice cop he took bribes and engaged in dubious actions until the corruption became too much and he quit. However, Officer Paul Drake, despite being a mere beat cop, is a dedicated and upstanding officer, who has the skills to be a great detective if not for his race holding him back. His integrity even worries his colleagues, with the lieutenant not-so-subtly warning Drake there will be consequences if he doesn't get with the program. Instead, Drake realises the LAPD is a dead end, and decides to become a private investigator working with Perry Mason.
• Person of Interest: Detective Joss Carter is initially the Hero Antagonist who wants to apprehend John Reese for suspicious activity. However, she's just doing her job since she's one of the few honest cops who has to contend with the corrupt police force and city officials known as HR. When she becomes a part of Team Machine, she struggles in To Be Lawful or Good until HR demotes her position and kills off several honest officers. Her efforts with the team brought down HR at the cost of her life.
• Power Rangers: Lt. Stone from the last season of the first series and first half of Zeo is an intelligent, hard-working cop who has the bumbling Bulk and Skull as his subordinates and eventually turns out to have a Mean Boss.
• Psych: While the present day Santa Barbara PD is efficiently and honestly run, the Season 6 finale reveals that hardnosed Sherlock Scan expert Henry was the only detective on his team who wasn't taking bribes from a drug lord.
• The Purge:
  • Recurring character Pete the Cop is an ex-policeman with a strong moral compass: before he quit the force, he was one of the only officers who opposed the Purge, trying to stop his colleagues from engaging in Vigilante Man behaviour, but was constantly stymied by his pro-Purge superiors and eventually left to open up a safe-haven bar.
  • Season 2 flashbacks show Ryan Grant and his team as the only ones at their precinct who are trying to stop a drug cartel (albeit by trying to go Cowboy Cop on Purge night) instead of taking money to protect it, which leads to them deciding to Turn in Your Badge and become bank robbers after seeing how their boss was dirty.
• Scream Queens: Played for Laughs. Throughout the series the Police are presented as utterly incompetent, to the point they completely fail to notice a decapitated body sitting in plain sight and rule Boone's death a suicide when even Chad Radwell was able to point out that was impossible (as well as missing the fact that Boone wasn't actually dead despite moving his body to morgue). At one point Chanel resorts to hiring two detectives from Scotland Yard to try to prove Grace and Zayday are the killers, the two immediately point out they have no jurisdiction in America and question the sheer absurdity of the events, but prove to be the only actually competent police in the entire show, managing within a span of less than 24 hours to uncover the pairs entire hidden pasts and completely exonerate them both.
• The Shield: Claudette is a By-the-Book Cop who closes important cases without breaking the law while the Strike Team (save short-term member Kevin) is hopelessly brutal and corrupt, the police administrators are cold-blooded politicos or can fall victim to Knight Templar moments, most of the other detectives and uniformed cops are bigots, thugs, or jerks, and even some of the other clean and generally honest, professional and/or community-minded cops like Dutch The Profiler, Fair Cop Tina, Julien The Heart, and Team Mom Danny can occasionally fall into using occasional excessive force or making Politically Incorrect Hero comments.
• Silo: While the sheriff's department (which investigates regular crime and guards prisoners) comes across positively, Billings is the only notable member of the Judicial Branch (which handles riot suppression, other security, and maintaining the Enforced Technology Levels and ban on relics) uninvolved in the shadowy conspiracy.
• Slasher: In Ripper, Detective Rijkers is a good man who is also good at his job while his boss, the main beat cop under him, and The Coroner are all corrupt to varying degrees.
• Snowpiercer: Most of the police figures aboard the train carrying the remnants of humanity work to keep the elite in power and the lower classes and stowaways in line through intimidation and occasional brute force. Stowaway Andre Layton is belatedly and grudgingly assigned to the police force to investigate a murder, due to none of the other ex-cops on the train having homicide investigation experience. He uses his position to serve as a mole for the train's rebels, and as an Internal Reformist, initially being the only good cop on the train, but gradually winning over some colleagues.
