Far from the mountains of paperwork associated with the smallest of traffic stops, the cops of the gaming world are one man armies. They're renegades; mavericks. Being a cop isn't their job, it's in their blood. Or, it would be if it weren't for all the transfusions. Pill-popping, thigh-slapping, beer-swilling, bullet-firing, no nonsense bad-asses, full of pithy one-liners. A license to kill and an attitude to match. No job is too big or too dangerous for them. Backup? Hah! Police work is basically long periods of extreme boredom interspersed with moments of exhilarating danger, followed by job satisfaction and/or death. The only game to come close to the monotony of day to day police work is the fantastic L.A Noire, notable for being a game that broke the mould. Even then, Detective Phelps had his share of action. Often, these games follow the movie tropes. The commissioner tells you to hand over your badge, so you do, and then you kill everyone in a twenty block radius and get it back at the end of the day, with absolutely no repercussions. If you've got to break one hundred laws to uphold just one, so be it. With a publicly funded service like the police force, the boys in blue get investigated for just about everything. The very idea of expecting to have a parade because you had the stones to go solo, eat dogfood for a few weeks and kill everyone in the Mafia with a kitchen knife, is, in itself, laughable. You're more like to be gunned down by SWAT when you check the grenade launcher out of the lock-up. Undercover cops have it even harder. Now that's a tough, unglamorous job. There's no downtime, you lose contact with friends and family for years at a time. At the end of it all, you can't ever be sure that you're safe, and you can't tell anyone what you've done. But not in games. You may have done some questionable things, you blurred the line between right and wrong, and sure, you've killed thirteen pedestrians on the way to buy milk, but you're a hero. You had to do those things so they'd believe you were a 'real' criminal. You're risking your life and you deserve a medal no matter how many fellow policemen have to be given a permanent desk job as a result of your 'justice spree'. No. You're a criminal in a tank top who just lost their pension.
