• Leon from Bubblegum Crisis.
  • Spinoffs give him a reason: he was in a SWAT team before and had to face rogue boomers with just a riot shield and (maybe) a shotgun. One can get a little iffy in such situations.
• City Hunter has inspector (later superintendent) Saeko Nogami, who is willing to hire a professional killer offering her own body as payment to take down the worst criminals, only to refuse to actually pay. Due a combination of being very smart and the daughter of the superintendent-general (the chief of the whole police in Tokyo), she not only gets away with it but manages to pass herself as a By-the-Book Cop.
• Juna in Earth Maiden Arjuna starts out as a Cowboy Magical Girl, mowing down through Raajers until Da Chief Chris tells her to stop.
• In Gunslinger Girl, this is what got Hillshire thrown out of Europol.
• Dominion Tank Police is what happens when you get an entire battalion of guys like this. And in a humorous twist, the most cowboy of the cowboy cops in the squad is the only girl in the squad: Action Girl and Cargo Shipper Leona.
• Batou in Ghost in the Shell is a good example for an actually heroic cowboy cop, but the whole Section 9 could fit this trope as well. Even Aramaki and the Major, who are much more sophisticated and less hot-blooded don't have the law very high on their list of priorities. Given the nature of their work, this is to be expected: Being Secret Police rather than regular cops, they have little effective oversight, don't usually need to worry about making a collar that will stand up in court, and are often actively fighting against other branches of the corrupt Japanese military and security apparatus.
• Bill Coleman in the Gunsmith Cats OVA is an A.T.F. agent and Jerk with a Heart of Gold who blackmails Rally and May into helping him with his investigation, but doesn't hesitate to throw himself in the line of fire to protect them when things go south and frequently launches his own investigations when his superiors stonewall him. He often compares himself to Eliot Ness.
• Daisuke Aurora in Heat Guy J.
• i tell c: Risa Aioi is an All-Loving Heroine who has the tendency to fall in love with criminals and pursues them by behaving as a Stalker with a Crush on the suspects, and breaks numerous laws to get to her "blight in shining armour". She's a criminal, and the police considers her a liability who can be discarded at a moment's notice.
• "Sleepy" John Estes, the titular Mad Bull 34, always acts in the interest of justice first and foremost. He does this by killing every violent criminal he meets — it's very rare for him to make an actual arrest. His chief thinks he' a disgrace to the uniform and keeps trying to curtail his exploits or get him fired, but Internal Affairs says he's clean (he's not)
• One Piece has Captain Smoker, the main protagonist's primary Inspector Javert / Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist. In fact, his tendency for this is implied to be the main reason why he had his rank during the start of the series — Smoker's strength was well beyond that of a captain at the time. Eventually, he gets promoted to Commodore, and then Vice-Admiral, and is still chasing after Luffy. Fortunately for Luffy, Smoker is a good man who's an example of the fairly rare heroic Cowboy Cop. Smoker is also a commander of a Marine unit of the 5th Grand Line Marine base, or G5 for short. It's where HQ sends all the cowboy cops and other overly violent Marines, meaning the Cowboy Cop of the series is now Da Chief of a unit composed out of cowboy cops. And much like their boss, they too are ultimately good men.
• One Officer Jenny in Pokémon the Series. She'll attack you with a bowling ball before sending out her Chatot, buddy.
• Hibari in Speed Grapher is a justified version: She gets away with being a Cowboy Cop because her chief is terrified of her. Besides, she doesn't attack people; she self-defenses them.
• You're Under Arrest!: Natsumi Tsujimoto has some shades of this, due to her brashness, though for the most part she's generally rule-abiding. She obviously contrasts with her By-the-Book Cop partner, Miyuki (who actually doesn't lack her moments of this every once in a while).
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Any cop that isn't a Corrupt Cop is like this. Even Tetsu Ushio qualified after his Heel–Face Turn. (Considering that the card game is Serious Business even to the police, and with motorcycles in this one, it's no surprise.)

• One Sprint commercial proclaims that its video phones make everything awesome, and as proof, shows a clip from a (nonexistent) film called "Epic Renegade Cop" where Callahan is ordered to Turn In Your Weapon by Da Chief. Among the things Callahan sets down are a (ludicrously huge) Hand Cannon, a pair of nunchucks, a machine gun, and, when Da Chief glares at him, a rocket launcher.

