Police Brutality / Video Games

• Virtually every law-enforcement officer (except two) encountered in the game Mirror's Edge until you learn that all of them except the two who aren't the Rabid Cop personified turn out to be Law Enforcement, Inc. instead.
• Several characters will accuse you of this in PoliceQuest. However, they are usually criminals that you are arresting. Intentionally trying to invoke this trope, though, will result in a game over. You can only use minimal required force.
• The Onett Police Force in EarthBound (1994) decides that the best response to a young boy's request to open a closed road is to have five officers try to beat him up. Since said boy has Psychic Powers, it doesn't end well for the police. There's a strong implication that they're being controlled, or at least influenced, by the Big Bad Giygas.
• Can be an Invoked Trope in The Sims series. Police officer is one of the occupations you can give a Sim, and there's nothing stopping you from having said sim have traits such as Insane, Evil, Grumpy, Mean, or similar once you can start assigning personality traits within the games (2, 3, and 4), and nothing preventing you from having said officer engage in unpleasant and offensive and violent interactions with everyone he or she meets and destroying everyone's property.
• In Half-Life 2, the Civil Protection officers (who're somewhere between cops and low-ranking Combine soldiers) are absolute scum who happily apply this trope on a daily basis and are legally allowed to do this to the Combine-dominated population centers' citizens. Anyone who so much as looks at them funny gets a beating (the player character merely coming near them makes them threateningly activate their stun batons), they mess around with people just because they can, and the La Résistance character operating undercover as one mentions being 'way behind on my beating quota'; it's not certain whether he was joking or not. The only halfway nice cop you come across is one who flicks a can sitting atop the side of a rubbish bin and tells you to pick it up and toss it in the bin for a chuckle and doesn't even threaten you. Throw it at his head and you get a whack or two with no permanent effect. They're implied to be 100% human on many occasions, so they don't even have the excuse of being brainwashed minions. They're not a threat to anyone able to fight back, either, just unskilled bullies through and through: Gordon with the HEV suit and just a crowbar can crack the skulls of two of them without a thought, and they almost invariably get slaughtered by Resistance members armed only with MP7s. Throwing the One Free Man into the fray just makes the Curb-Stomp Battle end faster.
• Mortal Kombat
  • Stryker shows police brutality in his x-ray move, fatalities, and some parts of his fighting style. Though to be fair, Mortal Kombat is brutal. He's even fond of shouting it! On the other hand, it's Mortal Kombat, it's about supernatural forces trying to threaten the earth and mankind with brutal gory deaths and soul-sucking with some Tournament Arc thrown in. For a Badass Normal like Stryker, Police Brutality is literally his only means of defense against the likes of four-armed giants, toothy bald guy with blade arm, toothy lady with Stripperiffic outfit, reptilian ninja and what-have-you. He's generally pretty heroic and upstanding for a cop, so it's most likely that he only delivered Police Brutality on criminals that totally deserve it instead of innocent people (and somehow he has a LOT of experience...).
    Stryker: Police brutality, coming up!
  • Jax's ending from Mortal Kombat 4 should have ended with him putting on shades and the theme song from CSI: Miami:
    Jarek: (Being held over a cliff by Jax) You can't drop me! You have to uphold the law! You have to arrest me! Wait, wait! This is brutality! You can't do it!
    Jax: Wrong, Jarek. This is not a brutality. This is a Fatality.
    Jarek: IMSOGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! (Falls to his death)
• In Fable, the guards around town beat you if you don't have enough money for a fine... and attacking in self-defense raises more charges against you. Kind of justified in a medieval setting, but still excessive.
• One of the patients in Amateur Surgeon is a police officer named Officer Brutality... though, apart from his name, not a whole lot implies that he's particularly tough on criminals. After all, he did go to back-alley surgeon Alan Probe for treatment.
  • In the third game, Officer Brutality is available as an Assist Character who has the special ability of beating injuries out of patients.
• Occurs in Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, wherein the city has enacted draconian measures to prevent graffiti, including assaulting graffiti artists with deadly force. One early level forces you to sneak away from a scene while two officers beat a graffiti artist to death while discussing how they'll decide he "resisted arrest."
• The FUZZ side-missions in Saints Row 2 have the main character disguising themselves as a police officer and committing wanton acts of police brutality (like breaking up a strike with a flamethrower) for a COPS-style reality TV show.
  Cameraman: Time for some vulgar abuse of power!
• Devil Survivor: Zigzagged this trope.
