Brian Irons

"I'm not letting anyone leave my town! Everyone's gonna die!"

- Brian Irons threatening Claire.

Brian Irons was a Raccoon City police officer who served as its last Chief of Police in 1998. He is a supporting antagonist of Resident Evil 2 and minor antagonist in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles.

Resident Evil 2
He is a chief of Raccoon City Police Department, but he is corrupt. It turns out that Irons is bribed by Umbrella, mostly by William Birkin, into keeping the company's secrets and allowing them to conduct experiments on living subjects, making him partly responsible for the T-Virus infecting Raccoon City. It is also heavily implied that he was a serial killer before the Raccoon City outbreak by the human skulls that are in his secret room in the police precinct.

Claire first encounters him in the police headquarters with the Mayor's daughter. Though at first he appears to be a benevolent police chief, it later turns out that he's been using the zombie outbreak to his advantage by doing whatever he wants without fear of repercussions, going as far as killing his fellow police officers as well as the mayor's daughter who he was supposed to protect, planning to keep her body as a trophy for himself. Later, she is held into gunpoint by Irons as it is revealed he worked for Umbrella and looking for his briber's daughter, Sherry. Suddenly, the embryo that Birkin injected him earlier on bursts out of his body, killing him.

In an alternate path, his fate is largely similar in that he corners Claire. However, he is instead killed by Birkin directly, being dragged down into a manhole and then having him being ripped in half from the waist down, with his top half being thrown back to the top just as Claire was about to investigate.

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles
Irons appears in a cut scene where he attempts to stuff the Mayor's daughter's cadaver (it is heavily implied that he murdered her by this time). Suddenly, he is confronted by Claire and Leon, whom the latter knows who he is because he works for him. Irons sees Sherry as he is searching for her. Just then, he is killed when a monster comes out of his body.

Personality
Irons is shown to have an uneasy relationship with people within his own police force as well as members of the press. His criminal history was found out through a fax sent to Chris Redfield that was found by his sister Claire Redfield in the S.T.A.R.S. office. In his diary, he mentioned that Edward's pained expression when he shot him in the back was "positively exquisite" and "beautiful," suggesting that Irons was also extremely sadistic and a likely psychopath, though he chose to simply arrest a reporter investigating him receiving bribes from Umbrella instead of having him murdered.

He was also extremely selfish and violent to an unhealthy degree, which was best showcased in how he attempted to ensure the city died with him instead of simply evacuating the city himself, even going out of his way to sabotage police efforts to rescue the civilians, all because he became paranoid that he had been infected with the t-Virus and could therefore potentially become a zombie.

Similarly, he also had a severe lack of control over his temper. This was best demonstrated when he was tasked with going to the sewers on August 16, when he threatened to shoot the Umbrella-affiliated manager in charge of the sewers simply for trying to tell a joke with the chief. This short temper was similarly demonstrated when Claire encountered him just prior to his death, where, when she asked him to calm down and tell her what happened, Irons angrily told her to shut up and proceeded to threateningly point his gun at her while ranting angrily that she can't ever understand what happened.

Trivia

 * In an act of censorship, the English localization of Darkside Chronicles establishes in a file Irons as having a wife, and he has a criminal past regarding domestic violence. The Japanese script for the same file instead describes his criminal past as being two cases of rape or sexual assault. The same file was also censored in Umbrella Chronicles as well.
 * In the scene where Brian Irons relays everything he knows about the G-Virus while threatening Claire in his taxidermy room, the localization erroneously inferred that the T-00 (referred to as "that monster that is tearing apart the precinct") was created by the G-Virus and that it was the ultimate bio-weapon when Brian Irons was explaining its properties to Claire. In the original script, he instead commented that the virus has the ability to rapidly advance human evolution without even mentioning the T-00.
 * Brian Irons made a cameo appearance in the Mini-Game, The Mercenaries - Operation: Mad Jackal in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. You meet him at the end of the mini game when you manage to get into the Warehouse Save Room, the end point of the mini-game where he beckons a woman to deliver a briefcase that presumably contained the player's payment. His face is hidden by shadows when the player meets him, though.
 * He is one of the most hated characters in the Resident Evil series for his horrific actions.
 * Originally, Brian Irons was to be an ally character. After Resident Evil 2 was rewritten, he was changed into a villain.
 * Brian Irons can be compared with Albert Wesker. Like Wesker, he was secretly working for Umbrella.
 * Brian Irons reappears in the remake, where one playable segment requires the player to elude him as he attempts to recapture Sherry.