good-cop, bad-cop
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Senses: examples: text: He was acting mean and ugly, but I had seen enough movies to figure he was playing good-cop, bad-cop.
ref: 1988, Soledad Santiago, Undercover, Bantam, →ISBN:
text: THE WHITE HOUSE PLAYS GOOD-COP, BAD-COP WITH GREENSPAN
ref: 1988, The Business Week:
text: The State Department appears to be playing “good-cop, bad-cop,” casting Helms as the heavy and limiting its own public criticism of Chamorro, while privately using the aid as a stick to beat concessions out of her.
ref: 1992 09, ISLA:
text: I am not interested in being one side or other’s hero or villain. I am not playing ‘good-cop, bad-cop’.
ref: 2003, Tina Kempin, Andreas Wenger, Ready for Peace?: The Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland 1998-2002, →ISBN:
text: In the “good-cop, bad-cop” scenario, the good cop puts himself on the side of the suspect, supposedly working against his own bad-cop partner, and forges a bond that eventually works against the suspect’s interests.
ref: 2006, Dona Vitale, Consumer Insights 2.0: How Smart Companies Apply Customer Knowledge to the Bottom Line, Paramount Market Publishing, →ISBN, page 73:
text: Senior sources say this could be a play of some good old-fashioned good-cop, bad-cop routine between India and the US, particularly on Pakistan.
ref: 2006, Selections from Regional Press:
text: What Carole and her co-counsel James Howarth did was play good-cop, bad-cop to the jury – with me being the very bad cop.
ref: 2007, Larry Nevers, Good Cops, Bad Verdict: How Racial Politics Convicted Us of Murder, LAN Publications, →ISBN:
text: The account executive and agency manager played good-cop, bad-cop with the client to give a sense of dynamic, just-in-time mediations to problems (pp. 172–5).
ref: 2007, Russell W. Belk, Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing, Edward Elgar Publishing, →ISBN, page 543:
text: He's not a bad guy, even though he often plays good-cop, bad-cop with faculty against outspoken student ruffians like me.
ref: 2008, Art Marsicano, Some Men Need Killing: A Hard Coal Country Saga, iUniverse, →ISBN, page 110:
text: We’ve all seen countless examples in the media of the “good-cop, bad-cop” game police play to extract confessions from criminal suspects. As the familiar routine goes, the “bad cop” confronts the suspect with overwhelming evidence of his guilt (it’s usually a “he”), points out discrepancies in his testimony, questions his alibi, and intimidates him with the prospect of a long jail term if he doesn’t confess. In contrast, the “good cop” offers sympathy and support, suggests possible justifications for the crime, and emphasizes the benefits of snitching on fellow criminals.
ref: 2009, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, Barry L. Beyerstein, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 220:
text: McGhee and Nitze played good-cop, bad-cop, but in the absence of progress in Paris, all present agreed they could then accomplish nothing more.
ref: 2009, Robert Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 554:
text: He’d be great at playing good-cop, bad-cop, as long as he got to play the bad cop, she thought. Too bad she wasn’t about to let him go through with it.
ref: 2010, Valerie Parv, Operation: Monarch, Silhouette, →ISBN:
text: Soto and Ford were about to play good-cop, bad-cop—an especially effective technique for breaking cocky teenagers.
ref: 2018, Celeste Castro, Lex Files, Bella Books, →ISBN:
glosses: Alternative form of good cop bad cop.