• The Sopranos: Whilst they rarely appear, it's made clear that the DiMeno family have nothing to worry about from the North Jersey PD, with their officers either quietly looking the other way or flat out being in their pocket. By contrast traffic officer Leon Willmore from "Another Toothpick" is shown to be an honest and incorruptible officer, as he refuses to accept a bribe and writes Tony Soprano up for speeding. This ends up ruining his life as it brings the wrath of the vengeful mob boss down upon him causing him to be forced to transfer to a dead end post and an investigation being launched into him by his crooked superiors. As a result, he loses his overtime pay and is forced into a Soul-Sucking Retail Job to make ends meet. However, Wilmore still sticks to his principles, even refusing a large charity payment from the remorseful Tony when he attempts to make amends for ruining him over such a petty matter.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • Andor: An interesting Subversion/Deconstruction. Deputy Inspector Syril Karn is the only person genuinely determined to solve the murder of two officers of the Pre-Mor corporate security forces (the other employees being portrayed as apathetic slackers), and clearly thinks of himself as the hero bringing a fiendish criminal to justice. The problem is, the two victims are scummy Dirty Cops missed by no one, who died in highly compromising circumstances that Karn's own boss would prefer never to see the light of day. Nevertheless, Karn persists and is actually able to track down the man responsible: Cassian Andor. But the ham-fisted attempt to arrest him results in several dead, Karn losing his job, and the Empire revoking Pre-Mor's favourable independent status as a result of the failure.
  • The Mandalorian: The New Republic is shown in this series to be nearly as bad at its job as the prequel-era Republic. Captain Carson "Blue" Teva, a recurring X-Wing pilot with the Adelphi Rangers, seems to be the only senior NR law enforcement officer actually interested in investigating recent happenings in the Outer Rim, and he gets stonewalled at every turn by his superiors on Coruscant despite mounting evidence of Imperial Remnant activity. This leads to him going to the Mandalorians for help when Space Pirates lay siege to Nevarro as part of the Imperial Remnant's machinations.
• Superior Donuts: Played For Laughs. Officers Randy DeLuca, a jaded but friendly veteran, and her partner, the young and idealistic James, are both regulars at the titular donut shop and good friends of Arthur and Franco. Overall whilst the show doesn't present the Chicago PD in a positive light, with a large number of the series jokes being about how ineffectual, corrupt, racist, and violent it is (which Randy and James usually either sheepishly accept or laugh along to with the others), and other cops to appear being presented at best as antagonistic and ineffectual if not flat out corrupt or bigoted, the two are still presented as overall honest and decent if a bit lazy cops.
• The Peripheral: A significant portion of the series takes place in Clanton, a backwater South Carolina town in the 2030s, where local drug baron Corbell Pickett rules the roost and has the county sheriff's department at his beck and call. Among their ranks is the genuinely principled Deputy Tommy Constantine, who grows increasingly frustrated when his attempts to investigate a ramming attack on his own police cruiser (conducted by Pickett) are stymied, and eventually snaps when he is asked to help frame his friend Flynne Fisher and her family, killing Pickett and the corrupt Sheriff Jackman, who had previously mocked him for attempting to cling onto his sense of justice.
• True Detective: Significantly downplayed by Detective Ray Velcro from Season Two. The Vinci PD are presented as utterly corrupt, with their primary focus being on covering up all the crooked corporate and political deals going on in the city, especially those linked to organised crime, with Chief Holloway, Lieutenant Burns and even Ray's partner Teague Dixon not only all being shamelessly corrupt but behind the 1992 double murder and robbery that kicked off the events of the season. But whilst Ray is heavily involved in the corruption and close friends with the local gangster Frank Semyon, even acting as their enforcer on occasion, it's made clear he's the only person left in Vinci who has a sense of decency, with his corruption stemming purely from desperation and cynicism. Working with the honest Detective Ani Bezzerides and California Highway Patrol officer Paul Woodrugh causes Ray to rediscover some of his former principles, and over the course of the season he develops a sincere desire to finally expose the corruption especially after nearly dying in a massacre set up by his own superiors to bury the case and kill Dixon.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Back There," when a time traveler tries to warn the cops at a police station that President Lincoln is in danger, only one man takes him seriously enough to try to put extra security precautions around Lincoln.
• Veronica Mars has two:
  • Before Keith's return to law enforcement at the end of Season 2, Leo D'Amato is the only remotely positive or supportive force for good among the Neptune police department.
  • Though Leo is still around in Season 4, he's an FBI agent at this point (and Keith is no longer in law enforcement). His role as the only good police officer is filled by Marcia Langdon, who genuinely listens to Keith and Veronica.
• Waking the Dead: As revealed in "Black Run", back when he first joined the CID Peter Boyd discovered himself to be this, with the rest of the officers in the station being nothing more than a gang who extorted and ran rackets through their area, with his DCI Eddie Vine being the most corrupt of them all. Following Boyd's attempts to bring him down through the system failing, Vine took Boyd aside and forced him to accept a protection payment making it clear he would be murdered if he didn't get with the program. Boyd instead burned the money, and, realising that he couldn't stop him through the system, manipulated evidence to incriminate Vine for the murder of his ex-partner (which Vine actually did) leading to him getting life in prison and ensuring Boyd's transfer.

