Matt Yglesias, as noted in the comments to the last post, posits that DKR is really about "transcending superheroism". Conversation ensues.
Bradford Plumer jumps in with an interesting speculation on "the crime economics of superheroes":
Realistically speaking, how much could any one superhero reduce crime in a city? In the Spiderman movie, I believe crime fell something like 57 percent under Spiderman's watch. (Or maybe it rose drastically after he hung up his costume, I don't remember.) Is that plausible?
All this probably depends on what kind of superhero we're talking about, but I don't imagine there's that much fluctuation (could Superman really reduce crime by that much more than Batman?) Anyways, it seems that superheroes are mostly good for stopping big, dastardly, conspiracy-type criminals that ordinary police officers can't stop or won't. So here you have the possibility of an arms race, where villains start coming up with bigger, more elaborate schemes and organizations to wreak havoc. But in actuality, the masterminds would either move to another city or de-centralize their crime syndicate, in the grand tradition Al Qaeda. A relentless superhero might get very far cracking down on gangs and gang violence—though he or she would probably have to couple those efforts with a liberal prevention program (better schools, etc).
What about ordinary crime? A superhero can't be everywhere at once, so he doesn't really change the expected value of committing a crime for most people. And for irrational or spur-of-the-moment crimes, a superhero obviously has no effect. Now if the superhero were particularly brutal, there might be some deterrent value, but then that raises ethical questions. On the other hand, the New York Times the other day noted that, while the city could reduce murders to a relative handful, that left the hardcore cases, the recalcitrants. An adept superhero might prove useful in cracking down on these last few, particularly difficult cases. Who knows.
Interesting question. The gist of the "Authority"-style answer ot the second question is that superheroes can't, in fact, do much about ordinary crime (except for the Flash, I suppose), and that their efforts to do so are precisely what keep them from addressing the real roots of the problem. As Warren Ellis's Superman stand-in puts it in Change or Die,
"Their job, as they see it, is to fight the menaces that come to them: the supervillians, the weird things in the dark. Their job is to return everything to the status quo. They spend so much time fighting crime that they have little choice… They try to save the world, but they make no effort to change it.”
Whether that means that superheroes would have to radically transform society to fight ordinary crime is then the question which logically follows. Which then leads to all the big questions about who watches the Watchmen, and all that.
UPDATE: Ezra at Pandagon jumps in to the fray:
I think Brad's missing the point of the vigilante, crime-fighting superhero (who I'm separating from the super-powered, spit-at-the-laws-of-physics superhero). While they may not be everywhere at once and may be totally unable to prevent most crimes, the very thought that, somewhere in the city, some guy with powers unknown and a really unpleasant attitude towards lawbreakers was waiting to tie you up in a web or swoop down and kick the crap out of you offers a real deterrent capability. It's the same concept employed by the cops, whose menacing cars and unexpected hiding places make most drivers more conscientious of road laws, despite knowing that the vast majority of those speeding down the freeway and running the lights get away with it just fine. There's just a threatening aura around cops that, when combined with the knowledge that they could be hiding behind the next overpass pillar, makes them a pretty effective deterrent. Now replace the cops with a seemingly invincible freak in a costume who, by dint of obsessive media coverage, becomes omnipresent on newstands and thus in your mindspace, and you've got a deterrent far beyond what a pedestrian, obviously mortal police force could hope to effect.
Which fits in well with Frank Miller's fixation on the media in DKR. When Batman returns to action, TV is all over it - and this has the secondary effects of triggering the Joker's re-emergence and of inspiring the ex-mutants to imitate his vigilantism as the Sons of Batman. Superman's deal with the government keeps him out of the media, which means that he can "do good" but can't have a deterrent effect, for better or worse.
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