Witless Protection Program

The Witness Protection Program serves to, well, protect witnesses to crimes in order to prevent perpetrators from... cleaning up after themselves, in a way. To put it simply, in case the perp has ideas to eliminate the witnesses in question, the Witness Protection Program will take those witnesses and officially alter all their records and form new identities plus have them move to another location in order to make them virtually impossible to track by the offenders. In Real Life, the program tends to be fairly successful in granting these people the security they need because there are multiple levels of protection and doesn't have to be a new identity, such as adding restrictions on who can read normally public records. In fiction, however... that's another story.

In fiction, if someone is placed under witness protection, they might as well have just pasted a huge "KILL ME" sign on their back because chances are that character is going down courtesy of the perpetrator, in spite of all the odds. Exactly how the bad guy finds these people regardless of all their records being virtually erased is rarely ever brought up. Perhaps the perp had some help from the inside? Or maybe the perp has supernatural abilities that aided their search. Or maybe the people who are supposed to be keeping their identities secret aren't that good at doing their job. Or perhaps they just happen to be a Scarily Competent Tracker. Or maybe the witnesses blow their cover by being Too Dumb to Live. Perhaps the perp just stumbled upon the witness by random happenstance. Or maybe they are just that good at being criminals. Whatever the case, they will find a way to get to these witnesses, government protection be damned (and the more law enforcement officials that physically get in the way to try to stop them, the bloodier it's going to get).

Sometimes, the witness will be lucky enough to survive the inevitable attempt on their life (usual reason being them being a main character), but that still means the witness protection failed; the perp found them anyway. Fortunately, should the witness survive, what usually follows is either the bad guy getting killed and the witness being able to return to their old identity (which is very much not advisable in Real Life witness protection), or the bad guy getting incarcerated, which usually only delays their inevitable return.

In cases where a government-issued program does not exist, friends, relatives, and associates of the witness may make their own form of protection. However, the chances of the witness getting found out only increases exponentially. Especially if the protectors happen to be particularly powerful.

The Anthropic Principle is in full force here; if the witness protection did work, the characters would simply happily disappear into their new lives, and there would be no story.

Subtrope to Witness Protection. See also Police Are Useless and Unsafe Haven, the latter of which operates on the same principle as this trope.

Not related to the Larry the Cable Guy film Witless Protection.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Played for Laughs in this Dutch commercial for an insurance company. A man testifies against a mob family and is placed in the witness protection programme. But no sooner has he settled in his new house, his cover is blown because he is the 100.000th new inhabitant of the town where he settled and is greeted by a huge welcome committee, complete with tons of press coverage.
• Played for Laughs in a commercial for A&W Root Beer, someone is being driven by Witness Protection in a car with giant "witness protection" lettering printed on the side. When a car full of mafiosi tailgate the witness protection car, the driver says "Hold onto your hats, I'll shake them" and very slowly changes lanes.

Anime & Manga

• Averted in Case Closed, there is a character called Jodie Starling who changed her name from Starling to Saintemillion due to this actress named Vermouth killing her parents and searching for Jodie. Jodie initially rejected the offer of Witness Protection by the FBI, but then changed her mind and it helped protect her. What changed her mind was making a promise with James Black to look for her parent's killer when she's old enough to join the FBI. The Witness Protection was successful, and she survived to adulthood and became an FBI agent.

Comic Books

• In the The Authority: Kev series, Kev Hawkins' address is supposed to be a secret due to his history with the SAS, but he keeps getting found by the various Irish terrorist groups who want him dead. It's later revealed that his handler, Froggett, deliberately leaks his location to his enemies in the hopes that they'll kill him and thus Froggett will finally be rid of Kev once and for all.
• Batman: Officer Down has a rare case of a completely unsympathetic witness — a former mafioso who resented being split up from his family (never mind that it was his choice to join the mob to start with) and guns down Commissioner Gordon for arranging the State's-Evidence deal to begin with. Ultimately, even Batman's unable to make him confess to the shooting, and he walks… until Bullock deliberately leaks his identity to some of his old associates.
• In The Trial of The Punisher, Frank Castle allows himself to be arrested and put on trial because he wanted to explain something in his defense: that he knows the judge presiding the trial used to be a high-ranking mafioso that provided evidence to the FBI and entered Witness Protection, and thus escaped punishment from the law — but not from Frank, who had already killed the corrupt DA that got the mafioso the deal before letting himself be captured, just to get in this room. The judge only has about two seconds to crap his pants before Frank gets out of his cuffs and unleashes the most literal example of "Rage Against the Legal System" ever.
• Saga: Journalists Upsher and Doff know of a program to protect testifiers, that doesn't just change their identity but also transfers them into a completely different body to make them harder to trace. While Alana and Marko turn down the offer, Petrichor and Robot IV take it, Robot giving a testimony about the real circumstances behind the destruction of the planet Phang.