Podcasts

• The Magnus Archives: Overall the police aren't presented in a positive light being at best Punch Clock Heroes, with nearly every character example being presented as corrupt or needlessly brutal in one way or the other. The Inspector framed numerous innocent people, Detective Robert Montauk was a disciple of the Hunt and murdered forty people (albeit under duress), an unnamed patrolman was secretly taking bribes to let people off tickets, and even Basira, who is genuinely well-meaning and honest, looks the other way at Daisy's extrajudicial murders out of personal loyalty to her. Furthermore, the London Police in general deal with the supernatural by lumping all problems on officers who have already been exposed to it, refuse them any extra support, and happily ignore the fact that solutions regularly result in deaths, even of other officers, only caring about the possibility of it being exposed. However, Sergeant Terrance Simpson and his partner Constable Clara Ross (both of whom notably aren't part of the Met) from "125: Civilian Causalities" are presented as honest and well-meaning, with them having to deal with the victims of the Hate Plague that the Slaughter unleashed upon the village and Simpson making it clear he tried his best to ingratiate himself to the locals and become part of their community.

Video Games

• Batman: Arkham Origins: James Gordon is the only honest cop among the GCPD during Bruce's early years as Batman, even if he initially opposed Batman for being a vigilante. That said, he still had the flaw of being a Horrible Judge of Character, naively believing that the majority of the police force had the same sense of right and wrong as he does and thinks that their badges prove they work within the law. One of his most egregious examples is when he puts blind faith in Branden solely because he's a cop, despite the fact that Branden has proven time and again that he's a Dirty Cop who hates his sense of justice. Barbara correctly points out that he "put[s] way too much faith in the system".
• In Cyberpunk 2077, the portrayal of the NCPD falls somewhere in between a Necessarily Evil organisation that's forced to be brutally violent because that's just how Night City is while still being so under-resourced that it's completely unable to go after anything but the very worst crimes, and so utterly corrupt that it's essentially just one more gang, just with official (public) support and more military-grade weaponry. There are a few good people left, but things for them aren't exactly easy:
  • V's neighbour Barry used to be part of the NCPD, but quit after a Maelstrom gangoon shot a kid right in front of him for shits and giggles, getting away scot-free due to his Corpo connections.
  • The trope is even Invoked by the title of an Act I side quest "The Woman from La Mancha", where V is hired to take out Anna Hamill, the only officer in the NCPD still struggling against the pervasive corruption of her department — in fact, the hit was put out by her own colleagues and superiors so she would stop investigating Kabuki Market and rocking the boat for everyone else.
  • River Ward, one of V's main allies and romance options, is a hard-bitten detective who genuinely cares about protecting the people of Night City but eventually ends up quitting the force to become a Private Detective, on the basis that he can do more good without the NCPD's many Dirty Cops breathing down his neck.
• Gotham Knights (2022): Following Gordon's death, and his replacement by Commissioner Catherine Kane's more militant approach to policing, the GCPD's capability has drastically fallen, with corruption again sky high, with even the officers who aren't corrupt being generally presented as ineffectual authoritarian's more interested in enforcing her anti-vigilante stance than solving crimes. Despite this Captain Renee Montoya is still an honest, dedicated cop and a staunch ally to the Knights. They even end up revealing their identities to her, forging a similar trusting relationship Bruce had with Jim.