  • Good Light — The first cop you see risks his life trying to protect civilians from demons. It's only once law and order have broken down that you start seeing brutal cops killing for their own gain. Even soldiers start to do this, albeit to destroy all summoning comps so the lockdown will end, which is a hopeless effort.
  • Bad Light — At the end of Day 4, when some of the more-maligned cops get their own demon-summoning COMPs, they decide that since Tokyo is locked down and isolated, that they're gonna disregard law and order (or rather, what little of it remains due to, again, Tokyo being cut off from the rest of Japan) and murder some civilians. After seeing one civilian die at their hands, the cops then turn their attention to you and you're forced to fight them.
• Lieutenant Carter Blake from Heavy Rain. He assaults Ethan's therapist for refusing to answer his questions, attacks a mentally disturbed suspect who turns out to have nothing to do with the case, and if Ethan gets arrested, Blake will proceed to beat the hell out of him, only stopping when Ethan falls unconscious.
• All of the Grand Theft Auto games contain this; police will often shoot you for hitting their car. You're often guilty of much more, so perhaps they're justified. However, you can usually run over three or four pedestrians before they'll take any notice. Corrupt police officers are obviously abundant in the Crapsack World and will often hire the player for hits. Particularly notable is San Andreas, where the Big Bad is a corrupt CRASH officer and the final mission takes place during what are basically the GTA world's version of the Rodney King riots.
  • The online portion of the fifth game takes this up to Daniel Shaver levels, where the LSPD is aggressive to the point where even looking at an officer funny results in shooting said "suspect" in the back.
• Alan Wake has Agent Nightingale, who at first tries to arrest Alan for the disappearance of Carl Stucky (whom Alan is forced to kill in self-defense). Nightingale is trigger-happy (twice shooting at Alan while a civilian is standing right next to him), a drunkard, and repeatedly blames Alan for various things that he has no control over, such as during one episode where he's screaming about how it's Alan's fault that the Dark Presence is attacking the police searching the woods for him. Averted with Bright Falls' sheriff, who repeatedly calls Nightingale out on his actions and even helps Alan throughout the story. Nightingale isn't even a real agent, having been fired prior to the game's start for drunken behavior. Nightingale's just a jerk targetting Alan to give his own life some meaning. He's also not necessarily in control of his actions; he's just written that way.
• In Liberal Crime Squad, if you try and fail to run away from the police, they can beat you senseless, even if you were just spraying a graffito. With Death Penalty and Police Regulation laws at arch-conservative levels, it overlaps with Disproportionate Retribution: Death Squads execute on the spot any criminal they catch, no matter their crimes.
• In one level of Super Scribblenauts, Maxwell takes on the role of a police officer and is eventually tasked with dispersing a peaceful hippie crowd without killing anyone. And "killing" is the center word. Sure, he can just type "megaphone" and make them disperse... or throw tear gas and flashbangs at them. Or sic a guard dog. Being a game where you can use any word, the Video Game Cruelty Potential is pretty much unlimited.
• Max Payne:
  • Chapter 7 of the first Max Payne game is titled "Police Brutality" and, fittingly, features Max (then an undercover cop) interrogating a crook at gunpoint after killing all of his henchmen. The crook tries to call Max out on "police brutality", to which Max calmly replies that he rates pretty high on it. Of course, by that point Max was "so far beyond the point of no return [he] couldn't even remember what it looked like when [he] had passed it".
  • In Max Payne 3, Max runs afoul of the UFE, who go beyond shooting back at favela gangbangers to beating down and executing unarmed civilians apparently just for the crime of being in the vicinity. They're actually killing witnesses of their illegal organ harvesting ring.
• The Krimzon Guard in Jak II: Renegade go significantly past merely brutal and into openly murderous. Their Establishing Character Moment isn't when they cudgel a terrified Jak into unconsciousness; it's when they proclaim "Surrender and die!"
• Implied several times in Mass Effect.
  • In the backstory, we have the First Contact War. Started when the turians encountered the humans breaking the law. The humans being obvious newcomers and a completely unknown species were politely informed through pictographs that what they were doing was illegal... Oh wait wrong card, actually they proceed to attack without warning or given reason, entering a skirmish war with the human government, and then proceed to attack and occupy a colony, killing presumably hundreds of human civilians in the process (it's mentioned they weren't shy about using Orbital Bombardment to destroy entire city blocks). It's explained in background material that among themselves, such force is justified: turians are mentally incapable of surrender unless faced with the threat of absolute annihilation. But when they turned that tendency on the humans, they were rightly chastised by their compatriots, and likely had huge repercussions for the turian people as a whole.
