Quigley Smitty

Officer **Quigley Smitty** is a recurring character on *The Rookie*. According to Eric Winter's Instagram story, a union vote ballot reveals his first name to be Quigley. This was later confirmed in the episode "Real Crime". He is portrayed by Brent Huff.

## History

### Season 1

Officer Smitty first appears in the episode "Plain Clothes Day" where he assists John Nolan and Talia Bishop during a botched raid in which a case of mistaken identity ruins the bust that Nolan was attempting to make. This is his only appearance in the season.

### Season 2

Smitty becomes a recurring character. He first appears in "The Night General" when he tries to convince Jackson West to move into the trailer park that he lives in after West is evicted from his apartment. However, West declines his offer and moves in with Lucy Chen instead.

In "Follow-Up Day", Smitty is shown being celebrated as an underachiever:

*"We're celebrating Smitty's last day as Mr. Irrelevant. The sergeants' exam happens once every two years. Whoever scores the lowest gets called Mr. Irrelevant 'cause they got no chance at getting promoted."* - Tim Bradford

In "The Bet", Smitty fills in for Angela Lopez as West's training officer when she rides with Nolan instead, and West is frustrated about how laid back and lazy Smitty is while on duty.

In "Casualties", when Nolan is asking around for suggestions on how to relieve stress, Smitty's response is "Goat yoga." Later in the episode, Nolan attends a goat yoga session with Grace Sawyer, meaning that he took Smitty's advice.

In "Hand-Off", after Lopez goes with Sergeant Grey to a parole hearing, West is forced to stay behind at the station and complete that tasks that Grey has asked him to do. While cleaning in the storage room, he comes across an unsolved murder and vandalism case. Smitty is present with West in the interrogation room as the suspect confesses to the crime as West needed to have a senior officer present in order to interrogate his suspect.

### Season 3

In "Threshold", Smitty is revealed to have served 22 years in the LAPD without incident, until serving one shift with John Nolan, in which they're attacked by a sniper, sent by Sandra De La Cruz ("La Fiera") to kill Cesar Madrigal in retribution for her son, Diego's murder. Smitty's 22 year length of service also made him a senior officer over Tim Bradford prior to Bradford's promotion to Sergeant I.

As Smitty is part of the detail that is diverted by La Fiera's extraction team in "Threshold", his fate was not known in Season 4 until "In the Line of Fire", when Sergeant Bradford selects Smitty as his aide for a day.

In "Red Hot" Smitty announces his intention to be re-elected as union rep, apparently running unopposed as he has been for years. Harper comments that the union delegate shapes their benefits package and that she'd vote for Smitty as "no one is more focused on benefits than Smitty". By the end of the episode, Nolan has decided to run against him.

### Season 4

In "Hit and Run" and "Breakdown", Smitty tries unsuccessfully to run against Nolan for union rep. He makes several anti-Nolan posters, and tries to hand out water bottles to get the other officers to vote for him. His campaign is ultimately ruined by Tamara Colins when she secretly records Smitty admitting that the only way to beat Nolan was by "playing dirty" against him. This causes the officers that were on Smitty's side to turn against him.

In "The Knock", it was revealed that Nolan had won the union rep position in a landslide.

During “Hit List”, Smitty is amused to be assigned desk duty with Nolan. As the two conduct business, Smitty mostly shrugs off the complaints of most of the visitors, forcing Nolan to have them come to him. After a long shift, Nolan finds a previous visitor dead, shocking Smitty.

In "Real Crime", he claimed that he had accidentally started the QAnon movement, while writing "This Is Us" fan-fiction. He claimed he used the letter "Q" (the individual or group upon whom the cult revolves) because it is his first initial.

During "Backstabbers", Smitty was resting in the breakroom and bore witness to Harper's engagement to James Murray. The pair didn't notice him until he spoke up to comment on their union being beautiful, something they appreciated though annoyed by their invasion of privacy.

## Trivia

* Smitty has made the most appearances of any guest character who has appeared on *The Rookie*. Out of the 98 episodes, Smitty has appeared in 36 of them.
* He is one of the few guest stars to appear in every season, along with Oscar Hutchinson and Sean Del Monte.
* He found Evelyn Nolan swearing amusing.
* He was unaware that most of the squad think lowly of him until Grey stated he took back every bad thing he said about him. Smitty responded by stating “You said bad things about me?”