• Batman:
  • Harvey Bullock from the comics is a Cowboy Cop at times. He often seems to be butting heads with Commissioner Jim Gordon over some aspect of police procedure. He could verge on being a Dirty Cop. He used to hate Batman in particular, but has since developed a sense of respect for him.
    • Depending on the Writer, Bullock goes back and forth on this. In some works, he's portrayed as being representative of the (often sizable) part of the GCPD that dislikes Batman because they think Batman tramples all over their authority. In others, he's almost as much of a maverick and outcast as Batman himself, and proud of the fact that he "steps on a lot of toes" and "doesn't play politics". And at least one work (Denny O'Neil's Batman: Knightfall novelization) states that he dislikes Batman because he thinks that Batman doesn't go far enough in hunting down criminals.
  • Deputy (later Sheriff) 'Shotgun' Steve Smith also fills the bills. Based on 'Popeye' Doyle from The French Connection, he was a classic cowboy cop who toted a Sawed-Off Shotgun as his personal sidearm.
• Bookhunter: Detective Bay would get chewed out by Da Chief in any rational universe. But he doesn't. Ever. Apparently everyone in the Library Police has cowboy tendencies.
• Chew: John Colby is gleefully willing to violate every bit of police protocol that gets in his way.
  • Thoroughly lampshaded:
  Colby: What can I say, Chu? I'm the unhinged, break-any-rule, loose-cannon cop. You're the by-the-book square that never met a departmental regulation that you didn't love. That's why we work so well together.
• Diabolik: Inspector Ginko is an interesting take on the trope: he usually plays by the rules, but that's only because he knows otherwise crooks and gangsters will be able to get away through a loophole, and is more than willing to commit break-ins and other crimes (including, if the situation calls for it, allying with Diabolik) to get evidence when playing by the rules fails. He has also thrown a mob boss in his own pool to vent some frustration, routinely used Diabolik gadgets confiscated after a caper or a raid on one of his hideouts, and, in one memorable occasion, staged the theft of Diabolik's confiscated gadgets to stage the theft of twenty gold statues to keep them safe from Diabolik while the museum prepared a Diabolik-proof room to expose them, and duped Diabolik into thinking the perpetrator was a mob boss that had cheated his way out of prison multiple times to make sure he wouldn't find out until too late. His hand-picked team is cut from the same cloth, and woe to the criminals who get them angry.
• Doberman: Hank Doberman is a prime example of this. He does things his own way and loves to drink beer.
• Green Lantern:
  • Guy Gardner is the Cowboy Cop of the Green Lantern Corps. The degree to which he's a help or a hindrance to an investigation largely depends on the era: He was not a useful team member (to say the least) back in the '80s, but he's since had some Character Development and is now a top member of the Corps, not that that stops him from apprehending bad guys by hurling himself through their windows◊.
  • Hal Jordan isn't exactly your model Green Lantern, and at times can be as much as a cowboy cop as Guy. Heck, he even starred in a comic called Green Lantern: Renegade.
• Painkiller Jane: The series invokes this trope with the title character from time to time.
• The Punisher: Deconstructed with Detective Paul Budiansky from The Punisher MAX. He disobeys orders and kills a teen aged school shooter to save a gym full of kids but while the media loves it the department does their best to punish him for it, sending him to therapy where a condescending therapist implies that he sees himself as this trope, which he denies. He feels no remorse for what he did and wonders if that makes him similar to the Punisher. Near the end of the story his wife is grievously and he tries to take the law into his own hands, but rather than being a badass vigilante he is simply acting out of range and helplessness. In the end, a brief encounter with Frank proves to him that they are nothing alike.
• Sin City: John Hartigan both invokes and averts this trope. It is invoked in the sense that he apparently skirts the rules here and there and his actions at the beginning of That Yellow Bastard would be considered police brutality. It's averted since he's the cleanest cop in the city to the point where people treat him as if he were a boyscout.
• Sam Burke, a supporting character of Spawn. An NYPD detective who takes pride as one of the only few clean cops in the department, Sam appears to others as an aggressive, boorish, and possibly dumb cop in contrast to his diminutive but book-smart partner, Twitch Williams. Although he lacks the investigative and scientific skills of Twitch, Sam makes up for it by being the more intuitive and street-smart cop capable of knowing everyone and anyone in the criminal underworld, and smelling out deceptions and betrayals.
• Superman: The villain Preus is a very dark take on the trope. As a member of Kandor's Citizen Patrol Corps, Preus frequently ignored procedure and acted on his own in order to secure criminals. Since he was an Absolute Xenophobe who essentially used the rules as an excuse to purify the city this was a bad thing, and even the rest of the CPC thought he was crazy.
• Tex Willer: Texas Rangers are this due often being the only representatives of the law in certain areas and caring only for the spirit of the law to the point of being willing to break its letter to insure justice. This also enables them to serve as an interesting take on Internal Affairs, as their command and the governor of Texas know perfectly that if a crooked sheriff of marshall hasn't technically broken the law they'll just get creative in busting them.