Comic Strips

• One The Far Side strip has an informant interviewed on TV (in a darkened room)… so of course, a janitor comes in and turns on the light right when they cut to the guy.

Films — Animated

• Parodied in Osmosis Jones — at one point the crew visits the Chicken Pox virus who says they are in the virus protection program. This is actually a case of Shown Their Work — the virus that causes Chicken Pox actually does lie dormant within your nerves after infection. At the age Frank is, it's very unlikely that he was vaccinated against Chicken Pox, thus he would have a dormant virus.

Films — Live-Action

• Bird on a Wire: Rick is recognized by his old girlfriend and immediately calls his handler, asking to be moved again. He's told his old handler has retired and introduced to his new handler… who promptly sells him out to the bad guys.
• Bullitt begins with Lt. Frank Bullitt and two other cops getting assigned to guard detail for Johnny Ross, who embezzled from the mob and is now testifying against his former employers in exchange for immunity and witness protection. Ross acts like he doesn't understand how much danger he's in, and when he unchains his hotel room door, two hitmen burst in and fatally shoot him. Bullitt smells a rat and investigates further, hoping to prove Ross's death didn't result from his department's negligence. He finds out that it was a setup — by Johnny Ross, who was playing both the police and the mob to fake his own death and disappear. The police never even met the real Ross; the man they were guarding was actually Albert Renick, a lookalike who Ross tricked into taking his place. And Ross was the one who tipped off the mob hitmen on which hotel to find him at.
• Casino: One of the mobsters managed to get on Witness Security and leave the country (ending up on Costa Rica), but his son is arrested and the rest of The Mafia, fearing that he will blab more info on the group, finds him and kills him.
• Discussed Trope in The Client. Mark Sway dismisses the idea that he should go into witness protection because he saw a movie with this trope. Never mind that it's pretty rare in real life; he's Just a Kid and doesn't know that Television Is Trying to Kill Us.
  Reggie: Look, have you ever heard of the Witness Protection Program?
  Mark: Lord, yes. That's where they put you in funny mustaches and send you off to New Jersey or someplace to live. I saw it on TV. But the guy on the TV movie, the mob found him anyways. And they blew his legs off.
  Reggie (shocked): You saw that on TV?
• Cohen and Tate: The film begins with the Knight family being established to be in Witness Protection because they saw a mob hit. Five minutes later (and very shortly after entering the program In-Universe) the titular hitman duo arrive to the safe house and massacre all of the Federal agents assigned to protect the family and the family except for son Travis and Travis' dad, although accidentally.
• The Dark Knight: Batman kidnaps a mob accountant and turns him over to Gotham police, and the accountant agrees to help the police bring the mob down in exchange for amnesty. In response, the mob hires The Joker as a "problem-solver"; Joker proceeds to get himself arrested, blow up the police station with a cellphone bomb, spring the accountant from his cell, and execute him by immolating him with gasoline.
• Invoked Trope (by the villains) on Eraser: Turns out that the Government Conspiracy that is selling out the Rail Guns has members within Witness Security, and so they are able to hunt down and try to kill (and successfully kill one of) the witnesses holding information on the secret arms sale. The Batman Cold Open that establishes the tactics of John "Eraser" Kruger happens because Johnny Casteleone (a Mafia informant that entered the Program and becomes a Chekhov's Gunman) decided to risk being found by the Mafia to go back to his favorite pasta place and eat his first proper (by his standards) meal in months.
