Character Analysis
Bored Bureaucrat
The Assistant Commissioner is a young man who's good at playing the game of police bureaucracy, so he's moved up to a position of influence pretty quickly. He's pretty wooden and not all that interesting, but he might actually be the closest thing to a "normal" person that Conrad gives us in this book.
He's not especially nuts about laziness, science, catching thieves, or himself. Instead, he's just really bored. He once loved his job, back when he lived in an exotic location. But then he married a superficial young wife who forced him to move to London. Because of this, he spends most of his free time playing cards as a sort of "drug against the secret ills of existence" (5.83).
Conrad doesn't use the Assistant Commissioner to criticize any worldview in particular. He just uses him to talk about the general sense of boredom that crept over English society toward the end of the 1800s. In fact, the Assistant Commissioner might actually be bored because he doesn't have the fanatical worldviews of people like Ossipon or the Professor. He just sort of takes things as they come, and wishes every now and then that he had a more adventurous life.
For Conrad, though, the Assistant Commissioner isn't just some innocent bystander. Bored or not, this dude is still a cog in the giant machine that creates inequality between the rich and the poor. And sure, he doesn't want the innocent Michaelis to do to jail, but this is only because he doesn't want to make his wife mad… not because of any overwhelming ideals.
Also, the Assistant Commissioner is a total social climber. Just look at the way the dude stabs his Chief Inspector in the back (not literally, although The Secret Agent is a pretty stabby book) and goes running like an obedient dog to a member of parliament. Did someone say future promotion? Yes, the Assistant Commissioner isn't as obviously as offensive as Ossipon or Verloc, but for Conrad, bureaucrats like him are just as responsible as everyone else for the badness of the modern world.