• Parodied by the "comic within the comic", in Al Capp's classic Li'l Abner. "Fearless Fosdick", who Abner Yokum idolized, was a satiric Captain Ersatz of classic comic strip detective Dick Tracy, and he often turned up the Cowboy Cop aspects of the Tracy strip to at least 11 (if not higher). The typical conclusion of a Fosdick adventure would feature Fosdick himself ventilated by a number of large bullet holes in his person (though in the context of the strip, these amounted to mere flesh wounds), while he stood surrounded by large piles of bullet-riddled corpses of innocent bystanders.
• Dick Tracy: Despite his high body count, the titular character is actually an aversion; Dick Tracy takes the law very seriously, and the reason he's killed so many criminals (aside from the strip being a Long Runner) is that he's usually dealing with gun-toting psychopaths who are trying to murder him. However, he has indulged in Police Brutality at least twice, once against Big Boy and once against The Brow by fighting them with his bare hands rather than just subduing them as quickly as possible. Big Boy, not being much of a fighter, was taken alive, while Brow got knocked out a window and impaled on a flag pole.

• Zig-zagged in The Horsewomen Of Las Vegas after the gunfight at the Jakked Motel where Naomi gets killed. The brass at the LVPD decide to spin it that she (a patrolman) "went cowboy" and Bayley (a vice detective) went after her to try and save her, as one of the dead at the scene(presumed to have been killed by Bayley) was Steve Blackman, an international assassin on Interpol's most wanted list. This gets her an unwanted reputation for being one herself. Much to her annoyance, it gets her a lot of unwelcome respect from the Clark County Sheriff's department, including Sheriff Steve Austin.
• Mordred in For It Is in Passing That We Achieve Immortality is a knightly version. When she hears Lancelot mention the need for knights to assist the people of the realm, she immediately sets off to pick a fight with a water demon... ignoring the bits about the necessity of a tight schedule to deal with the unstable border and the possibility of an invasion. The exasperated Lancelot catches her afterwards and makes it clear she needs to adhere to Camelot's regulations, only excusing her due to how she's new to the Round Table and as a courtesy to her mother and siblings.
• Chief Toombs of Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race is described as such. Being chief means he does have to play by the rules and deliver a firm yet fair hand when dealing with his officers. But we're still talking about a man who wears a kilt on the job, can and will backtalk and yell if he's got a point to make and will take on Dr. Wily's entire army with a rocket launcher if it would save even one more life.
• Garrus Vakarian of Renegade, to an extent that even his main universe counterpart would consider a bit much. His favorite method of entering buildings is via truck, his favorite type of gunshot is to the kneecap, and apparently he can drive a tank.
• Qui-Gon Jinn in ruth baulding's works, in a To Be Lawful or Good choice, will always choose Good. To the point where, in Exodus, he lets himself get enslaved because he knows the Council will send someone to rescue him (and the rest of the slaves with him). It ends up being a Running Gag in Star Wars: Lineage.
• Deconstructed in Supernova (One Piece). It's acknowledged that most of the upper echleons of the Marines got where they were by not following procedure in order to get results but that requires that they actually get results, not to mention most of them settling down once they reach a certain rank. Smoker deserted his post, caused his underlings to desert their posts, stole government property, and misused government resources (among other crimes) in order to capture the Straw Hat pirates after they injured his pride by breaking his flawless record. It's all but stated that if he had succeeded, all his crimes would have been swept aside and he'd have gotten a promotion for his actions. Instead, he failed repeatedly and ran the risk of his rather valuable Devil Fruit falling into enemy hands. When he protests an unearned promotion that's part of a cover-up, the World Government finally has enough and has him executed.

• Captain Holly Short of the Artemis Fowl series.
  Holly: Are you implying that I occasionally stray from the rulebook?
  Foaly: I'm implying that you don't own a copy of the rulebook, and if you do, you've certainly never opened it.
  Holly: ...Fair point.
• Big Trouble: Agents Seitz and Greer think nothing of shooting an unarmed criminal in the foot to get information or yanking an obnoxious motorist through his window to commandeer his car. However, they claim that they actually are legally allowed to do that thanks to a recent executive order.
• The Black Echo by Michael Connelly — Harry Bosch is this trope to a T.
• George Liddy of Chosen One Protective Services believes that he's serving the US government as an FBI agent, fighting the evils of communist plots in every way in which he can. He wreaks a swathe of destruction and innocent (at least of the crimes he believes) victims in his self-imposed mission after he intercepts Cyrus's report and forges orders to assign him to it.
• Madeleine Urban & Abigail Roux's M/M crime romance series Cut and Run gives us FBI Special Agents Ty Grady and Zane Garrett, who are both Cowboy Cops (though Zane keeps up a By-the-Book Cop facade most of the time, in contrast to his more Hair-Trigger Temper partner).
• In The Dresden Files:
  • Lieutenant (later Sergeant) Murphy plays this straight when she helps out her wizard PI friend Harry Dresden, but in other cases tries to stick to the law. It's only after she gets dragged into Harry's world more she begins to go full cowboy. Off-screen she has to make a To Be Lawful or Good choice between ignoring the supernatural craziness infesting Chicago and keeping her career, or fighting it full-on and getting drummed out of the force. She chooses the latter, but not without regret.
  • Harry is effectively one of these as Warden of the Council. He's well respected and moral, but tries to skirt around laws that are there for a reason. Add that to his increasing strange list of allies and allegiances, and his warden and council colleagues find him hard to trust and predict.
• Discworld:
  • Deconstructed with Sam Vimes. Vimes, despite being promoted time after time, is nonetheless an archetypal Cowboy Cop, rejecting the rules if they stop him from doing his job and hunting down criminals — or, as in Night Watch, rejecting the code that has lead to the Watch becoming useless and Ankh-Morpork a police state — and frequently running up against Da Chief in the form of Vetinari (although Vetinari is quite trope-savvy in this case, and appears to willingly take the position of Da Chief in order to nudge Vimes in the right direction). The deconstruction comes because Vimes hates it — he hates that the system does not work, that it forces him to be a Cowboy Cop to get things done and that it keeps trying to push him into chaos when all that is important to him is the law.
    