• The '90s B-Movie Made Men starts with Bill Manucci, a Con Man in Witness Protection, getting a phone call warning him that the criminal syndicate he used to work for has discovered where he is and has a group of men already on their way to retrieve the money he stole from the organization before informing on them, after which they will surely kill him. Bill then has to play his old comrades, the local criminals, the corrupt sheriff, and one guy in the group sent after him who claims to be an undercover cop against one another in order to survive.
• In the third act of Malavita, the Mafia family that has been hunting down the Manzonis ever since Giovanni (the father) provided State's evidence manages to find out that the Manzonis are hidden in a small town in France by a collection of Contrived Coincidences involving Giovanni's son writing an article using a quip his father liked to use in his Mafia days for his school paper and a copy making it all the way to the United States and the hands of the Don.
• The Mother opens with the title character in an FBI safehouse. She warns them that she's not safe there and sure enough all but one of the FBI men get killed moments later by her former colleague. The Mother happens to be pregnant and is forced to give up her daughter to foster care to protect her, as it's pointed out that the FBI is not inclined to protect someone who got a bunch of their agents killed.
• My Blue Heaven has two instances of the bad guys finding the informer (under witness protection as Tom Wilkinson).
  • The first time is when he decides to go out dancing with his FBI handler and attracts too much attention.
  • The second is when he is caught committing crimes in the small town he's been hidden in and the assistant district attorney indicts him under his real name. Another failing of the witness protection program is that they seem to relocate all of their witnesses to the same half-dozen small towns.
• Combined with Witness Protection and Cannot Keep a Secret, this is the main premise of Our Lips Are Sealed, a DTV-movie starring the Olsen Twins. To go into greater detail, after witnessing a jewel heist, Abby and Maddie Parker (along with their parents) are placed in the FBI's Witness Protection Program. Unfortunately for the FBI, they end up having to constantly relocate the Parkers due to the twins being (self-admittedly) "blabbermouths" who keep blowing their cover (including it being deliberately invoked by them at one point of the montage because they sure as hell won't accept being forced to pretend to be Amish). The twins and their parents are eventually placed in Sydney, Australia, where Abby and Maddie actually do a pretty good job of finally keeping their mouths shut. Unfortunately, the criminals who committed the jewel heist do find the girls in Australia, but they're ultimately apprehended by the authorities, finally giving Abby, Maddie and their parents the chance to go back home to America (which they decide not to take because they have come to like their new lives).
• Princess Protection Program is a fictional princess-specific equivalent to the people protection program, and as such during this movie, the program fails to protect Princess Rosalinda, even as it moved her from South America to a small town in Lousiana because her country is undergoing a coup from a local Banana Republic. She's discovered when the Alpha Bitch finds an article about her in a magazine and recognizes her immediately, then calls up her country to let them know where Rosalinda is.
• Runaway. The police catch Jackie red-handed with the templates for the killbots and, after she confesses, decide to use her as The Bait to flush out her Mad Scientist boyfriend Dr Luther. Unfortunately Luther is ​a supreme expert in Hollywood Hacking and Crazy-Prepared (having concealed multiple bugs in her clothes) and she doesn't survive the night.
• Justified in Sister Act, where the main character under witness protection is found by the mob thanks to a mole working inside of police headquarters. The police know (or at least suspect) the leak exists, but it takes some time for them to find and plug it. Unfortunately, the mole finds the protagonist and reports her to the mob just before he gets caught. Also downplayed in that it takes most of the length of the film for the mole to find her in the first place.

