In the fictional world, there’s nothing quite like a good bad cop. From sleazy, utterly decadent moral vacuums like Harvey Keitel’s eponymous Bad Lieutenant to duplicitous departmental rats like Colin Sullivan, Matt Damon’s character in The Departed, there’s always a motorway of movie mileage to be obtained from bad apples.
The same, of course, applies to TV. With Line of Duty‘s nail-biting second series now over, CultBox is stood beneath the tree with its apron spread to catch five of the small screen’s best/worst police officers as they tumble from grace…
5. Jimmy Beck in Cracker
Although Jimmy Beck is hardly a shining beacon of decency at the beginning of Cracker, proving himself to be incompetent, bullying, resentful and prejudiced from the first episode onwards, this is actually only the start of his descent into dastardliness.
His ineptitude leads to his boss being murdered, and the subsequent guilt pushes him completely over the edge. A spiral of violence and corruption culminates in the rape of his colleague Jane Penhaligon and Beck eventually jumps off a hotel roof to his death, killing a murder suspect in the process.
Fitz is unforgiving: ‘I spit on the bastard’s grave every time his name is mentioned.’ Fair enough.
4. Pretty much everyone in The Shadow Line except Chiwetel Ejiofor
The Shadow Line wasn’t just the most enthralling British police drama serial of 2011. It was also home to one of the most corrupt police forces in the history of television.
From Commander Khokar downwards, nobody in the nick seemed immune to the allure of illicit lucre – even the heroic Lia Honey turned out to be incapable of resisting Gatehouse’s seductive charms and went bad in the end.
The sole exception was Jonah Gabriel, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Despite finding himself up to his neck in sleaze, he managed to remain nobly resistant until the very end, when previously loyal sidekick Honey blew him away with a sniper rifle. There’s no justice.
3. Officer Dibble in Top Cat
On the face of it, Officer Dibble is one of the unsung heroes of the NYPD. He’s constantly trying to evict Top Cat and his gang from the alley and thwart their illegal schemes to turn a fast buck – and although he never succeeds getting the cuffs on any of them for more than a few minutes, he never gives up.
He’s an example to cops everywhere, right? Wrong. In fact, he’s actually complicit in the feline fraternity’s criminality and one of Top Cat’s pals into the bargain.
According to the title song, only ‘close friends get to call him TC’ – and that’s precisely what Dibble does, allowing the moggy malpractice to continue and never once calling in Environmental Health to sort out the strays. Officer Dibble is officially a bastard.
2. Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in The Dukes of Hazzard
Although Boss Hogg’s idiot, doesn’t-know-his-left-from-his-right-hand-man demonstrates on several occasions that he has a heart of gold beneath the swaddled layers of buffoonery and antipathy towards the Duke boys, he’s still one of the lamest lawmen ever to wear a badge.
Rosco knows where Bo and Luke live, yet whenever they escape him in the General Lee, does he go to the Duke Farm and arrest them? No, the slow-witted sheriff stays in his (usually upside down in a creek) car, fuming.
Why the hell doesn’t Boss Hogg sack him? Nepotism, of course. His wife Lulu is Rosco’s sister.
1. Fox Mulder from The X-Files
He may have been instrumental in saving Vancouver the entire world from aliens, mutants, ghosts, angry computers, cannibals, giant tapeworms and the Devil, but police work is all about procedure – and Mulder’s methods tend to involve plunging heavily into illegality, breaking into restricted bases, punching superiors whilst under the influence of hallucinogens, exchanging moments of furrowed sexual tension with Scully and wielding a mobile phone as an extra extremity rather than doing things by the book.
This is top-level corrupt behaviour, and his FBI bosses should have seen to it that it was Mulder, rather than the truth, that was out there – on the street, looking for a new job.
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Who’s your favourite corrupt cop on TV? Let us know below…