    Occasionally he resorts to it and the trope is played straight. It is always in circumstances that clearly warrant extreme measures. His rationalization: "It's me doing it." Put it this way; Vimes is a Cowboy Cop who kept getting promoted. He's also very aware that the justification "It's all right to break the rules because it's me doing it" could very easily be the start of a very slippery slope — even bad guys can use "it's okay, because it's me doing it" to justify their actions. (And Ponder Stibbons points out that 'part of being a good guy means not doing certain things'.)
  • A character that is a unmitigated Cowboy Cop, is the wali of Prince Cadram, 71-hour Ahmed. As he says to Vimes (paraphrased): "Your beat is a city you can walk across in half an hour. Mine is a million square miles of barren desert with no company but sword and camel." His rationality is that he must strike first, and swiftly, before the criminal has a chance to. He got his nickname from when he killed a man in the man's own tent after 71 hours, not the 72 mandated by Klatchian hospitality customs, because the man had poisoned a well, and he had testimony and a confession.
  • When Vimes continues his Cowboy Cop ways in Night Watch (Discworld), it works so well that Da Chief tries to have him assassinated. Ouch. Da Chief wasn't Vetinari this time — Vimes went back in time many years due to a magical accident and ended up as the Sergeant that trained his younger self. A young Havelock Vetinari actually saved Vimes from assassination at one point. This kind of thing happens on the Discworld all the time; apparently there's nothing that can be done about it....
  • Sergeant Detritus could be considered a Cowboy Cop as well. In his case, the subversion is that he's a troll officer who usually works the troll beat, and it could be argued that in a culture who regard hitting each other with rocks as a form of conversation, nailing drug-dealers to the wall by their ears is simply maintaining community relations.
• In Ragnarok, the first of The Echo Case Files, Navarro, a local police officer, brings a SWAT team along on a Confederate Marshals operation without getting permission from his superior. Except, well, this is a subversion: he's only a maverick because he's acting like a proper police officer in a corrupt department.
• In The First Rule of Survival, veteran South African detective Vaugn de Vries is seen, by the new Black African leadership of the SAPS, as an anachronistic dinosaur whose attitudes and approach to policing are not only a product of The Apartheid Era, but completely out of synch with modern policing methods. Knowing his time in the South African Police Service is most likely coming to an end, he takes on a case involving child sex abuse and trafficing of abducted boys in a manner that seriously strains the rulebook, and involves a lot of cowboy coppery.
• The Godfather: Albert Neri was more than a "loose cannon" as a cop. Frustrated at the inability to do anything about the parking violations around the UN building he bashed in the ambassadors' windshields until he was reassigned to Harlem, then he smashed the skull of an unconscious pimp that he had caught molesting a little girl, which got him sent to prison. Fortunately, his father in law knew the Corleones, and Michael was looking for a replacement for Luca Brasi.
• The In Death series. Eve somehow manages to be both a By-the-Book Cop and this!
• The Interstellar Patrol write their own rules and are willing to use ruthless or audacious methods to catch criminals and resolve conflicts, such as in "The Nitrocellulose Doormat," when they are tasked with identifying and stopping the people behind stealing and/or selling arms to perpetuate a gruesome war. The Interstellar Patrol boobytraps a weapons shipment, then, after it is stolen, blow it (and the various criminals and guerrillas nearby) up.
  Instellar Patrol Colonel: Those that blew up were guilty. We detected the criminals by seeing who got punished by his crime.
• Joe Pickett in the novels by C.W. Box is a game warden with a reputation as a cowboy cop (his position does give him law enforcement powers). Joe doesn't set out to deliberately break the rules, but operating on his own a long way from any back-up means he often has to employ his own initiative. His 'cowboy ways' — along with a personality clash with his supervisor — even gets him fired at one point.
• “King City”: Sergeant Wade morphs into one of these due to being sent to man a precinct in the city’s worst gang territory with practically no support as a Uriah Gambit by the police chief who he embarrassed by helping the FBI build a case against the mans handpicked (and heavily corrupt) major crimes unit. By page 35 he’s shot out the tires of a gangs car once they vandalize his to avoid showing weakness, and goes on to dump a murder victims body on the police chiefs lawn as a form of protest for not being given the recourses to investigate her murder, and drive a car through a wall while trying to arrest a Cop Killer
• Matthew Hawkwood — a cowboy Bow Street Runner!
• Captain Kotov in Night Watcher, at least before he became a Cowboy Vampire Hunter.
• Raptornator: Silver Eagle is an elite police unit that bends the rules and is beyond even the actual SWAT team.
• Sano Ichiro is a Samurai who upholds the code of Bushido. His honorable approach to his job as the Shogun's Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People works for his early cases in the series. But as his rivals, especially Chamberlain Yanagisawa are willing to push the boundaries more and more, Sano must begin relying more on finding loopholes, secretly breaking social rules about autopsies, and taking harsher approaches to suspects to get information so he can solve his cases and keep his reputation intact enough to not result in his and his family's exile and/or death.
• Attorney Arcinas of Smaller & Smaller Circles displays shades of this — most notably, he jumps the gun by arresting the wrong suspect, which gets him a severe reprimand from the NBI Director, who nearly threatens him with the NBI version of Turn in Your Badge (i.e. being fired or having his law practice revoked). He does try to get his kicks by suggesting a manhunt for the Serial Killer towards the end of the novel.

