Always Gets His Man

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Fraser: [slams jail cell door on fugitive] That's the last time he'll fish over the limit. —Due South

This is a cop's cop. He is incorruptible, competent, and feared by evildoers. If he is not Da Chief it is likely because either he is too young, or his path is blocked by Obstructive Bureaucrats who fear him for obvious reasons.

He is often a By-The-Book Cop, though some versions have a bit of Cowboy Cop in them. If he is an Inspector Javert, he will be portrayed sympathetically as a Worthy Opponent and he is only on the opposite side by an unfortunate error in the system or else because the protagonist is a Villain Protagonist. Often, because Elites Are More Glamorous, this kind of Cop belongs to a famous law enforcement organization: effectively the constabulary equivalent of a Badass Army.

Very often, he's a Determinator who is Lawful Good-- with a strong accent on lawful. Generally a fair cop, though if the protagonist is operating outside the law, he'll pursue him as relentlessly as anyone else. You very much do not want to do something to make him follow you.

Examples of Always Gets His Man include:

Advertising

• Molson (IIRC) Lager commercials: "Malcolm the Mountie Always Gets his Can".

Anime and Manga

• Inspector Zenigata from Lupin III thinks of himself this way.
• Inspector Lunge from Monster loses his family and eventually takes an unpaid vacation of several months to try and catch Tenma. He's so determined that, while dying of blood loss he handcuffs himself to Tenma to try and stop him from escaping.

Comics

• Gordon & O'Hara from Batman.
• Colonel Samuel Benfield Steele, in Don Rosa's Hearts of Yukon. The trope title is even played with:

"We always get our duck"!

• "No man escapes the Manhunters!"
• Inspector Ishida in Usagi Yojimbo.

Film

• Like Zenigata above, Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther believes he is this.
• Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) in The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals.
• Jack Valentine in Lord of War.
• From Clue:

Wadsworth: Like the mounties, we always get our man! Green: Mrs. Peacock was a man?! (Mustard and Wadsworth slap him)

• Horsefeathers' Professor Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) is no lawman, but at one point he invokes the trope in song anyway:

My son is right, I'm quick to fight, I'm from a fighting clan When I'm abused or badly used, I always get my man No matter if he's in Peru, Paducah, or Japan I go ahead, alive or dead, I always get my man

Live Action TV

• Leroy Jethro Gibbs in NCIS. Ditto Fornell.
• Don Eppes in Numb3rs.
• Cordell Walker (Chuck Norris) in Walker, Texas Ranger.
• Odo of Deep Space Nine.
• Babylon 5: Officer Garibaldi.
• Josh Randall from Wanted: Dead or Alive.
• Fraser in Due South: well, he is a Mountie. See Real Life below.
  • Notably, he protests whenever someone claims that the Mounties' slogan is "We Always Get Our Man." Once again, see Real Life below.
• Sheriff Carter in Eureka is a more mild version of this.
• Horatio of CSI: Miami is a suspected Affectionate Parody of this trope.
• Olivia Benson of Law and Order SVU is a female version.
• Joe Friday in Dragnet.
• Tuvok in Star Trek: Voyager
• Columbo in Columbo.
• Peter Burke in White Collar
• In Bones, Booth mentions this trope when Brennan comments that he could never catch her if she were to commit a murder:

Booth: That's right. See? Because I always get my man. Bones: I am a woman.

Literature

• The Rhodian Navy collectively in Over the Wine Dark Sea. They keep the peace in the Aegean and they are feared by pirates.
• Discworld: Sam Vimes, Carrot as his right-hand man.
• Solomon Kane, who once pursued a bandit from France into the middle of Darkest Africa.
• Zinc Chandler, a Mountie from Michael Slade's RCMP novels, recited the Mounties' "Get Your Man" slogan repeatedly in his head when he shook off the effects of being rendered nearly unconscious. Nearly all of Slade's Mountie heroes fit this trope, singly or collectively.
• In the Commonwealth Saga, Paula Myo fits this trope to a T. Genetically engineered to be an incorruptible super-cop, she has been working for the Serious Crimes Directorate for centuries, and in all that time has only failed to solve one case. Which she is still pursuing, after a century and a half. When circumstances force her to decide between arresting the Well-Intentioned Extremist perpetrator and saving the human race from extinction, she suffers a near-fatal nervous breakdown.
• Harry Bosch, the hero of many a Michael Connelly mystery novel, is this with Cowboy Cop mixed in.

Tabletop Games

• In GURPSTraveller Sword Worlds the Confederation Patrol provides a lot of these kinds of Space Police for the Sword Worlds Confederation.

Web Comics

• A Modest Destiny persodies the fugitive speech.

Western Animation

• Dudley Do-Right. He is a Mountie, after all (see below).
• Klondike Kat always gets his mouse!

Real Life

• Though they may or may not qualify under the trope, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, one of those "constabulary Badass Army" type organizations that have a lot of these kind both in fiction and presumably in Real Life, are the Trope Namers here, thanks to the famous motto: "The Mountie always gets his man!". (It's not really their motto--that's "Maintain The Right"--but it's gotten established in pop culture that way.)
  • Even referenced in Peabody's Improbable History segment of Rocky and Bullwinkle when Peabody and Sherman went back in time to Canada to meet a Mountie who always gets his man. He couldn't arrest a wanted Native American because she's a woman which turns out to be a man in disguise at the end.
• Robert Carrey, an Elizabethan adventurer who served as Warden of the Northern Marches and patrolled the Anglo-Scottish border keeping evildoers at bay. A decent and honest man and too seldom remembered.
• Eliot Ness: He and his men were not called "the Untouchables" for nothing. He was an US Treasury agent who kept organized crime at bay in Chicago in the days of Al Capone.
• In a town in Arizona a highwayman lies buried at the graveyard. Marked on his tombstone is "Wells Fargo Never Forgets".
  • Though that sounds rather like a combination of Vigilante Man and Best Served Cold . Still it is a Badass Boast.
• Theodore Roosevelt apparently acted like this back in his days as a New York Police Chief. He'd go patrolling in the streets and if he saw a cop acting corrupt (taking bribes, hassling people for no good reason), he slapped them and then fired them on the spot.