• Mafia III: The New Bordeaux Police Department is presented as being in the pocket of Sal Marcano to the point that police officers can be seen actively protecting the gangsters' properties and moonlighting as their enforcers. Even without the corruption, overall the NBPD is presented as aggressive and highly racist, reacting to the slightest amount of wrongdoing with a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality and can be encountered beating up minorities and protestors, with many officers even being part of the Southern Union. Standing in stark contrast to this is Detective "Big Jim" McCormick, a dedicated, honest, cordial, and notably not racist individual, who is sincerely disgusted by the damage that Doc Gaston's drug ring is doing to the French Quarter. Given that the NBPD's corruption has caused all his efforts to bring Gaston down to fail, he's willing to accept Lincoln Clay's help to get rid of the drug dealers.
• Need for Speed Heat has Officer Eva Torres who is part of the PCPD Task Force. While her superiors Lt. Frank Mercer and Officer Danny Shaw are both a Dirty Cop and Rabid Cop respectively by taking advantage of the task force as a way to profit or for personal gain by exploiting the city’s street racing problem, smuggling cars and indulging in excessive violence against street racers, Torres on the other hand are against doing the illegal activities her teammates engage in. All she genuinely wants is to end the illegal races without the necessary violence or grifting.
• Road 96: Fanny appears to be the only member of Petria's police force that doesn't abuse authority and is caring to the hitchhikers that she meets and even helps some of the ones she encounters. She doesn't enjoy working for the corrupt Petrian government, but works for them anyway to support her adopted son, Alex. However this trope is deconstructed since despite being a good person, she's still part of a corrupt system in a dictatorship that treats innocent people as nothing more than criminals and it's made very clear that she lives in denial about how bad things truly are to even do her job, while being a hypocrite since she's shown arresting runaway teens despite being the mother of a runaway herself.
• Wasteland 3: Marshal Kwon of the Colorado Springs Marshals, who can at best be described as one slightly off-smelling apple in a barrel of rotten ones. While he is a Dirty Cop who happily takes bribes and sleeps with prostitutes in his off-hours, he's grown increasingly disillusioned with the turn the Marshals have taken into becoming Black Shirts for the Patriarch and ignoring any kind of rule of law by happily consigning people to freeze to death in the stocks for the most minute of offenses. As a party member, Kwon will disapprove of the party sending too many prisoners to the Marshals instead of taking them in yourselves, though he ultimately feels that some kind of police of Colorado Springs is needed and will oppose the Rangers outright overthrowing the Marshals and the Patriarch.
• Watch Dogs: Legion: Inspector Kaitlin Lau is a Metropolitan Police detective — one of the few remaining after policing has been outsourced to the brutal and corrupt Albion PMC after a deadly terrorist attack — who helps DedSec orchestrate the downfall of "Bloody" Mary Kelley. While initially adamant that Mary must be brought to justice and prosecuted for her crimes, she eventually realises that, despite overwhelming evidence against her, she's likely to weasel out of it due to her ties with Albion, and eventually allows her to be killed by her would-be-slaves when their Explosive Leashes are disabled by DedSec.