• John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme: Spoofed all to hell with "Casterbridge", who is a Cowboy... Store Detective (since it was the result of a bunch of executives trying to find the one type of police story someone hadn't made a TV show about). As a result of his job, there's not exactly a lot of rules he can really break to begin with, and his attitude just perplexes his boss.

• The "Cop" character archetype in Cyberpunk 2020 and its related games is essentially this trope. This is somewhat justified in-setting where everyone and their mother is packing high-caliber heat and cyberware and the justice system being heavily corrupt.
• The Maverick Cop from Feng Shui is nearly invariably one of these kinds of cops. In many games, he or she is usually paired up with the more by-the-book Karate Cop.
• In Magic: The Gathering's Ravnica block, the Boros Legion was an entire guild of this sort - it's what you get when you combine White's morality and concern for the greater good with Red's emotional nature and individuality, and then give it the task of enforcing the law.

• Paper Perjury: Fie envisions her pet cat as "Detective Toasty", who doesn't play by the rules. When a real policewoman visits Fie's house, she suggests that Toasty set a good example instead, but Fie and Toasty agree that that's boring.

• Chuck Steel: Raging Balls of Steel Justice. The claymation Cowboy Cop uses every cliche expected of a 1985 action hero, failing to realise that it's actually 1986.
• Homestar Runner: Dangeresque, Strong Bad's action-hero alter ego.
• The Ultra Fast Pony episode "Stay Tuned" turns into a Cop Show parody, with Pinkie Pie in the role of "cop on the edge, living on the limits of the law, with a gambling problem and a brother on the other side!"

• Danger Zone One has Madison Wynter, a bona fide loose cannon cop at the Pallad City Police Department. Her notoriety has earned her the nickname, "Maniac" Madison, along with the title of "Ice Queen of the PCPD." But, despite her reckless tactics, the Chief is hesitant to rein her in, due to her impressive track record and the undeniable results she achieves.
• DOUBLE K parodies the trope to a ridiculous degree.
• Full Frontal Nerdity featured a tabletop RPG based on crime procedural shows where being able to act like this without having a case thrown out of court was a character feat.
• McGillicutty in Machall hits every single Cowboy Cop trope in his three featured strips. Intentionally so; one of Ian's sketches of him had the filename "Clint".
• Inverted in the Happy Jar strip The Scotsdale Case, which is about Good Cop, who respects Da Chief's judgement.
• Nobody Scores! — Subverted here. Complete with a real horse. And a Turn in Your Badge.
• PvP referred to this trope when Brent had a run-in with a bike cop.
• In The Order of the Stick, in an act of desperation to get his story to go at least somewhat the way he wanted, Tarquin offers to hire a legion of adventurers that Roy could command, with Elan being the leader of his own squad. That way, Elan could still be a leader while being subordinate to Roy. Then Roy could say how Elan is a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules before sending him off on his quests where the story would be about Elan from then on. Kind of a fantasy adventurer equivalent.
• Deconstructed in Sidekick Girl with Rhys Griffin/Shiver. He is a dangerous loose cannon with a laundry list of excessive force charges, and there have been accidental (and "Accidental") deaths connected to him. Making matters worse, he doesn't use these methods against the really dangerous villains- just mundane criminals. While paired with Val, he nearly kills the petty thief Harvey by totally freezing him over (had Val not broken the ice over his mouth, Harvey would have suffocated), although he could have easily stopped him just by freezing his hands and/or feet.
• In Villain to Kill, Cassian put little stock in orders and plans even before being betrayed by Lampas, ditching the undercover sting plan when villains lay hands on a mother and child, with the resulting explosive battle sparking a major scandal that led to him being put on probation for excessive force.
• Visseria has Alchione: Has bad habits involving going off on her own to 'investigate' potential criminals, browbeating lesser scum to get any info she wants. Apparently this in of itself wouldn't be too much of a problem with the higher-ups, but she tends to use self-defense as an excuse to murder suspects. Ironically she gets the Da Chief treatment not from her actual chief, but from a higher-ranking bureaucrat.
• Witchcraft Carnival has Detective Elliot Rodgers, a warlock detective famous for hunting down the worst of the worst and unafraid to break the law if it gets in the way of what's right.

