Basic Trope: A cop protagonist is suspended from active duty for overstepping their bounds in investigating a case... but they continue to work the case anyway.
- Straight: Da Chief pulls Detective Alice in to his office, subjects her to an Insignia Rip-Off Ritual and suspends her for two weeks. But by now, It's Personal, so Alice continues to Pull the Thread on the sly.
- Exaggerated: Alice is sacked from the police force altogether for gross misconduct, but continues to obsessively pursue That One Case as a Private Investigator or Amateur Sleuth.
- Downplayed: Alice is removed from the case and given a stern warning, but not suspended. (This is common in episodic formats where suspending and rehiring the protagonists once every couple of weeks would start to look a bit silly.)
- Justified: Alice really is demonstrating bad professional judgement and running herself ragged in the process, and putting her on administrative leave is the work of a Benevolent Boss.
- Inverted: Alice is an Amateur Sleuth who gets seconded to the utterly bamboozled police force after demonstrating her smarts. The chief even deigns to give her a "deputy" badge, but firmly draws the line at a gun.
- Subverted: ???
- Double Subverted: ???
- Parodied: The chief tries to suspend Alice only to be told she's already suspended and is in fact earning overtime for coming in on her time off. He buzzes his secretary to ask why he didn't know this, only to be told he suspended his secretary for getting his coffee order wrong.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice is reprimanded, removed from the case, put back on it, suspended, called for advice by the new cop given the detail, brought along as a consultant, and in the next scene is discussing the case with the chief as if she was never taken off it in the first place.
- Averted: ???
- Enforced: Showing the case being investigated through proper channels by several different people would both be more boring & bureaucratic and wouldn't allow Alice's character to do everything herself, so the writers take away the support and resources of her professional colleagues to force her to go it alone.
- Lampshaded: "I managed to go ten years in this job without demanding anyone's badge. What should I do next, take up smoking cigars and complain about "having the male on my ass"?"
- Invoked: Chief Bob actually really wants this case solved but the department is officially prevented from investigating it for some reason. Suspending Alice means they can deny all involvement if she's caught, while still offering her help in secret.
- Exploited: Alice's disciplinary and suspension is faked in order to sell her as a disaffected Cowboy Cop with nothing to lose so she can get in with the Dirty Cops she's really investigating.
- Defied: "I could fire you, but what's the point? You'd just have more free time to obsess over this case. You're being Reassigned to Antarctica."
- Discussed: "The chief's gonna have my badge for this..."
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: After screwing up a case in the first season finale, at the start of the next season Alice is riding a desk with no explanation. She doesn't want to talk about it.
- Deconstructed: Alice, in her pursuit of solving the case (and getting her badge turned in as one of the few consequences), DOES actually solve it, but at the cost of being branded a vigilante due to the technicality that she broke the law by solving the case as a citizen.
You broke every rule in the book, but dammit, you got results. Come on back to Turn in Your Badge, the place is falling apart without you
