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Police Brutality: Difference between revisions
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[[File:Police Bruality 2 1573.jpg|frame| These anti-riot squad officers [[Blatant Lies|calmly]] tell a pedestrian [[Disproportionate Retribution|not to litter]].]]
{{quote|'''Billy Tripley:''' Look, this is police brutality!
'''Elliot Stabler:''' Trust me, when you're being brutalized by me, you'll know it.|''[[Law and Order Special Victims Unit]]'', "Sick"}}
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** It becomes clear a bit later on that this hiring choice was entirely intentional.
* The first ''[[Dirty Harry]]'' movie has Harry Callahan roughing up the Scorpio Killer while in custody to learn where he had hidden a kidnapped girl, [[What the Hell, Hero?|and getting called out on it]]. After Scorpio gets let out of custody because of it and other red tape issues, [[Police Brutality Gambit|the killer pays a guy to beat the crap out of him so he can blame the beating on Harry, whose only defense is that it couldn't have been him, cause if he was the one who beat him, the guy would look a lot worse]].
** Subsequent films continue the trend, naturally.
{{quote|'''Lt. Neil Briggs:''' I've got nothing personal against you, Callahan, but we can't have the public crying "police brutality!" every time you go out on the street.}}
* ''[[The Fighter]]'' has some cops breaking Micky Ward's hands simply due to him being a fighter. It's also worth noting that he didn't do as much damage as his half-brother, Dickey Eklund.
* This is [[Older Than Television]]. An extreme early example can be found in the 1941 [[Film Noir]] ''I Wake Up Screaming'' and its 1953 [[
* ''[[The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus]]'' has the song ''"We Love Violence (Join the Fuzz)"'' where a troupe of singing, dancing policemen extols the virtues of being able to perform violence within the law.
* In ''[[Ip Man]] 2'', one British policeman has his buddies hold down {{spoiler|editor-in-chief Kan}} while he deals out a beating.
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* Stella Bonasera has gotten called out for using excessive force a couple of times on ''[[CSI: NY]]''
* ''[[Dragnet]]'' got in on it at least once as well, in an episode showing the police application process of the time. Friday and Gannon were suspicious of one applicant with a 6 month gap in his background history, and it was discovered he'd been kicked off another town's sheriff force for police brutality.
* A first season episode of ''[[Due South]]'' had Ray beating a Mafia don senseless (after the Mafia don [[Idiot Ball|agreed to talk to him in private, in a locked room]]) and threatening to tell the entire neighborhood about it unless he agreed to stop harassing a local shoemaker that the Mafia don had ordered a hit on for [[Disproportionate Retribution|stealing a hundred bucks from a church's poor box]].<ref>The shoemaker had resorted to stealing from the poor box because the Mafia don had bled him dry in a protection racket, causing the Shoemaker to lose his business and be abandoned by his family)</ref>
** Amusingly enough, on the "[[Idiot Ball]]" note, is that the reason Ray got the first hit in was because he tossed the don a basketball, ensuring that his opponent's hands would be full when he took the first swing. It could almost be a [[Visual Pun]] on the concept of the [[Idiot Ball]].
** Ray made a point of leaving his gun and badge in the car before he went inside to confront the Don, so he wasn't beating the crap out of him as a cop, but as a member of the community (That said, still a cop, still an unlawful beatdown, still counts.)
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* In the series ''[[The Last Detective]]'', while the protagonist is a [[By-The-Book Cop]], his DCI is an [[Old-Fashioned Copper]]- think a washed-up Gene Hunt. In one episode, the latter talks nostalgically about no longer being able to have suspects "fall down the stairs".
* ''[[Law and Order Special Victims Unit]]'': Detective Eliot Stabler gets away with a disgusting amount of brute force, probably because people consider the guys he badgers and brutalizes deserving of their fates. Even though at worst, he occasionally find out that the suspect is an innocent man.
** All the other main detectives (and the persecution lawyers, occasionally, and the various ADAs) aren't above threatening their suspects or not minding Elliot attacking suspects.