• The internet comedy group BriTANick has performed a sketch during at least one of their live shows featuring a Cowboy Cop parody character named MacNamara who explains to Da Chief that he acts the way he does because his wife and children were killed by a werewolf. Understandably, the chief is skeptical, and rightfully so, because it turns out MacNamara just shot his dog while pretending it was a werewolf and subsequently claimed to everyone his family was dead when they obviously weren't, all so he could be seen as insane and be given early retirement. It doesn't work, so he changes tactics and pretends to transform into a werewolf himself. When it seems like he's about to get naked, the chief relents and grants him early retirement.
• Funny Or Die's Tough Justice, which pits Vic Mackey alongside Connie Tough... who definitely isn't Lady Mary from Downton Abbey.
• Parodied in these articles from The Onion.
• Seeking Truth: Zeke Strahm, though he is woefully Wrong Genre Savvy and ends up having to deal with a problem a bit bigger than an ordinary scumbag.
• As a detective in Trouble in Terrorist Town, Turpster tends to favour shooting first and not bothering with the questions, at least in Sips' videos. This gets to the point where he dubs himself the "RDM Detective" ^note RDM stands for "random death match" and is a potentially bannable offence in TTT since games can degenerate into pointless shootouts and ruin the fun for others. This eventually presses Lewis Brindley's Berserk Button and drives him to murder Turps out of sheer anger even though they're both innocent. Video here.

• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: All of the Galaxy Rangers are to some extent or another. Zachary is more of a By-the-Book Cop in comparison to the other three (though he has his moments), while Gooseman is a Clint Eastwood Expy with all that implies (and can get away with in an animated series).
• Arcane: Caitlyn isn't outright rebellious, but she does tend to do things her way, like investigating a smuggling operation gone wrong when she should be guarding her family's tent at the fair, or when she arranges for Vi's release by forging papers despite being technically resigned from the force.
• Detective Harvey Bullock of Batman: The Animated Series. He admits to frequently bending the rules, tends to rough suspects up during interrogations, and was once seen reading a crook his rights as follows:
  Det. Bullock: You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, you'll probably bore me to tears — so shut your trap, dog-breath.
• Discussed and parodied in an episode of BoJack Horseman. Da Chief and several officers get sidetracked from the main plot trying to figure out which Cowboy Cop cliché most describes Officer Meow Meow Fuzzyface.
• Parodied on Clone High, when Gandhi and George Washington Carver collaborate on a Buddy Cop Movie called Black And Tan. The gag is that Carver (a black guy) plays the role typically associated with the white cop, while Gandhi plays:
  Tandoori Jones, a typical East Indian cop who plays by his own rules... NONE!
• C.O.P.S. (Animated Series): Sundown, aka Walker Calhoun, is a literal example, since he still looks and acts like the Texas sheriff he used to be.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy's parents rent a movie called Loose Cannon Cop That Doesn't Play By The Rules!.
• Fillmore!: The title character Cornelius Fillmore is a child-friendly version, being a member of the Safety Patrol. When given the choice between To Be Lawful or Good, Fillmore chooses "good" almost every time. This results in him being something of a Destructive Savior, causing large amounts of damage to school property in the name of bringing his culprit to justice, as well as going rogue when he needs to bypass the rules against criminals who are beyond the law's reach. He was originally balanced out by his former partner, By-the-Book Cop Wayne Liggett, but his current partner Ingrid Third, while less infamous than Fillmore in regard to school property damage, also chooses to go beyond the rules with her partner when needed.
• Agent X in Men in Black: The Series.
• The Simpsons
  • McGarnagle, the Show Within a Show is the perfect embodiment of this trope.
    Chief: You're off the case, McGarnagle!
    McGarnagle: You're off your case, Chief!
    Chief: What does that mean, exactly?
    Homer: (watching at home) It means he gets results, you stupid chief!
    Lisa: Dad, sit down.
  • McBain is another one, when he isn't being either James Bond or a straight Arnold Schwarzenegger Expy.
    • Various clips of McBain on The Simpsons has been edited together to make one linear narrative here.
  • A Show Within a Show featured a clip of Charles Bronson standing in for Andy Griffith on The Andy Griffith Show naturally ends up with this.
    Barney Fife: Where's Otis? He's not in his cell.
    "Andy Griffith": (nonchalantly as he reads the newspaper) I shot 'im.
    Barney Fife: Well that's— WHAT?!
    "Andy Griffith": (puts the newspaper away and draws a revolver) Now I'm goin' down to Emmett's Fix-It Shop, to "fix" Emmett.
• Mercilessly lampooned (of course) in South Park:
  Chief: One UPS vehicle valued at twenty-five thousand dollars, one civilian vehicle valued at sixteen thousand, the second floor of the post office AND a coffee shop valued at sixteen thousand! The mayor's gonna have my ass!
  Stan: Uh, sir, we just kinda got blind-sided by the—
  Chief: You got careless! Now, I don't know how they do things down at that dog-and-pony show they call the Fourth Grade, but here we have rules! Jesus, we don't have guys to question now, because you killed them all!
• Todd McFarlane's Spawn: Sam and Twitch. Sam fits this a bit more than Twitch, but both generally act outside the rules and registrations of their precinct. This makes them probably the most honest and ideal cops in the series and a constant thorn in the side of the dirty cops working their precinct.

