Roger Gaffney

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.