Massachusetts State Police - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Matt Damon plays a corrupt trooper who infiltrates the MSP for the Mob in The Departed (2006). Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin and Leonardo DiCaprio all portray troopers in the S.I.U. as well (DiCaprio as an undercover). Director Martin Scorsese asked the MSP if he could use actual logos, badges, and color schemes on the uniforms and the cruisers, but was denied.
• Ben Benson's series of novels featuring Massachusetts State Troopers such as high ranking Chief of Detectives Wade Paris and rookie Trooper Ralph Lindsey, appearing mostly in the 1950s, were among the earliest examples of police procedurals.
• The agency serves as a partial-setting for Dennis Lehane's novel Mystic River and its film version, in which the characters played by Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne are MSP detectives.
• The Robert B. Parker character Spenser is said to have been with the MSP, specifically as a detective with the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. He frequently interacts with an MSP homicide detective named Captain Healy (who also appears in the Jesse Stone novels) and worked with an MSP trooper named Brian Lundquist in the novel Pale Kings and Princes.
• An MSP cruiser comes to a halt at the Wordloaf Conference in The Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa", having pursued the Simpsons into Vermont Minute 11:50 in the episode.
• Norman Rockwell's famous painting "The Runaway" depicts a Massachusetts State Trooper and a young boy at a lunch counter. Rockwell lived in Massachusetts for much of his life. Actual MSP Trooper Dick Clemens is the Trooper portrayed in the painting. The boy's name is Edward Locke.
• In Edge of Darkness, Ray Winstone's character is killed by a Massachusetts State Trooper.