8. All Gotham Cops Were Foolishly Trapped Underground
The Gotham Police Department is not the smartest group of cops in the world. They do not learn very quickly from their mistakes. After putting almost their entire force on Narrows island only to be incapacitated by Scarecrow's fear toxin in
Batman Begins, they again put too many of their eggs in one basket and wound up trapped underground in
The Dark Knight Rises. To quickly set the record straight, not every cop in Gotham was trapped. There were "dozens" left free enough to roam around Gotham in secret, according to Commissioner Gordon. Still, with the benefit of hindsight, it was unwise for such a large portion of Gotham's police force to be assigned underground. That was kind of the point, though, was it not? It's not as though Gordon ordered every available cop into a tunnel immediately after he first saw Bane and the underground army. Gordon ordered a grid to be worked to find the masked man he saw. This was going on for sometime thanks to Deputy Commissioner Foley's half-hearted effort in carrying out his superior's orders. Once Bane emerged and took high profile hostages below the surface, Gordon's frustration, which had been rising, finally boiled over. At the time, Gordon had no way of knowing Bane had already spent months pouring explosive-laced concrete into the city's tunnels. Give credit to Bane for successfully angering Gordon to a point where the commissioner did not consider every possible outcome and made a rash decision that wound up being a tactical error. This was not the first time Gordon was intellectually out-dueled by a villain. The Joker issued a threat to the city's hospitals in
The Dark Knight, forcing Gordon to allocate all available cops to mandatory evacuations and saving Coleman Reese while forgetting to send any cops over to The Joker's known location that Gordon was just planning to raid moments before. Let the
Dark Knight film without errant police strategy cast the first stone.