A Harlem detective who works the case the legal way while the man she is investigating keeps solving it the other way.
Mercedes Kelly Knight, who nobody calls Mercedes, is a detective at the 29th Precinct with a strong sense of justice and a habit of standing in an empty street until it tells her what happened there. She is introduced as Rafael Scarfe’s partner and as the person most determined to find out who Luke Cage actually is.
She is the argument the Netflix run keeps having with itself. Four people in Manhattan have decided the law is too slow, and Misty Knight is the one who still turns up with a badge and a notebook and does it properly. The series does not let her win that argument, but it never treats her as naive for making it either.
Minor spoiler
She loses her right arm in an encounter with Bakuto. Claire Temple and Colleen Wing help her through the recovery, and she is later given a prosthetic built by Danny Rand and Colleen Wing. In the comics that arm is her defining feature. Here it arrives late, and the show spends more time on what losing it costs her than on what it gives her.