Note that in real life, police do have the ability to forgo certain normally required steps during law enforcement operations if absolutely necessary - the doctrines of "exigent circumstances", "hot pursuit" and imminent threats to people’s safety apply here - if an armed person drags a hostage inside their house and shuts the door while threatening to kill them, police officers don’t need to wait for a warrant to break the door down, apprehend or kill the suspect and rescue the hostage. These kind of scenarios are not a case of police being Cowboy Cops as the officers involved are still operating within prescribed legal limits covering these types of circumstances - they may have to justify their actions which may also be subject to independent scrutiny by the courts and other agencies.

Having said this, the cases below are when cops went far beyond permitted behaviour:

• Most infamously, suspicions of "cowboy" antics by police proved fatal for the prosecution in the murder trial against OJ Simpson. Evidence was introduced of LAPD officer Mark Fuhrman being a hard-nosed racist who talked of routinely committing and covering up police brutality against African-Americans. Even though Fuhrman claimed that he was only playing a character for dramatic purposes, his proven use of racist language and innuendo allowed Simpson's defense lawyers to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury on an otherwise strong case.
• The "Rodney King" video likewise presented an image in the minds of America, of (white) "cowboy cops" beating a helpless (black) citizen; even though defense lawyers successfully argued that the police were going strictly "by the book" in properly subduing King as a criminal suspect. Their acquittal resulted in the famous L.A. Riots and sparked the officers' eventual conviction on Civil Rights charges.
• Speaking of the LAPD, they've had several Chiefs who were known for their fiery and heavy-handed approach to law enforcement:
  • James E. Davis was the Chief of the LAPD from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. Under him, the department became known for having a very rough and cowboyish style when it came to dealing with crime, resulting in accusations of police brutality and corruption. Davis himself wasn’t shy from controversy, especially when it came to dealing with unions, communists, and migrants, as well as his stated admiration of Adolf Hitler’s policies against the Jews.^note Crime writers of this era, particularly Raymond Chandler, often used him as a model for the Rabid Cops that their upstanding private eyes had to deal with.
  • In the 1950s and '60s, William Parker transformed the LAPD into a more professional police force. But it came at the expense of the relationships with L.A.'s African-American and Latino communities, who accused the department of racism and police brutality, which Parker vehemently denied.
  • Beginning in 1978 under Daryl Gates, the LAPD became more militarized, with new creations like SWAT, anti-gang teams like CRASH, and anti-drug programs like DARE. Despite this, the department's relationship with the African-American and Latino communities continued to erode and Gates’s extreme and very controversial approach to policing played a heavy factor in the L.A. Riots taking place.
    • The CRASH unit itself was a unit of Cowboy Cops whose internal culture got uncovered starting with a road rage incident where CRASH officer Kevin Gaines was shot by an LAPD officer while both were undercover. An investigation to the office revealed false statements, planted evidence, Police Brutality, drugs going missing from the evidence locker, and even one officer having orchestrated a bank robbery. Several CRASH officers were also linked with Death Row Records boss Suge Knight, and there is strong speculation that people in the unit are linked either directly to the murder of The Notorious B.I.G. or covered up evidence of who did it.
  • The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has been under fire for the revelation that there exists several Deputy Gangs. The membership to these gangs is rumored to require the Deputy to kill someone, or even specifically killing an unarmed innocent, and as a reward, a member can then get a membership tattoo.
• The NYPD has also been under the microscope for several heavy-handed tactics in the last 25 years.
  • The Stop and Frisk and Broken Windows laws that were instituted by Police Commissioner William Bratton in the mid-1990s. While it may have contributed to a major drop in crime in New York City, many critics have accused the polices of unfairly targeting people of color, mainly African Americans and Latinos.
  • After the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has taken major steps in bolstering its anti-terrorist unit and providing state-of-the-art surveillance to monitor potential terrorist attacks around the city, which has been praised by other government officials like the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Army. The department even has anti-terrorist units in 15 different cities around the world.
