Noble Bigot with a Badge

"I have dealt with your type before. I will civilize this land." —Cpt. Stanley, The Proposition

Di Georgio: Ah that's one thing about our Harry. Doesn't play any favorites! Harry hates everybody. Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, n****rs, Honkies, Chinks, you name it. Gonzales: How does he feel about Mexicans? Di Georgio: Ask him. Harry Callahan: Especially Spics. —Dirty Harry

Stereotypical smart mouth, racist, big city cop — but with a Sympathetic POV, which makes all the difference. Almost always written as a noble, misunderstood "good guy" (or girl). This could give the impression that the writer(s) are downplaying bigotry--or, in a passive aggressive way, justifying bigotry in certain situations — to the point of making "loyalty" to "your own group" a virtue, thus making lack of bigotry come across as Category Traitor.

Sometimes this guy is shown as honestly mistaken and will moderate his bigoted views over time. This will often involve him coming into close contact with the group that he hates, possibly even being partnered with one of them.

The "noble" part frequently takes the form of not allowing his prejudices to interfere with police work — you won't see him charge a black guy with a crime he knows he didn't do. Is almost always white, but can also be of color. The ethnic version exist for the character to critique their own gender or race without the writers worrying about being called racist. Kinda like a inversion of N-Word Privileges by proxy.

Subtrope of--obviously--Noble Bigot. Usually a Politically Incorrect Hero.

Examples of Noble Bigot with a Badge include:

Anime

• Huang of Darker Than Black is a Fantastic Racism version, but certainly looks the part, being a cigar-chomping, hard-drinking, overweight, Jerk with a Heart of Gold.

Comic Books

• Also most of the pro-Registration side in Civil War were supposed to be this. Unfortunately, so few writers believed in the Pro-Reg argument that the 'Noble' aspect never came up.
• The DC Universe has Detective Harvey Bullock; like Sam Vimes, he Hates Everyone Equally. (Except for Batman, who he hates just a little bit more)
  • In the DCAU, he hates Batman because he's a "freak", who's hogging all the investigations.
• Lieutenant Burke from Sandman Mystery Theatre probably qualifies.
• Subverted, played straight, lampshaded and deconstructed in The Question #15.
• Officer Pete "Shock Headed Peter" Cheney of Top Ten is extremely hateful of robots, largely referring to them with the offensive Fantastic Slur "clicker." The Forty Niners prequel features Adam "The Spirit of '76" Pure, who hates robots, vampires, and everyone who isn't white (excepting vampires) — though these were much more popular sentiments in 1949.

