This was mentioned in a recent Cracked article. Superman isn’t a policeman. Neither is Batman, Spiderman, Captain America, Green Lantern, Iron Man, or virtually any other superhero. They’re private citizens who run around anonymously in masks “fighting” crime.
Assuming they don’t kill the criminals they catch, what happens then? We occasionally see some superhero dropping a bunch of criminals off at a police station or inside a prison. But dropping them off isn’t enough. You’ve got to have a trial and convict them of something.
Let’s say I’m Evil Nemo and I’m robbing the Gotham Art Museum. Batman’s out on patrol and he catches me, ties me up, and dumps me in Commissioner Gordon’s office.
Now nobody other than Batman saw me robbing the museum. The police don’t have any evidence that I committed a crime other than a guy dressed up as a bat said I did it - a guy whose name they don’t even know. How are they going to charge me with anything? All I have to do is say I’m innocent and they’ve pretty much got to let me go. I can even ask them to file charges against Batman for kidnapping me.
Your average super villain is pretty flamboyant and doesn’t really attempt to hide the crimes he/she is committing, relying, rather, on the inability of the police to catch them. That’s where a superhero comes in handy.
By the way, my favorite superhero nitpick is on one of the old Logically Critical podcasts. How many people die every year from drunk driving accidents alone, not to mention reckless driving in general. Batman has a car that can drive itself, and yet he hoards this technology for himself. Selfish bastard! Yeah, kudos for keeping Cat Woman from stealing the Gotham Diamond, but dooming thousands to fiery deaths is way uncool, (Bat)man.
Given a world in which someone like Batman or the Green Hornet exists, it strikes me as likely that there’d be legislation in place effectively making them police officers, with powers of arrest etc.
There’s possibly also the equivalent of anti-terrorism legislation which means Supervillains can be detained for a long/indefinite period without trial (or a trial by a jury of one’s peers, because really, who would constitute a jury of The Penguin’s peers, for example?)
Combined with the already noted tendency for flamboyance amongst supervillains, and one assumes CCTV footage or other evidence gathered from the scene by the people who do the CSI thing in that world, I don’t actually think Superheroes (legally) Bringing Supervillains To Justice is as hand-wavy a concept as it first appears.
You have, of course, identified the great weakness of the superhero concept - it essentially depends on a species of fascism to succeed. This derives from one of the starting premises of the concept - we the audience are privy to the bedrock knowledge that the hero is virtuous and we are shown the villain’s villainy, so we are not conscious of any violence being done to norms that apply in a regular universe not populated by superheroes. Superman’s dropping of the villain off at the police station is a cypher for “and then the System took care of the little details”, and it works because the necessary narrative conventions of triumph of good, casting down of evil, etc, are all functionally complete by the time said villain is so dumped.
The only attacks allowed on a superhero are attacks on his competence, not his virtue, which must be taken for granted by all serious protagonists including the villain. There is a nod to this in Spiderman. J Jonah Jameson behaves perfectly reasonably (by real world standards) in questioning Spiderman’s motives, but because he is not an actual villain, he is made to look foolish.
If Superman were required to come to court and give evidence as real police are, his virtue would be attacked, his freedom of action challenged and his moral supremacy undermined. So all of that pesky proof stuff is just hand waved away.
Pretty obviously, this system of superhero as both policeman and punisher could not function in a civil society that was not essentially a police state. But it all makes for great entertainment.
If I remember my law studies, the circumstances under which one can be effected without opening the arrester up to all sorts of liabilities (criminal or civil) are so limited as to be virtually non-existent, at least here. My law lecturer rounded off the unit thusly: “Don’t.”
And, as usual, Noel Prosequi raises some excellent and thought-provoking points.
Even cops need to testify to put poeple away, it seems like a successfull superhero would have to spend half his day testifying in court. And I’d think most judges would hold you in contempt if you tried to testify wearing a mask. Not to mention is a criminal really being given a chance to “confront his accusers” if his accuser is wearing a mask and using a goofy nickname?
Superheroes work best when they are dealing with villains the government is ill equipped to or cannot deal with. See Kal El and the various Kryptonians and bits of tech and aliens that have made their way to earth, is anyone really saying that a shapeshifting nano supercomputer from Krypton has civil rights?!
Basically questions of civil rights never arise because the villains are not human/not from earth and when talking about BRANIAC or Starro we’re getting to the edges of morality.
I think thats the whole point of a "super"hero, a regular hero is a police officer.
Oh and what about the point that most human villains keep escaping from prison? In that case Batman doesn’t need to prove the Joker was robbing the museum, esentially he just handed the police a prison escapee or fugitive.
I imagine that once the villain is caught, there will probably be some fingerprints, etc that link him to the crime scene.
But also, super-heroes probably occasionally need to testify in court.
In the Marvel Universe at least, I’m pretty sure that the Avengers have some special governmental status that makes them police equivalents. (Though Captain America is military, so I wonder if there’s some posse comitatus issue there.) I don’t know about super-heroes in the present of the DCU, but the future Legion of Super-Heroes are legally deputized Science Police officers.
I don’t have a cite for this, but I seem to recall that Batman was a ‘duly sworn officer of the law’ having been deputized by Commissioner Gordon.
At least in the 1960s TV version.
In the DC universe there have been a couple mentions of a constitutional amendment in the US that allowed them to testify without compromising their secret identities.
IIRC, it was stated as the 19th, although by the dates of the real world amendments, and when superheroes first appeared in the DCU of the time, it should have been the 23rd or 24th.
Now I’ve got to create a comic with a caped & leotarded Comrade Stalin flying around, thwarting rat-faced Trotkyite wreckers, punching tiger tanks, and replacing the red star atop Moscow U.
Golden Age Batman was an honorary member of the Gotham City PD with full powers of arrest. They seem to have dispensed with that some time in the late 60’s or early 70’s.
I’ve always liked when comics address this. I seem to recall a Green Arrow comic from the early-2000s in which Arrow busts a corrupt city-councilman and leaves him tied up for police with a bag of cocaine still in his pocket and photos of his other crimes stuck the wall next to him.
Also, a lot of villains are flamboyant enough that they don’t just commit crimes, they advertise them. When villain goes on TV or sends the mayor a letter threatening to set of a bomb at a big public event or robs a bank in broad daylight in a brightly colored costume with matching henchmen, it’s hard to imagine the authorities not being able to make a case against him, even if they weren’t the ones who caught him.
In general, I’ve always operated under the assumption that most villains like the Joker and Lex Luthor (when he’s a mad scientist rather than an “upstanding” businessman) are already fugitives, wanted for their various past crimes, jail-breaks and so forth so a superhero tracking them down is akin to a bounty-hunter who doesn’t (in most cases) take the reward. This doesn’t necessarily work for villains making their first appearances, but as I said many (if not most) are blatant enough that the case almost makes itself.
I missed this post when I replied before. Have you, by chance, heard of Superman: Red Son? Baby Kal-El’s rocket lands on a collective farm in the Ukraine rather than in Smallville, Kansas and he’s raised to fight “a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact” rather than the usual “truth, justice and the American way.” It’s actually a pretty good read.[/hijack]
