Patrol
Topic: Comic Books
More on super-heroes.

They always seem to be able to just stumble across a crime in progress. They swing around town, or listen to the police scanners, or some cosmic planet-eater's herald shows up and warns them of the impending extinction event that is their master's lunch. In short, they make it look easy.

Ever considered how you'd go about it?

Take the "swinging around town until a crime presents itself" option. From way up there, how are you going to see someone robbing someone else? What are the odds you'll be there at the exact same time?And if you do see it, how will you be able to tell it's a robbery and not a couple of the restaurant's employees grabbing a quick cigarette in the alley? It's hard to tell from up there, I'd bet. How many times would you interrupt a smoke-break, and have to say "Oh, sorry... I thought you were circus midgets" and then zoom away, your face flushed red beneath your mask?

Police scanners are great, but you need a portable one if you swing around, and you need a car if you don't. And if you're in a car, odds are that the police will be there first anyway. If you're swinging around, or flying, you might get there first... but then what? How are you going to tell the police that you weren't there to begin with, causing the problem? How do you convince them that you're not the perpetrator? And if they get there first (or if you let them get there first so there's no need to convince them of your innocence), aren't you interfering with an arrest?

Concerning planet-eaters... I got nothing.

So I was thinking, maybe, they'd just check the newspapers and look at the police logs, and figure out the crime hot-spots, and hang around there until they saw something. So I checked the major newspapers of Boston, New York, and Detroit. And you know what? None of them had a police log. Apparently, so much crime happens there, they don't have time to catalog it all. I checked my own little town's paper, and it has a police log, but it's boring, covers a huge area (not just my town, but several nearby ones too, probably the entire county), and only lists things like "arrested for OUI," and "arrested on oustanding warrants," and "illegally becoming involved with a domestic dispute."* These are not events worthy of a person capable of dodging bullets or throwing small vehicles.

Now, the large number of crimes in a major city does imply that one is more likely to be seen, by sheer number of crimes committed. But consider that they're not happening at a predictable time or place, and they could happen anywhere, and it then becomes a waiting game. You would have to pick a spot and hide there until someone came along to commit the crime. You'd be busting up muggings and drug deals, and you know, it's not really helping the police to do that.

Muggings, sure, it helps the people out that are getting mugged. But the police may not be able to prosecute if the public defender for the mugger throws some "rules of evidence" bullshit out there, or claims that the mugger was needlessly beat to a pulp by some vigilante that the police should be stopping, but aren't because they don't want to. They may have a harder time making the charges stick, is what I'm saying.
As for drug deals, they want to stop major pushers. They might not be able to do that if they just get one street pusher and not his source. They set up sting operations to do that, and you just may be interfering with one by stopping to "help."

The big crimes are usually not going to be like that anyway. They're going to be white collar. All you need to bust that crime is to email the evidence to a police investigator or newspaper. The crime will be discovered and stopped. No need for a cape.

And bank robberies do occur, but what super-hero is going to fly around all the banks in town, just to make sure nobody robs one of them that day?

Best bet seems to be having not just one, but a whole bunch of people, with communications devices of some kind, that patrol the city. They could wear costumes that identify them as members of that organization, so people will know them when they see them. They could carry defenses like tasers or maybe some kind of billy club, for self defense. They could have cars distinctively marked so people would know to get out of their way when they were on the way to stop a crime in progress, and have a centrally located headquarters and dispatch station, and a connection to emergency phone numbers like 911...

Oh, wait. We already have something like that, don't we. It's called "The Police Department."

Maybe we could have two police departments, the second one to take up the slack of the first one?

Skip it. Never mind. Any super-heroes reading this, forget about it and go back to flying around the city looking for muggers with your x-ray vision or something like that. Forget I said anything.

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*Whatever the Hells that means.

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