  • Despite these achievements many have criticized the department for overstepping its boundaries as a local police force and that many members of the unit have used their position to spy on Muslims at their stores, restaurants, mosques, websites, and public gatherings. Even the FBI called that type of surveillance very unhealthy.
• The London Metropolitan Police have been accused of slipping into this territory recently. Among other things, they've tried to engineer the dismissal of a government official, and have reportedly dropped off gang members in territory controlled by rival gangs after questioning, which is sometimes tantamount to a death sentence. They've also been accused of using excessive force against peaceful protests — partially good old-fashioned police brutality, and partially the controversial "kettling" technique. Not to mention the standard racist and anti-Islamic behaviour when dealing with minority suspects, and infiltrating any political group that criticises them or campaigns for internal investigations into their behavior.
• Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona (which includes Phoenix) from 1993 until 2017, is what happens when a Cowboy Cop becomes Da Chief. During his tenure as sheriff, he promoted himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff" and took a very hard line on crime (especially illegal immigration, often to the detriment of other law enforcement), and his mediagenic nature saw him making, by his count, two hundred TV appearances a month. A sampling of his greatest hits:
  • His handling of the prison system included making prisoners wear pink underwear, banning Playboy, bringing back chain gangs (albeit volunteer-only), setting up an in-house radio station called "KJOE" to play classical music, opera, Frank Sinatra, and patriotic music, and being called out twice by the federal courts for violating Constitutional provisions against cruel and unusual punishment, including charges of feeding moldy, spoiled food to prisoners and denying medical care. The most notorious bit, though, was his creation of a tent city to house surplus inmates outside in the Arizona heat that he himself compared to a concentration camp. He justified it by claiming that American soldiers in Iraq wearing body armor lived in the same conditions, which they didn't, and that it was only for those who had already been convicted. Furthermore, he operated a county jail, not a penitentiary or state prison, meaning many of the people sent to him were not convicted of a crime yet.
  • His greatest notoriety came from his hardline stance against illegal immigration, at the expense of other crimes. His routine targeting of Hispanics with racial profiling eventually brought the attention of the Department of Justice, and in 2017, after repeatedly refusing to comply with orders to end racial profiling, he was found guilty of contempt of court (though President Donald Trump pardoned him soon after). When he wasn't going after immigrants, he was launching politically motivated probes into his opponents. Meanwhile, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office reportedly cleared as many as three-quarters of all cases without arrest or proper investigation, with sexual assault in particular treated as a low priority.
  • The requisite property destruction was also there. He once brought a full SWAT team complete with a tank to break up a cockfight. Why such a show of force? He swears it had nothing to do with the fact that Steven Seagal was filming an episode of his TV show with them.
  • He also devoted his energy to endorsing the "birther" conspiracy theory claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the US and was therefore ineligible to be President, and devoted MCSO resources to an ultimately fruitless "investigation" that he nevertheless kept pushing for years.
  • Phoenix voters eventually got sick of his antics and threw him out in 2016 by a thirteen-point margin. He hoped to run for sheriff again in 2020 but was eliminated in the August primaries.
• Christopher Dorner was a strange subversion of the usual order. While he hated the LAPD's structure and regulations and was described as a loose cannon by superiors, his conflict with them was for completely different reasons than usual — he thought that the LAPD was covering up out-of-control police brutality and racism, and felt that his attempts to expose this were the reason he got fired. It ultimately ended in him Going Postal, killing four people before barricading himself in a cabin at Big Bear Lake, where he died after an extended siege.
• Overly problematic Cowboy Cops will often become what are known as "gypsy cops", so called because they drift from police department to police department, being rehired almost after they're released, due to the difficulty/unwillingness to get records about the cop at their previous employer, difficulty for small communities especially to get quality officers, and a lack of any oversight board to strip bad police of their badge permanently.
• The Baltimore Police Department had a major scandal in 2017 when the elite Gun Trace Task Force was indicted for racketeering for shaking down citizens, stealing cash from raids and even once robbing a pharmacy during the Freddie Gray protests, and selling stolen opiates forward through their underworld contacts. These events were dramatized in We Own This City