* ''[[Life On Mars]]'': DCI Gene Hunt has a tendency to let his anger be his guide in investigation/interrogation rather than a sense of due process. Yeah, forget things like "facts" or "due process" or "the truth": Let's just go out and reenact scenes from ''[[Death Wish]]''.
** Note that the traditional explanation for suffering injuries while in British police custody is "falling down the stairs"; bonus points if this is in a police station where the cells are on the ground floor.
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** The show was inspired by the [[wikipedia:Rampart Scandal|horrific scandal at the LAPD's Rampart Division]], which included some rather eye-popping allegations: A bank robbery planned by a police officer, multiple suspects killed with weapons planted on them for justification, actually joining the "Bloods" street gang, stealing drugs from the evidence locker for hip-hop producer Suge Knight, and murdering Notorious B.I.G.
* In the first episode of ''[[Sledge Hammer]]'', the titular officer holds a purse-snatcher at gunpoint and orders him to beat himself up. This is typical of how he treats suspects.
** In another episode, Sledge pitches the benefits of being a cop on the basis that he gets paid to legally beat up and kill people.
* Parodied on ''[[Whose Line Is It Anyway?]]'' a couple of times:
** In game of "Hollywood Director," Brad, playing a cop responding to a car accident between Ryan and Wayne, immediately after arriving on the scene, beat up Wayne for no other reason than because he's black.
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* Subject of many a Gangsta Rap [[Protest Song]], most notably N.W.A.'s "Fuck Tha Police" and Ice-T/Body Count's "Cop Killer".
* The [[Frank Zappa]] songs "Concentration Moon" and "Mom & Dad" are about police shooting hippies and smashing them in the face with rocks.
* The parody song GO COPS plays with this for all its worth.
* The German punk band called Wizo has a song which called ''Kopfschuss'' (Headshot). The song is esp about Wolfgang Grams (was a member of the Red Army Faction, a German far-left terrorist organisation), who got killed by German elite cops at the train station in Bad Kleinen.
* [[David Bowie]] 's Life on Mars? has the lyrics "Take a look at the law-man/Beating up the wrong Guy/Oh Man! Wonder if he'll ever know.../He's in a best selling show?".
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== Video Games ==
* Agent Robert Nightingale in ''[[Alan Wake]]'', 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 the chase where he's ranting about how it's Alan's fault that the Dark Presence is attacking the police searching the woods for him. This behavior made him a stark contrast with Sarah Breaker, the Bright Falls' sheriff who repeatedly calls Nightingale out on his actions and even helps Alan throughout the story.
* 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.
* ''[[Devil Survivor]]'' takes this to [[Nightmare Fuel]] levels. {{spoiler|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.}}
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** Police Chief Thomas Byrnes perfected police brutality in what he calls 'The Third Degree'.
* Saipan in the CNMI is rather well known for this alongside a heavy dose of corruption, and an arguably believable [[Conspiracy Theory]] states that [[Taiji Sawada]] was one of its more famous victims. The official story that he hanged himself in his cell doesn't make very much sense, unless you really do believe people tape their mouths before hanging themselves...
* South Africa has a brutal and corrupt police force. The black policemen are frequently abusive and racist towards whites in their hands—Afrikaner women in particular are terrified of being arrested, because it sometimes ends with rape in the police-cells. On the other hand, today's white policemen, while not quite as bad as those from [[The Apartheid Era]], can often be abusive and racist towards blacks; Afrikaner policemen have a particularly bad reputation in this respect. Finally, [[Corrupt Cop|corruption/bribery]] is rampant in the police forces, among officers white, black, Asian, and Coloured, high-ranking, low-ranking, and everything in between.
* Brazil is also infamous for its police cruelty, especially after the release of police actions in the states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Few people actually like the police, even when they are actually needed. Most are incompetent and trigger happy, with no problems with pointing their guns at the faces of women and the elderly for no proper reason. The rest just try to do a good job while keeping a low profile, because the corrupt ones do NOT like cops that don't "participate."
** The only thing that separates those countries from America is that it's hard to get filmed proof of police brutality, because they made it illegal. That's right, if a corrupt cop sees you filming him beating up someone, he can just take your camera away, delete the evidence, and arrest you. (And then he'll likely beat ''you'' to a pulp.)
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