Film

• Jack Moony from Heart Condition. Subverted in the end though, because of a heart transplant from a Black man, who ended up staying around to make Moony see things differently.
• The Proposition Morris Stanley gives people The Sadistic Choice, beats up prisoners, discriminates against Irish people, is a bit blunt on the whole imperialism thing, and doesn't trust his wife with information that might upset her. The thing is, it's all out of a misaimed sense of duty and chivalry, and he's not really a bad guy, underneath it all.
• Police officer John Ryan from Crash. He starts off as just plain bigot then gets slightly more noble while the films does it's best to make itself the unfunny version of Avenue Q's "Everyone's a little bit racist".
• Although he doesn't have a sympathetic POV, Officer Coffey from Boyz N the Hood is a very provocative take on this. As he's a black officer that shows apathy, and hostility towards his own race. Likely a double subversion being that he was black and wasn't depicted as noble... Arguably
• Similarly, the black drill sergeant Calhoun from the underrated HBO film First Time Felon is arguably given a Sympathetic POV. He despises the black juvenile felons because "I hate the fact when white people see me, they see you instead. I love black people, but I hate n****rs". He hates the stereotypes that they help perpetuate of decent black people like him. He despises the felons so much he intentionally undermines their rehabilitation by provoking them to hit him. He even goes as far to say "I'm never gonna let you get released back on the streets! I'm gonna lock up your children, and their children's children!" . The character can definitely be interpreted and dissected in many different ways.
  • An Alternate Character Interpretation is that he's a embittered cynic who doesn't believe in redemption.
• Henry Oakes from NARC, for several reasons; not the least of which is that his "daughter" is actually a girl he had rescued from her sexually abusive father, after putting her in a squad car and beating the ever-lovin' shit out of her dad.
• Variant: Detective Spooner from I Robot, whose prejudice against robots gets him involved in a mysterious case...
  • Though this isn't so much hating robots as simply not trusting them. It's also largely justified.
• Variant: small town Police Chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) in In the Heat of the Night. At the beginning, he seems the stereotypical obnoxious, racist redneck, but — also thanks to Steiger's Oscar-winning performance — slowly emerges as a decent (if bitter) man who befriends the black protagonist, Virgil Tibbs. It helps that Gillespie is shown to be significantly less bigoted than most of the rest of the town.
• The police officers in Slumdog Millionaire hate lower class Indians and use Electric Torture as a matter of course. However, after the protagonist doesn't confess under torture, they start believing him and are even somewhat helpful.
• Sergeant Gerry Boyle, the main protagonist of The Guard is this in spades. He makes outright racist comments at a briefing ("I thought only black lads could be drug dealers. And Mexicans) and believes Americans to be overly idealistic. However, when his rookie partner's wife informs him that her husband is missing, he goes out of his way to solve the case. Even when every other guard in the area has been bribed to stay out.
• Philadelphia has Joe Miller, a lawyer version of this trope. He is (at first) homophobic but agrees to help a gay man with AIDS sue his old employers for discrimination because such discrimination is against the law.

