The Bludhaven Police Department was the local law enforcement agency for the city of Bludhaven.
Steeped in corruption, a 1971 anti-corruption committee eliminated the post of Police Commissioner in the department when its power and influence began to rival that of the city mayor. In modern times the current Police Chief, Francis Alexander Redhorn, is still more powrful than the mayor but at a lower official pay grade.
Stories of secret offshore "retirement" funds, intentionally bungled investigations and entire precincts on the take lead nowhere as the FBI, DEA and Treasury Department are led on countless wild-goose chases time and again.
The rest of the department followed Redhorn's lead. If the rank and file cops were not busy looking the other way while crimes were committed, they were busy committing the crimes themselves.
When Nightwing (Richard Grayson) adopted Bludhaven as his new home, he tried to acquire a contact within the police department to be an allie much like Batman (Bruce Wayne) had done with James Gordon. Inspector Dudley "Deadly" Soames, Nightwing's initial contact whom he met when Chief Redhorn put out an execution order on the vigilante, was revealed to have had the intention of pitting the various factions in Blüdhaven against one another; Feeding information on Blockbuster's criminal dealings to Nightwing, while serving Blockbuster as a mob lieutenant, and overseeing many of the criminal activities of Chief Redhorn's corrupt tenure with the police.
After Grayson joined the police force to work the system from within, he made contact with an underground group of honest cops doing their best to fight the corruption from within.
When Redhorn was stabbed to death, Captain Phillip Aswal Addad, previously captain of the Homicide division and member of the underground group, became the new head of the department and set about cleaning up the department.
A revelation came when a journal, kept by Redhorn's wife, Mary Redhorn, was found that contained information and evidence to root out large quantities of corruption within the department and the city, Sergeant Amy Rohrbach, another underground group member and Grayson's initial partner, was promoted to Captain. It was in this role that she discovered that Grayson was the vigilante Nightwing and, instead of turning him in, asked that he leave the department.
However, with the dismissal and arrest of numerous officers, the department became severely understaffed and a record recruitment drive was conducted to revive the numbers.
The department and a majority of its members were destroyed along with the rest of Bludhaven during the events of the Infinite Crisis.
Trivia[]
- The Bludhaven Police Department had the highest rate of early retirement of any police department in the country.
- Hank Hogan, owner of the local cop watering hole Hogan's Alley, was one of the few honest cops in the department before he retired.
- Following being partnered with Sergeant Amy Rohrbach during his probation period, Grayson was then partnered with Officer Gannon Malloy for the remaining duration of his time in the department.