Now in Season 24, South Park is filled with iconic and moronic characters, including the police. But as legendarily incompetent as Officer Barbrady generally is, he is still somehow not the worst police officer in town. That honor goes to Sergeant Harrison Yates, the lead detective of the Park County Police Department and someone who has redefined what it means to be incompetent in the world of fictional law enforcement.
Officer Barbrady made his first appearance in Season 1, Episode 1 and popped up frequently for the first several seasons, largely because he was quite literally the only member of law enforcement in South Park. It was discovered in Season 2, Episode 4 that Barbrady was completely illiterate, which begs the question of how he was able to pass any of the exams involved in becoming a police officer in the first place.
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Describing Barbrady as incompetent hardly does the man justice. He was depicted as incapable of solving virtually any case, and any time he did was almost completely by accident. Yet he was somehow able to keep the peace. In the same episode that tackled his illiteracy, Barbrady briefly retired from being a cop, and the town almost immediately devolved into a prequel to The Purge.
Sergeant Yates is no smarter than Barbrady and is definitively a much worse person. He is openly racist and homophobic, though the same can be said about the rest of the Park County Police Department. But Yates goes to new levels. For example, when Michael Jackson moved to town, Yate was confused by how to treat him because of the discrepancy he perceived between Jackson’s skin tone and his actual ethnicity.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Yates’ terrible decision-making. When running a prostitution sting operation, Yates dressed like a woman and went undercover. As his subordinates kept pointing out, he didn’t actually need to perform any sex acts with the Johns to make the busts, but he kept doing it. At one point, Yates, still in disguise as a prostitute, married his pimp and moved to Switzerland before finally busting him.
One could chalk that whole incident up to Yates being thorough. That being said, it doesn’t explain why he believed Cartman was a psychic and actually took advice from him on a case involving a prolific serial killer. Yates ended up imprisoning and killing several innocent people and ignored the real killer and evidence. If treating Cartman as a credible source of information isn’t a sign of gross incompetence, nothing is.
No one is suggesting that Barbrady is a competent or trustworthy police officer but he at least knows better than to trust Eric Cartman. As an extra bonus, Barbrady also isn’t a complete racist. Over the years since he joined the series, Sergeant Yates has repeatedly proven that he is a terrible cop and a terrible person.
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