Literature

• Sam Vimes from the Discworld books may be considered one of these. Vimes is more a misanthrope than a bigot, though he's occasionally described as being biased against everyone, regardless of race or species.
  • He genuinely seems to hate vampires but that's more about class than a matter of species. Vimes especially despises members of the upper classes who abuse their power by exploiting others and taking the fruits of their labor without giving anything back. Vampires represent everything he's ever stood against.
    • As of Thud, he lets a vampire join the watch though, and lets her stay on even after she's revealed as a spy.
    • Mainly because at first, he is forced to take her on, and after the fact because if he plays it right, no-one will be able to tell him who he takes on ever again. He then wonders if Vetinari thinks like this all the time.
    • And by Snuff, he has at least two vampire officers on the force.
  • As mentioned in a throwaway line in Unseen Academicals, he's also employed a medusa. She has to wear sunglasses. Really, the fact that people don't find too much to complain about in this is all you need to know about Ankh-Morpork.
  • Vimes tends to see two kinds of people, Watch officers and non-Watch officers. If you are part of the latter, then he mistrusts you, with only a few exceptions — he mistrusts most races — but if you are part of former, that is your race, in his eyes.
  • An interesting aspect of Jingo is Vimes's reaction to genuine racism. His Klatchian counterpart points out that Vimes refused to consider a Klatchian could have been the killer, because that was the sort of thing men like Rust would have thought. "Be generous, Sir Samuel. Truly treat all men equally. Allow Klatchians the right to be scheming bastards, hmm?"
  • Similarly, in Snuff, Vimes' reaction to the casual racism against goblins is to treat the goblins with all the care and respect he shows to any other victims of a crime. He even asks about the name of the deceased without thinking about it, which impresses the goblin chief since most humans refuse to consider that goblins have names.
  • Fred Colon is intended as a parody of this trope.
    • The difference between Fred and Vimes is highlighted in The Fifth Elephant. Fred makes bigoted comments about nonhuman officers during the book, and it upsets the nonhuman officers because of it. However, Vimes has been known to make similar comments, but they tolerate it from him because they know that when things get dicey Vimes has their back, where Fred is a usually-Lovable Coward.
• Fat Ollie Weeks from Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels.
  • Likewise his Expy, Ollie Chandler, in Randy Alcorn's books. Chandler softens up a lot more quickly, though.
• Pretty much every non-corrupt cop in the L.A. Quartet.
• Played with in Empire of the Wolves with Jean-Louis Schiffer. A retired police officer and somewhat of a legend (albeit rather sinister one) among his colleagues, Schiffer is extremely knowledgeable about Parisian minorities and is apparently on speaking terms with community leaders. At the same time he gleefully spouts racist slogans and is not averse to using Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique on the suspects. The reader (and Schiffer's rookie partner, Netreaux) is not really sure what to make of him until the end, when he is revealed to be deeply corrupt, serving as a middleman in heroin distribution. He is killed by his courier who has gone rogue and took off with a large shipment and whom Schiffer was tracking down throughout the novel.
• Soledad O'Rourke of Those Who Walk in Darkness and What Fire Cannot Burn fits this trope to a T, and is the reason given for every one-star review of the former book on Amazon.com as of this writing. She's described as a "good cop" for her honor and devotion to her work, but even her sidekick considers her to have fallen beyond redemption, due both to He Who Fights Monsters and the fact that the "freaks" she hunts aren't Always Chaotic Evil.
  • The other MTacs are perhaps better examples, with the character Bo in particular actually being a normal human being shown prone to introspection and a life outside of killing things, while Soledad has nothing in her life except killing mutants and her boyfriend and later, trying to kill her mutant boyfriend. The normal police officer doesn't even manage that level of noble, either.
• On those occasions when Imperials in the Star Wars Expanded Universe are portrayed as something other than a lot of Complete Monsters or a bunch of not-really-Imperial people who switch sides immediately, they fall into this trope. Admiral Pellaeon might be the best example, both before and after the truce. One of the authors in the New Jedi Order gave him an extremely Narm-ish tract crudely connecting his governing style with gardening, and how one must weed and pinch errant buds.
• Braxton Underwood, a minor character and newspaper owner in To Kill a Mockingbird, is said to be unable to stand black people and unwilling to let them anywhere near him. Nevertheless, he respects Atticus (even while disagreeing with his decision to defend a black man) enough to have his gun ready to defend Atticus when a lynch mob comes for his client (albeit without making his presence known until after the threat has passed) and all but condemns Tom Robinson's conviction and the shoddy nature of his trial in his newspaper on principle.
• Adjudicator Roz Forrestor in the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures. She's a black woman who is totally prejudiced against aliens, but also one of the few Adjudicators in Spaceport 5 who actually makes any effort to help them.
• In Death: Lieutenant Mills from Judgment In Death. He is white, male and heterosexual, as well as being a fat slob. He doesn't like anyone who is not white, not male, or not heterosexual. He is not all that "noble", even though he did say something about his dead fellow cop Kohli was good at his job, even if he was black. Later, Mills gets murdered, and it turns out that he was a Dirty Cop who wanted money. So much for "noble".
• Anita Blake can be viewed as a Fantastic Racism version of this. She hates vampires but will not blame a vampire for a crime he did not commit.
• Plainclothesman Elijah Bailey of Isaac Asimov's Robot series hates robots but will enforce the law even if it means protecting them. His views are changed when he is partnered with a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw.

Live Action TV

• FBI agent Seeley Booth in Bones is generally a nice guy with no apparent bigotry, but he displays contempt toward the BDSM and Fantasy Role-Playing subcultures, as well as Voodoo practitionners (although the Voodoo episode treated the religion realistically and avoided Hollywood Voodoo.)
• Det./Sgt. Andy Sipowicz from NYPD Blue.
  • Who was an Expy of Det. Norman Buntz of Hill Street Blues (both played by Dennis Franz)
• Agent Doyle of 24. Seemingly a bigoted, arrogant, stuck-up, ends-justifies-the-means agent who won't take crap from anyone and isn't afraid to make things physical if they disagree. Has also secretly covered up honest mistakes and screw-ups of his co-workers to make sure they don't get hot under the collar with their Obstructive Bureaucrat superiors, and admits he's spiritually lost.
• Officer Maurice "Bosco" Boscorelli from Third Watch.
• Life On Mars comes with a rather good selection of these, Gene Hunt being the star.