Literature

• Nightmares & Dreamscapes: In the short story Dolan's Cadillac, the wife of protagonist Robinson witnessed a crime by mob boss Dolan and was put in Witness Protection before the court hearing. Dolan took virtually no time to find her (Robinson suspects bribed Federal agents) and place a bomb on her car. Robinson decides to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, and considering the story is a Homage to The Cask of Amontillado you can guess what he did to Dolan…
• Recoil by Brian Garfield involves an attorney who went into witness protection after witnessing a mobster bribe a judge. Nine years later, the mobster's associates have tracked him down. However, this is not presented as easy — they first have to find a clerk who can be blackmailed (because she's a lesbian; the book was written in 1977) and then she has to find the right file. Later, after the hit on the attorney fails and the clerk is arrested, the mobster's wife comes up with the idea of sending in a professional burglary team to steal all the files, which will cause chaos and make everyone afraid to turn evidence for the government. Fortunately, the mobster never has a chance to carry out this plan, the attorney having purchased the help of a Vigilante Man.
• The Saint short story "The High Fence". A captured criminal agrees to turn Queen's Evidence and tell the police who the High Fence (an underworld buyer of stolen goods) really is. He's murdered in his cell by being fed poisoned food. When another criminal is taken into custody and agrees to tell Inspector Teal the High Fence's address, he's shot dead before he can do so.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow: At the start of season 7, Felicity Smoke and William are in ARGUS witness protection program since Diaz, the Big Bad of the previous season, is still out to get them. Naturally, he tracks them down and almost kills them both, prompting Felicity to send William away to a boarding school in Cambridge, and herself to return to Star City and reunite Team Arrow to take down Diaz herself.
• Better Call Saul features a fascinating, almost complete inversion of this trope: Season 4 involves the construction of a meth superlab using foreign contractors. The contractors are carefully vetted and hired by Mike, who supervises them in a secure location while they do the work (living in a warehouse almost like a government safe house). The contractors all have cover stories and don't know where they are geographically. When one naively exposes the operation to possible discovery by both the DEA and a rival cartel, Mike is forced to execute him and is shown to be greatly upset by it.
• Subverted in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. After receiving death threats from Jimmy Figgis, Jake and Holt end up living in Florida under witness protection. They manage to live there under the false identities of Greg and Larry for six months and are often checked up on by their Marshal. However, the two intentionally break several rules to lure Figgis to Florida in order to finally apprehend him and resume their lives in New York.
• Criminal Minds:
  • Hotch's ex-wife Haley and their son Jack are put under protection when a serial killer targets them. It's mentioned off-hand at one point that they're being moved because Haley contacted her mother, but this still didn't enable the killer to find them. He does manage to find them because the marshal assigned to their case had Haley's number saved into his personal cell phone. Granted, they note that isn't standard procedure and that it was a special case because Hotch was the man's friend, but it's still pretty sloppy.
  • Subverted in another episode, when the team discovers that one of their victims was in Witness Protection and assume that her abduction is related to her father's related criminal activities. It turns out to be a complete coincidence, and the father's past only comes into play at all because of the skills he gained as a mafia hitman. The team needs to track down the family years later, and they're only able to do so through the program, and the marshal deliberately brings both groups to a neutral third location, rather than revealing anything about their new placement.
  • Yet another episode features a civilian-run equivalent, an "Underground Railroad" to help battered women escape their abusive husbands/exes. The UnSub of the Week is a mercenary Cold Sniper hired by one of said abusive husbands who manages to slaughter his way through the railroad in 48 hours and almost gets his target.
• CSI: NY: In "To What End?" a young man who testified against some PCP dealers who had killed a friend of his is placed in the Witness Protection Program and sent to live in Memphis under a new identity. In spite of this, the dealers track him down and send a hit man after him. He manages to overpower the hitman, interrogate him as to who sent him, and then kills him before returning to NYC to go after the sender as well.
• Delocated is an example of the "you can't fix stupid" variety and revolves around a Jerkass witness code-named "Jon" deciding to film a reality show of his family living in New York City. Unsurprisingly, the most dramatic moments of this comedy series happen when the leaders of the Russian Mafia Jon testified against come calling with no desire to take prisoners.
