Basic Trope: An officer believes The Hero is the bad guy and goes after him ruthlessly.
- Straight: Detective Bob believes Alice, who has been framed, is a thief and does everything in his power to arrest her.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob mistakes a ketchup stain on Alice's shirt for blood and attempts to arrest her for murder.
- Bob wants to kill any and all criminals.
- Alice once faked being sick when she was in high school. Truant Officer Bob will see that she makes up for the day she was absent even if he has to chase her to the Andromeda Galaxy and give her lessons on her death bed.
- Bob is such a stickler to the law that being provided proof that he has ever broken it, no matter how minor the transgression (ex. he stole a penny from a "take a penny, leave a penny" tray when he was three), makes Bob try to kill himself or march into the nearest police precinct looking to "confess".
- Bob is so driven to capture Alice (who, while quite a right a-hole, still has some humanity) that he considers her existence and (literal) misdemeanors as more vile than the actual murderers, drug dealers and sex offenders in the sector, and he is willing to disregard anybody else's crimes (unless they're too notorious) and will even manufacture evidence for the sake of tossing Alice in the nick.
- Downplayed:
- Bob, a truant officer, goes after Alice whom he believes is skipping school, but has graduated school years ago.
- Bob begins his search of Alice as an evildoer but decides to drop it very early — either becoming an ally to Alice or finding reasons to hunt her down that overwrite (in and out of universe) "she is a criminal".
- Justified:
- The hero is framed for all the shit, but without evidence, Bob is right in trying to apprehend her.
- Bob is not actually responsible for determining whether Alice had committed the crime, merely apprehending suspects. While Alice might not have been guilty of the crime that made her go on the run, she nonetheless breaks the law by evading arrest and doing other scofflaw acts to get fed/dressed/mobilize/find the true guilty party/collateral damage of battling said party, giving Bob just cause in pursuing her even after her innocence had been proven.
- Alice is in a Police State so Bob can do anything to apprehend her.
- Alice has a Criminal Doppelgänger who framed all her crimes on Alice, and Detective Bob fell for it.
- Alice technically did commit the crime ... when under the Big Bad's Mind Control, and Bob didn't know that.
- Inverted:
- Alice believes that Detective Bob is actually the villain in disguise and tries to capture him.
- Alice is deluding herself (and possibly others) when she says that she has committed no crime and that the laws of man are unjust for people like her, and Bob is quite righteously justified in hounding her (even if he is still quite an ass about it).
- Subverted:
- Bob is after Alice, who claims to have been framed, but turns out, was lying and did commit the crime.
- Bob knows that Alice is innocent but continues to pursue her, because he committed the crime and needs a pasty to pin it on. With some luck, he may even be able to kill her to keep her quiet and pass it off as resisting arrest.
- Alice is able to prove that her Criminal Doppelgänger did the crime (or her under Mind Control, which made her no different from your average store bought drone, for all means and purposes). Bob accepts that he is dealing with an Outside-Context Problem and changes his outlook.
- Double Subverted:
- But that was not the crime Bob is after Alice for.
- After Alice manages to prove her innocence and Bob manages to get rid of any incriminating evidence, he still is after her because of all the very minor misdeeds she pulled off in the search for proof, with the same amount of severity he was applying earlier on... which means he now wants to kill her because she jaywalked.
- Once Bob arrests Alice's Criminal Doppelgänger, he still tries to arrest Alice "just to make sure" until the CSI crew has compiled all the evidence and make sense of which crime that occurred during the plot was done by which person.
- Bob arrests the Big Bad who utilized Mind Control to force Alice to do the crime, then tries to arrest Alice anyway under an extremely vague interpretation of Felony Murder laws and a one-liner about how this is for the judge to decide and for what it's worth (which at this specific moment in time is very little) he still sympathizes with Alice and he hopes she will beat the charge and set precedent for any future victims.
- Parodied:
- Alice is a completely innocent woman, but through a series of coincidences and misunderstandings, Bob accuses Alice of several crimes, and her every attempt to prove her innocence only makes things worse.
- The police sends Bob, its most Implacable Man, to hunt down Alice. The chase lasts years on end and sees Alice sacrifice everything to keep so much as a single second ahead from Bob... and the reason is because they wanted to give Alice an apology letter and refund check for that time she got a ticket.