Gene: Now. Yesterday's shooting. The dealers are all so scared we're more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma's about as lively as Liberace's dick when he's looking at a naked woman, all in all this investigation's going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory. (Sam drops his radio) What? Sam: Think you might have missed out the Jews

• A rare, non-white male example: Det. Frank Pembleton of Homicide: Life On the Street (Though he was more an intellectual snob than racist)
• Detective Sergeant Jimmy Beck from Cracker.
• Dets. Stabler and Tutuola from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, while not especially racist or sexist, tend to be...less than fans of the GLBT community.
  • Fin learned later he has a gay son, which softened him somewhat.
  • They're both interesting cases in that they don't outright hate members of the LGBTQ community; they just don't really understand much about it. As mentioned above, Fin softens up after learning that his son is gay, and Stabler has become increasingly tolerant after repeated interactions with various members of the LGBTQ community.
• Since the show is, in many ways, a procedural, House is like this, with "badge" replaced with medical license. Sure, he's generally misanthropic, but he does make crude racist remarks--despite his background and linguistic abilities being quite cosmopolitan.
  • House is bigoted against everyone. Racist, sexist, pick an -ist. He just doesn't like anyone, including himself. The times he makes racist and sexist remarks usually come across as his trying to push people's buttons.
    • Cameron, of all people, explicitly lampshades this in one episode, telling him that she knows he's "a misanthrope, not a misogynist."
• Sgt. Troy of Midsomer Murders might count- granted, he's a young guy rather than a grizzled hard boiled type, but he is notably close-minded in his views (especially towards homosexuals), but is a nice guy regardless.
• The NCIS episode "Designated Target" showed Tony Di Nozzo as uncharacteristically hostile toward African immigrants. It hasn't been mentioned much since then but he does still tend to get a little politically incorrect when trying to get under a suspect's skin.
• Not cops, but otherwise fits pretty much the entire cast of Rescue Me. At sensitivity class:

Franco: You see, that's another thing. Puerto Ricans even get shafted when it comes to racial slurs. Chinks have what, like four? We have one-- spick. That's it. The Irish they got, mick, patty, donkey. The Italians they got guinea, wop, dago. Sean: Yeah, and spaghetti-bender. Franco: Ah, spaghetti-bender went out of style during Sinatra's first marriage. Mike: Greaseball. Franco: Yeah, greaseball. There you have it; that's four. Tommy: Yeah, and the same thing with the Jews, right? Heeb, kike, Jew boy, Benny.

• • Later...

Tommy: ...Let me tell you somethin' the next time I run into a burning building and refuse to bring out anybody who's not the same color as me, then that's when you can bring my angry, pink, sober, Irish, a* back down here. Got it?

• Detective Sikes from Alien Nation.
• A medieval version, King Uther from Merlin with his "all magic users are evil" outlook. No actual badge here, but he *is* the king.

Video Games

• Ashley Williams from Mass Effect.
  • Everybody from Mass Effect but the pilot, the Captain, and an especially Paragon Shepard has at least one group they act like this towards.
  • Ashley, oddly enough, appears to have her reasons for disliking aliens, as her grandfather was commander of the Shanxi garrison during the First Contact War, and her whole family was blacklisted in the military as a result. She also apparently spent next to no time in space, and was forced into planetary garrison duty on safe, human-populated worlds, so she's had no contact with aliens prior to joining Shepard's crew.
  • Perhaps Ashley's best redeeming feature is that if the player is feeling indifferent to the topic of aliens, she'll get over her issues on her own.
• Rusty Galloway in LA Noire.