There Are No Police

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

In a modern city, full of schools, post offices and subway lines, there is one thing noticeably absent: the police. Whether you're on a murder spree, blowing up buildings, or just walking around stealing things, there's no need to fear the police. This is because they don't exist. No one even mentions the police or tries to avoid detection. Compare Police Are Useless, where they exist but aren't going to help. See also Anarchy Is Chaos.

Examples of There Are No Police include:


Anime and Manga

  • Bleach: Multiple times in Karakura Town there have been explosions, buildings being damaged or destroyed, and large numbers of humans being killed. The series has never shown any police investigation (or any government response of any kind, for that matter) to these events.
    • There was a scene in the first movie where someone had to have called the paramedics to retrieve Ichigo's body, due to him being in Shinigami mode, and therefore out of his body. Then again, this is Filler.
    • The first instance in canon was during the recent Xcution arc, where the Big Bad starts fights Ichigo and a few new protagonists, however because none of them are in "spirit bodies" like the other fights, people do take notice. In fact, the fight is broken up because the police are coming.
    • The first episode perhaps? You see a group of police who have blocked off an area where a "Gas explosion" had caused damage, we however know it was caused by a hollow.
  • School Days: After Sekai stabs Makoto, and Katsura carries his severed head around no one even mentions the police or tries to avoid detection.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! pre duel monsters, killer theme parks, and people being set on fire occur without the specter of police attention.
  • In Noir the Anti-Hero protagonists never show slightest concern towards the police in wealthy industrialized nations when applying their trade of killing people for money. And indeed, the only time that the police interfere is when they are corrupt cops hired by an equally corrupt judge to protect himself from them. You would think that he could have gotten perfectly legal police protection, under the circumstances.


Film

  • In The Cook the Thief His Wife And Her Lover, the Thief in question is a brutal Complete Monster who publicly beats his wife, attacks his own customers at his restaurant and commits his crimes in full view and yet, no cops show up.
  • Pulp Fiction has a noticeable lack of police or any sort of legitimate authority figure. Either the characters are very lucky, or there are no cops in Los Angeles. Even after Butch deliberately runs down Marcellus, gets into a car wreck, is chased down the street and shot at and a bullet hits a bystander, nobody thinks to call the cops.
    • Well the owner of the pawn shop called a cop, but he wasn't all that interested in protecting or serving...
    • Vincent's drug supplier was pissed when Vincent called him on a car phone, apparently in case the conversation (Mia Wallace OD'd on heroin) was overheard by the authorities or someone willing to contact them.
    • The characters were also concerned about getting pulled over once Marvin was shot in the face.


Literature

  • In Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, there are no police on the Moon. There are only the Warden's guards, who don't care about convict on convict crime. The convicts (and their many descendants) handle "justice" their own way. In fact, one of the reasons that people there start to support revolution happens when the guards start to take an interest in enforcing the (mostly newly created) rules.
  • Justified in the Nightside series, as the Nightside was created by Lilith to be a place without rules or authority.


Live Action Television


Video Games

  • Rather literal in All Points Bulletin as the police are replaced in their entirety with groups of vigilantes.


Web Comics

  • Many Gag Per Day Webcomics fit this trope, inasmuch as they feature Comedic Sociopathy as a major source of their humour, necessitating that the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist (e.g. Ethan of Ctrl+Alt+Del), Man Child (Rayne Summers of Least I Could Do), or violent Jerkass (Mike Warner of the Walkyverse) rarely, if ever, faces arrest or even a warning from the police.
  • Invoked until just recently on El Goonise Shive, and even then you are more likely to see journalists than cops.
  • Completely subverted/averted in Megatokyo. Almost every major occurrence of weirdness has police intervention, in the form of Inspector Sonada and the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division. Figuring out who's responsible and actually catching them however, is a completely different matter, especially when there can be more pressing things to deal with, like Zombie Godzilla attacks.


Western Animation

  • An episode of "Family Guy" subverts this trope when Peter detonates explosives outside a childrens hospital, entirely destroying the building. No repercussions of the incident seem to occur, as is common in the show, until the very end where Peter is informed that the crime has been investigated and is taken to court.
    • The Futurama episode "Three Hundred Big Boys" ends similarly, with Bender being beaten by the police for stealing a $10,000 cigar much earlier in the episode.