- Alice and Bob run all over the world for years on end like Valjean and Javert, with a severity reserved for enemies against mankind, because Alice refused to pay her $5.00 ticket for parking next to a fire hydrant. for further parody points, Alice is a hard-core criminal and the reason Bob is chasing her is (for all that it befuddles the rest of the cast) Right for the Wrong Reasons.
- Zig Zagged:
- Sometimes, Detective Bob accuses Alice of a crime. Sometimes, he does not.
- Detective Bob accuses Alice of a crime. Sometimes she is innocent, sometimes she isn't.
- Averted: Alice really is guilty of the crime Bob accuses her of.
- Enforced:
- "Enough of this Black-and-White Morality! Let's make the antagonist an honest cop who sincerely believes the hero is a bad guy."
- "Alice is becoming boring. We need to give her a new nemesis, someone she cannot just shake off. A cop sounds nice—she'll need to be careful around him, otherwise she will go to jail for assaulting a police officer even if she's not guilty of whatever Evulz is framing her for this week or something."
- Les Misérables is one of the greatest books of all time, The Fugitive is one of the greatest shows of all time... there's no harm in copying from the best, right?
- Alice is the Villain Protagonist of the series and they need a Hero Antagonist. Enter Bob. To maintain sympathy on Alice, Bob is too overblown with his tactics or reasons to capture her.
- Lampshaded: "Don't the police have anything better to do?"
- Invoked: The lazy Chief of Police hires Bob, knowing that his arrest percentage alone will cover for the incompetence of the entire department.
- Exploited:
- Evulz and his minions are constantly doing "anonymous calls" to Bob about where Alice is, so she can't just run away from him and hide someplace. It is very easy to frame her as a result, as well.
- When Evulz is caught red-handed by Bob in one of his schemes, Evulz spins a wide web of lies painting Alice as the evil mastermind behind the scheme and that he would be glad to become Bob's mole. If Bob is lucky — and sane — he may still arrest Evulz or at least not go into shock and let go of his cup of coffee as he figures out he's been had.
- Defied:
- Statutes of limitations say that Alice can't be arrested for her alleged crime after a few years, so Bob drops the case.
- Alice maintains constant track of where she has been alongside plenty of iron-clad evidence, so whenever Bob comes to her trying to accuse her of some misdeed, she provides the evidence to make him eat his words.
- Bob is most pointedly not assigned to Alice's case. Detective Reeson is.
- Discussed: "Listen, I understand that Les Mis is one of the greatest literary works of all time, but what the heck made you think that we needed some guy that is one "this I swear by the stars" away from a full Russell Crowe impersonation?"
- Conversed: "Bob is a very lawful man. He's the most lawful man in the whole city. He's incorruptible, he's implacable, and he will make sure you do 90 years in Attica for stealing a loaf of bread."
- Deconstructed:
- After Bob has arrested Alice, evidence of Alice's innocence pop up, and Bob is fired for his inability to spot this evidence before.
- Bob had wrongfully accused others for so long that no one believes his accusations, even when he's right.
- Bob is too determined to bring Alice to justice. By the end of the story, Bob has become so obsessed with the mission that he has completely turned into a villain and betrayed the law in some brilliant (in his mind) scheme to draw Alice out.
- Reconstructed:
- This becomes a Career-Building Blunder and Bob later arrests the true villain by spotting similar evidence.
- Bob has so much power within the agency he works in that it doesn't matter whether he's wrong: he's surrounded himself with yes-men that reinforce his accusations, telling him only what he wants to hear so that he can continue his job unopposed.
- Played For Laughs: Bob allows actual criminals to go free in his pursuit of Alice.
- Played For Drama: Bob is so obsessed with proving Alice Guilty that he neglects and possibly loses his family in his quest to do so, as well as risks his career.
- Played For Horror: Bob is a psychotic Rabid Cop that has no problem killing everything Alice loves and framing it as an unavoidable hazard of hunting down a "notorious criminal", because he seriously believes that anybody who has any connection to Alice is a potential abetter.
Back to Inspector Javert's jail! We're sure you're that infamous ban-evader!