  • In Mass Effect, when Garrus tells Shepard about one of his cases where he brought in one of the suspect's assistants for questioning, Shepard can respond that they don't believe that Garrus was just questioning the assistant, which Garrus doesn't deny.
  • In Mass Effect 2, when you meet Officer Bailey, you walk in on him telling one of his subordinates to "make [the suspect] scream a little."
• This is standard operating procedure for a surprising amount of Security players in Space Station 13, to the point where some servers had to have Security's batons cause an officer to electrocute themselves if they try to beat someone with it while the baton is turned on.
• Fallen London: It'll depend on which cops it is you're challenging. Regular constables are somewhat nastier than most modern cops when it comes to beatings, but violence isn't quite their first resort, it's simply always on the table. But the Velocipede Squad has a bad case of this. Even when there's no actual arrests involved, someone will get the crap kicked out of them. Doesn't matter if you're a docker with a hundred bar brawls under their belt, the sons of the local nobles, or even a huge clay golem, you're getting your vicious beating. Generally, excessive and even lethal violence is tolerated in this universe because people in the Neath come back to life, but repeated beatings can still ruin their bodies permanently and intentionally-excessive force can permanently kill someone.
  • 'Special' Constables can and will carve out your memory with brainwashing if they find even a balanced critique of the Masters of the Bazaar. Since they are primarily Culture Police and retain the full right to kidnap any undesirables, expect this trope.
  • The Constables over at the Magistracy of the Evenlode, a few miles West of London, generally act pretty much the same as their London-stationed counterparts, with a few exceptions reserved for those especially disrespectful to the law, heinous, or the more repeat customers. Those are just thrown into the river-fed water pit at the back of the Magistracy, so deep its bottom glows with Peligin light. The lucky ones drown and get washed down the river into the dockside; the others are claimed by something at the bottom and never return.
• Prison Architect can have this enforced by the player. Normally, armed guards are in Thou Shalt Not Kill mode, and don't kill with their firearms. Set the prison to operate on free-fire however, and watch as a prisoner gets their brains blown out for starting a fistfight.
  • If a prisoner has the "Cop killer" reputation, the guards aren't exactly going to treat them kindly. Usually, guards will beat a prisoner unconscious for getting violent. For the same crime, a cop killer will be readily beaten to death.
• Persona 5: The protagonist is beat and drugged by police at the beginning of the game after he is caught at the end of a heist. Notably, a police detective will threaten to break one of your legs if you refuse to sign a False Confession.
• In DmC: Devil May Cry, despite Kat getting on her knees and putting her hands up, the SWAT team shoots her in the shoulder and stomps on her repeatedly before arresting her. And Dante, who is stuck in Limbo, is Forced to Watch it happen without being able to do anything about it.
• Dwarf Fortress has the Hammerer, a noble whose sole purpose in life is to deliver brutal beatings to anyone who is convicted of a crime, justly or otherwise, and can still cripple or kill their targets without facing any retribution, since that's their job. Deprived of a hammer, they will cudgel your poor dwarves with whatever they have on hand... or with their bare hands (and feet, and teeth), with little or no loss of efficacy.
• In PAYDAY 2, Cloakers basically function like the Witch from Left 4 Dead: they jump on the player character, incapacitating them with one hit and then stand there, exclusively beating the everloving crud out of them with a nightstick while spewing Trash Talk. It's heavily implied that Cloakers are The Friend Nobody Likes among the Police because their overzealous use of force towards criminals appalls them.
  Cloaker: Now go to the forums and cry like the little bitch you are!!
• In Call of Juarez: The Cartel, you play a trio of Dirty Cowboy Cops on a off-the-books crusade against The Cartel. Consequently, a lot of what you do involves excessive violence, including some very uncomfortable instances.
• Jet Set Radio has the Keisatsu, who have absolutely no concept of proportionate use of force. Juveniles skating around on rollerblades should be prepared to have SWAT teams firing on them with tear gas, alongside their loose cannon of a captain waving around an oversized revolver. And if they start spraying graffiti? Then they should be prepared for parachute squadrons, attack choppers and tanks to come after them. And yes, every single one of the above uses live rounds.
• The VR game Duck Season has several endings, with one of them called "Best Men" ending, in which the player character David calls the police, who come chasing the knife-wielding villain into your backyard with a helicopter where they shoot him. And then shoot him again. And again. And again.