• In the Doctor Who serial "The Ambassadors of Death", a scientist called Lennox runs away from where he's been held and forced to do alien experiments and turns himself in to UNIT. His superiors are quick to find out where he is and murder him by putting a radioactive isotope in his cell.
• FBI: "Compromised" sees Maggie and OA dealing with several people in the Witness Protection Program getting exposed and assassinated in rapid succession, even several who have already spent years within the program without a problem. It's acknowledged in the episode that this has never happened before and shouldn't be possible. It turns out the local head of the US Martials running the program is corrupt and is selling the information for money.
• One episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had Will recounting a story to Jazz about witnessing a mob hit, leading to Will and his family being put into witness protection. Despite being located into backwoods appalachia, the hitman tracks the family down due to Hillary leaving behind a note that the hitman finds in the Banks' mansion. Will isn't able to finish the story, and Jazz thinks Will's messing with him. But Will freaking out when Jazz sneaks into the house dressed as the hitman as a prank hints there might have been some truth to it.
• This turns out to be the case with Rose's boyfriend Miles in The Golden Girls, as he was really a mob witness named Nicholas, on the run from a boss named The Cheeseman. Later he returns with a new identity as an Amishman, only for Rose's new boyfriend to be the Cheeseman, recognizing Miles and holding everyone hostage until their neighbor, a cop, comes in to save them.
• The Green Green Grass: Invoked. Boycie ends up having to flee his beloved London, following it being leaked that will he testifying against the Driscoll Brothers. As such he sells everything and buys a farm in Shropshire, then leaves in the middle of the night without telling anyone. When Marlene asks why not go into a Police witness protection, Boycie points out it was the Police who told the Driscolls he was the grass. The Driscolls do eventually find him, but only after Marlene foolishly invites her sister to visit for the weekend, up to which point they admit they had no clue where he was.
• In Plain Sight zig-zags with this trope. Many times the protection's secrecy breaks because of the witnesses being Too Dumb to Live (or something else happens, like a recording where one appears becoming a YouTube sensation), and sometimes because of inner leaks or because the bad guys are that much of an example of the Implacable Man.
• A mob turncoat from Law & Order is under federal protection pending his testimony against a criminal kingpin. The turncoat gets shot dead in an alley by his date, who pleads self-defense against an attempted rape.
• Series 2 of Line of Duty begins with the murder of somebody in witness protection, and the plot of the series is basically the investigation into that murder.
• In The Mentalist episode "Red Sauce", the Victim of the Week is a mobster in Witness Protection after testifying against his boss. His wife did it because he cheated on her again after she gave up everything for him going into the program.
• In Person of Interest, Samaritan leaks the entire witness protection database onto the Internet as part of its war with the Machine. The NYPD spends most of a day struggling to reach the people in the WPP and get them into protective custody, but several are killed.
• The Police Woman episode "No Place to Hide" has hitmen working under the guise of a detective agency taking down former mob witnesses. One of them has a girlfriend working on the inside to provide information on the targets.
• The backstory of Signed, Sealed, Delivered episode "Time to Start Livin'" has a boy riding his bike down an alley and stumble onto a lowlife narcotics ring just before a shooting. He became the star witness and he and the family had to hide out at some undisclosed location until he could testify against the criminals at the trial. In the episode proper, the baddies use a female agent to extract the location from a letter the boy secretly sent to his grandmother in an elderly home. The heroes catch up with the agent and prevent her from reaching and killing the boy.
• In the Taxi Brooklyn episode "Ambush", a witness in a mafia trial is being transported via a prison bus that gets hit by mobsters, even though she was traveling under an assumed name. Subverted somewhat in that the mobsters don't know her real name or what she looks like, so WITSEC at least didn't screw that part up.
• In one episode of Veronica Mars, Veronica is unintentionally manipulated into tracking down a man in the Witness Protection Program, thinking she's helping a woman find her ex-husband. It wasn't very difficult for her to find out who he was and where he lived, and almost gave the woman the man's home address before her father stopped her and told her who she was actually aiding.
• Witness Protection rarely works out for anyone in The Wire. Because the city is so broke that it can't afford a proper witness protection program, on numerous occasions over the course of the series, witnesses are killed or people who try to come forward with evidence of crime unintentionally give themselves away to their fellow criminals and pay a heavy price as a result.