Webcomics

• Lavender Jack: Chief Inspector Honoria Crabb starts out as an Inspector Javert, obeying orders to hunt down the vigilante Lavender Jack and prevent the visiting Great Detective Theresa Ferrier from discomfiting the status quo with her investigation. But she genuinely wants to protect and support the people of Gallery, and comes to see her police department is ineffective at best, and under the thumb of the wealthy elite (and the power-hungry Chief Justice Gall) at worst. This leads to her To Be Lawful or Good moment, deciding it's better to quit the force to stand with Lavender Jack and Detective Ferrier in actually taking a stand against injustice.

Western Animation

• Fillmore!: In the episode "South of Friendship, North of Honor", Fillmore visits his old friend Wayne in Tennessee and finds out that Wayne seems to be the only honest member of the Safety Patrol of Wayne's school, with the school's Safety Patrol being headed by the Patrol Sheriff Thrift, a middle school take on the Dirty Cop/Small-Town Tyrant, and staffed mostly by his cronies. When Fillmore and Wayne try to find evidence that the Thrift stole a supply of pralines meant for a school fundraiser, only one other patroller, Jeter, is revealed to be honest and willing to help expose the corruption. The end of the episode sees Thrift having his crimes exposed to the school's principal (who also happens to be Thrift's father), and Wayne is made the new Patrol Sheriff for the school.
• Final Space: Quinn Ergon fulfils this for the Infinity Guard. Whilst in the past the Guard were genuinely heroic protectors of the galaxies, in the present it's clear they have fallen with the majority of members coming across as incompetent and authoritarian individuals. Quinn meanwhile is still highly intelligent and dedicated but bogged down by her superiors ignoring her reasonable concerns such as forbidding her from investigating the breach despite it endangering the earth, this often leads to her having to strive out on her own to actually get things done. As it turns out the vast majority of the Infinity Guard are actually in the pocket of the Lord Commander and deliberately sabotaging their efforts, to help spread his tyranny. In particular her boss Superior Stone. Learning this causes Quinn to wash her hands of the organisation, though she makes it clear she still believes in the ideals they used to hold.
• G.I. Joe: Renegades: The episode 'Busted' gives us Christopher Lavigne (Law) as a heroic prison guard. The Joes have to free Duke from a corrupt prison. The prison is run by horrible guards who force their prisoners to fight each other. The only good guards are Christopher Lavigne and his dog Order, this continuity's version of Law & Order, lesser-known Joes. Christopher wants to fight back against the corruption of the other guards, however he has no power or evidence to overthrow the Captain. He does help Duke when the other Joes storm the prison to save him.
• The Simpsons:
  • Springfield, Unknown State, is up there for having some of the least competent cops in fiction, all no thanks to none other than Chief Wiggum. He is stupid, lazy, corrupt, and often causes a lot more damage than the criminals ever do, and everyone else isn't much better. Officer Lou, however, actually has some competence at his job, usually being the one to point out Wiggum's mistakes, and is the first to understand when something is wrong and tries to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, since this is Springfield, a place where almost nobody is allowed to be competent, Lou gets ignored more often than not, while Wiggum continues to cause chaos and destruction.
  • In "The Springfield Connection", Marge Simpson joins the Springfield police force when she gets a rush from thwarting Snake's three-card monte scam, and she is shown to be far more competent than most of the other cops. During target practice, she only shoots criminals (Chief Wiggum even berates her for missing targets of a baby and a blind man), and she arrests Homer when he parks his car across three handicapped spaces, refuses to move it, and takes her hat. Near the end of the episode, Marge exposes Herman's scheme to sell counterfeit jeans, but the rest of the police force can't arrest him due to a lack of evidence. That lack of evidence of course, being that the cops decide to take all the counterfeit jeans for themselves. Unable to stomach its corruption, Marge quits the force.
• South Park: Zigzagged with Officer Barbrady. While he's not what you'd call the most competent in his profession, he at least tries to do the right thing and legitimately wants to help keep the peace. This is in contrast to Detective Yates and the rest of the South Park PD who are blatantly corrupt, obsessed with targeting minorities even if their alleged suspects are innocent, and often fail miserably at catching the real criminals.

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