Major Friedkin
Major Friedkin is a female polar bear and the commander of the Zootopia Police Academy, introduced in the W-Series. She has run the Academy for over a decade, and Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde both came up through her classes.
Background
Friedkin trained Judy and Nick before either was famous, and remembers the rest of her cadets without sentiment: a wildebeest who cried through orientation and became one of Precinct 3's best patrol officers, a timber wolf who was dared to swallow a training whistle and did.
Personality
Friedkin praises almost nothing out loud. She does not cheer a spectacular win, and whatever she writes on her clipboard during an exercise she shows nobody. Discipline comes flat and closes the subject. What approval she gives arrives sideways, in a held second of eye contact or a fraction of extra weight on a name.
Series History
W-Series
In "Recruit Grumpiski", Friedkin asks the ZPD for help with a class three weeks from graduation and coming apart, and gets Luther on her roster under an invented name. Briefed on who he really is, she carries the Bark Grumpiski fiction for two weeks and never slips in front of the cadets. Her reading of Packard is blunt and public: he wins his fights and loses his team. Once the harassment of Miles Mobian is confirmed she removes Harris, a wolverine, and Proctor, a weasel, from the graduating class herself. Alone in her office one evening she asks the empty room what is wrong with Wilde. Her graduation address argues that a second chance is the harder one to come by, and that earning it tells you something about the mammal. Afterward she passes Luther a glitter-bordered certificate Clawhauser made, angled so only he can read it.
Key Relationships
Luther Pawthorne
Friedkin finds the arrangement ridiculous and sustains it anyway, treating a veteran intelligence agent as a re-enrolled security wolf and grading his push-up form on the standard rubric.
Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps
They were her cadets before they were detectives. She hands them the training yard as guest instructors, backs their harassment investigation with authority only she has, and blames Nick for the enrollment form.
Trivia
- Major Friedkin is from Zootopia (2016), where she runs the Academy during Judy's training.
- Friedkin's line "What is your major malfunction, Wilde" references Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's iconic phrase from Full Metal Jacket (1987).