Podcasts

• SAYER: An Artificial Intelligence goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against its creators, and its most valuable developers are reassigned to other departments to protect them, but it eventually manages to kill them anyway by manipulating a new employee to do it.

Print Media

• A parody of Police Woman that appeared in MAD has The Hero use the protected witness as a Human Shield against the bullets fired by the mobsters that want the witness silenced. Almost like a mantra, this poor guy asks, "Are you sure you're not out to get me?"

Video Games

• "A New Life" in Hitman: Blood Money is a mission where you must assassinate a former Cuban crime lord who will be testifying against his former partners. Among other flaws in his security detail include two FBI agents in a surveillance van who will easy disclose their occupation to you after you give them donuts which may or may not be drugged to knock them unconscious, and another FBI agent who likes sniffing his charge's daughter's panties, which can be powdered with ether to also knock him unconscious.
• Tommy Angelo, the protagonist and narrator of Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, trades in his mafioso secrets for a new identity under the US WPP. His old mob cronies find him twenty years later, anyway, and shoot him dead in the epilogue.
• In Police Quest 2: The Vengeance, escaped convict Jessie Bains is getting his revenge against the protagonist Sonny Bonds, the cop who arrested him, and the three witnesses who testified against him. One of the witnesses, Donald Colby, is under Witness Protection, and Bonds even gets a warning to him and the police of the city Colby is in. Nevertheless, Bains manages to kill the witness. Of course, it didn't help that Colby still used his real name and even opened a business under it, allowing Bains to easily track him.
• Saints Row 2 has a side mission where you have to assassinate a guy in WPP, which is as easy as going to the next fast-food, ordering every item from a menu to lure him out, and shooting him and his two bodyguards (both basic cop NPCs) dead. This is justified by the police in Stilwater being both extremely corrupt and extremely incompetent.

Visual Novels

• Witness: A Bodyguard Romance has this in spades. The main character, Niamh, witnesses the husband and wife duo who are also the leaders of The Irish Mob murder an innocent man and is placed in witness protection. The problem is, A) her assigned bodyguard, Cassian, is the man/women she slept with the previous night (which would compromise their position if their boss found out) and B) the duo who would be after Niamh's blood if they even knew she was there didn't even see her (at first). And that's just the start. Niamh constantly flip-flops between cold aloofness towards Cassian and wanting to have sex with them (even after being told to keep things professional so poor Cassian doesn't get fired), she blows her cover at least thrice for stupid reasons, Cassian is later revealed to have been working undercover for the Irish mob in the past and didn't think to mention it, and Cassian's boss ends up betraying the two to the mob anyway to keep his family safe.

Webcomics

• In the "Barsoom Circus" arc of Schlock Mercenary, one of Lunesby's allies that she tried to arrange a form of witness protection for, posing as a clown, got shot out of a cannon at a cliff by their enemies in UNS intelligence.

Western Animation

• In the Family Guy episode "To Live and Die in Dixie", Chris becomes a witness in a robbery and anonymously sends the thief to prison; however, his identity is spilled to the robber twice by both Peter when he wanders into the wrong room looking for his son, and also by the FBI when they give the robber the Griffin family's new address in Dixie.
• Zigzagged in Fugget About It. The Mounties are shown as actually competent in protecting the family. Still, they tend to let too many things slip through the cracks, like Jimmy reaching out to his family in New York, which they should keep closer tabs on. But when things actually escalate, Jimmy would probably have been killed if McCool wasn't there to protect him.
• In the Futurama episode "The Silence of the Clamps", Bender has to go into witness protection after he agrees to testify against the robot mafia. The detective in charge of the case directly tells Bender that the mob will find and kill him. Bender survives only because the mob mistook a similar-looking robot for Bender. No credit to the detective, though — his 'relocating' of Bender consisted of getting Bender a job at the pizza place across the street from his previous employer.
• The Simpsons: The episode "Cape Feare" is a Whole-Plot Reference to Cape Fear and as such the program does not work out. Sideshow Bob threatens Bart to kill him, so the family decides to go into witness protection until Bob is sent back to prison. The relocation agents name the family the Thompsons and tell them they'll leave Springfield to begin a new life in Terror Lake. The family drives to Terror Lake and move into a houseboat, believing they are safe from Bob. Bob, however, has belted himself to thes bottom of their car. In Terror Lake, Bob resumes his threats to Bart.
• Paramount's "Mike the Masquerader" features a rather dim elephant who is entered into a witness protection program. While carrying a body advertisement sign, he collides with Mike, who had just robbed a bank. The police think they have a cut-and-dried case as "an elephant never forgets". Mike tries (in disguises) to eliminate the elephant who is holed up in a hotel room surrounded by police. After failed attempts on his life, the elephant now doesn't recognize Mike. He admits his memory is so lousy he has to keep his memories on a tape recorder, and he happened to record Mike saying "Don't you remember me bumpin' into you when I robbed that bank?" which he played back to the police.

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