Roger Gaffney

Det./Capt. Roger Gaffney
Det./Capt. Roger Gaffney
First appearance	"Son of a Gun" (unidentified) "Nearer My God to Thee" (first identified as Gaffney)
Last appearance	Homicide: The Movie
Created by	Tom Fontana
Portrayed by	Walt MacPherson
Information
Gender	Male

Roger Gaffney is a fictional police officer of the Baltimore Police Department on Homicide: Life on the Street. He was played by Walt MacPherson.

MacPherson made a brief appearance as a uniformed police officer who finds an earring at a crime scene and offers it to Bayliss as possible evidence. The character is not identified by name, and there is no indication whether or not the beat cop he played in "Son of a Gun" was the same character. Gaffney is first identified as homicide detective Roger Gaffney in "Nearer My God to Thee", the opener of the show's third season, as one of the night shift detectives working under Lt. Megan Russert. Introduced as a rude, bigoted, incompetent bully who is universally disliked in the squadroom, he becomes the primary detective on the first of three murders for which both shifts are called in. In this episode, he provokes a fight with Pembleton (whom he provocatively refers to as "Boy" and "Sambo") after the fastidious Pembleton, who has to share a desk with him, complains about his failure to clean up after himself. The two nearly come to blows, only to be restrained by their fellow detectives and sharply upbraided by Russert.

When Russert learns of Gaffney's failure to investigate a potentially important lead, she reassigns the murder to Pembleton; his subsequent insulting remarks lead her to transfer him out of Homicide. The character is rarely seen again for the rest of the season, but his limited screen time does establish that he holds a grudge against the Homicide unit in general, and against Russert in particular. By the time of the Season 3 episode "Nothing Personal," Gaffney has ended up in Missing Persons.

Meanwhile, Russert is promoted to Captain for political reasons, infuriating the much more experienced Lt. Al Giardello ("The Old and the Dead"). In Season 4, following a confrontation with Colonel George Barnfather over her mishandling of the apprehension of a sniper, who commits suicide, Russert is demoted three ranks to Detective ("Sniper: Part 1"), leaving the position once again open. In the subsequent Season 4 episode, "The Hat", Gaffney is suddenly shown both as a Lieutenant and as commander of his old evening Homicide shift, Russert's previous job. By the end of the episode, he has been promoted to Captain, once again over Giardello. His promotion surprises the unit, and upon his appointment, he issues thunderous orders about how Homicide was going to be run by the book under his command, citing among other things various small infractions of department rules that Giardello had chosen to overlook.