(funky music)
- (Michael) What’s up Wisecrack, Michael
here.
In 1987 and 1995, two movies about futuristic
crime fighters were box office hits…  well,
one was a hit and the other was a huge flop.
Ok Ok, let me try again. In 1987 and 1995,
two movies about futuristic crime fighters
sold tickets across North America: RoboCop
and Judge Dredd.
At first, these films might seem like just
two more additions to the dumb action flick
canon about the forces of good racking up
bad guy body counts in the name of justice.
But what if they’re actually doing a lot
more - like asking some really big questions?
Questions like: how should a society enforce
its laws?
- (Dredd) Happy motoring.
- (Michael) And more importantly, what if
they’re secretly commenting on how these
guys answered that question?
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition
on Robocop and Judge Dredd: Who is the law?
- (Dredd) I am the law!
- (Michael) And of course, spoilers ahead.
- (Michael) Before filmmaker Paul Verhoeven
and screenwriter Edward Neumeier brought us
this
- (Man) Here's a bunch of MI kids that look
like they eat bugs for lunch!
- (Woman) Yum yum yum!
- (Michael) they brought us RoboCop. In a
futuristic dystopian Detroit, the megacorporation
Omni Consumer Products (OCP) wins a contract
to run the city’s police department. After
cutting funding so that the cops can’t do
their jobs properly, they lead police officer
Alex Murphy to a gang of criminals led by
the dad from That 70s Show. Murphy is murdered,
and OCP, looking for a guinea pig, rebuilds
him as a cost-saving cyborg that is programmed
to
- (Robocop) Serve the public trust, protect
the innocent, and uphold the law.
- (Michael) Eight years later, Judge Dredd
premiered. Sly Stallone’s Judge Joseph Dredd
isn’t a robot, but a heavily armored Street
Judge who patrols Mega-City 1. In this 2080
totalitarian police state, law is maintained
by Street Judges who serve as judge, jury,
and executioner. Dredd basically worships
the law, and is VERY good at implementing
it with catchphrases like:
- (Dredd) I knew you'd say that
- (Michael) Until he gets framed for murder.
- (Judge) Dredd you're under arrest!
- (Judge Hershey) What's the charge?
- (Judge) Murder.
- (Michael) RoboCop and Judge Dredd have a
lot of similarities, and it’s not just the
co-ed locker rooms. They’re both stories
about crime run amok, and the increasingly
desperate and ethically questionable means
of containing it.
Importantly, both the worlds of Robocop and
Judge Dredd see law enforcement outgunned
and ill-equipped to maintain order. Alex Murphy,
for instance, gets gunned down, in part, because
backup is unavailable.
- (Murphy) Now where's the backup?
- (Dispatcher) Backup is still unavailable.
- (Michael) And, even Judge Dredd’s police-state,
still can’t seem to keep up with the riff-raff.
Some cultural context is important here: In
the 1960s and 1970s, the violent crime rate
in America increased by 126 percent. The 1980s
brought the crack-cocaine epidemic, and handgun-related
homicides doubled between 1985 and 1990. Crime
was heavily reported on and sensationalized
by the media, and became a frequent talking
point of political campaigns. While most millennials
and zoomers have lived their entire lives
in a world with decreasing crime rates, the
same can not be said for the original audiences
of these films. The idea that “street savages”
had made the law as we know it collapse — as
the Judge Dredd intro tells us — was a familiar
idea to anyone watching the 5 o’clock news. 
And for those terrified by crime, something
like this:
- (Morton) We're projecting the end of crime
in all Detroit within 40 days.
- (Michael) Was the stuff of fantasies.
At first glance, one might assume these films
were all aboard the “let’s shit our pants
over a crime epidemic” train. But both of
these films are subversive commentaries on
these fears, not simple reflections of them.
For Judge Dredd, the logical conclusion of
being “tough on crime” is this:
- (Dredd) I am the law!
- (Michael) Whereas Robocop warns us about
the dangers of fear mongering and a for-profit
criminal justice system.
- I say good business, is where you find it.
As you know we've entered into a contract
with the city to run local law enforcement.
- (Michael) But the core of these films’
commentary has less to do with dystopic predictions
about policing, and everything to do with
… this guy: Earl Warren.
Chief justice of the US Supreme Court from
1953 to 1969, Warren headed the court through
rulings so world-changing that it’s hard
to imagine a time before them. Of course,
there’s the big hits, like Brown v. Board
of Ed - which desegregated schools, and Loving
v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage. 
But there’s also the Miranda warning
- (RoboCop) You have the right to remain silent.
- (Michael) which was not a thing some sweaty,
wig-wearing founding father came up with,
but rather the result of a 1966 case involving
a guy named Ernesto Miranda.
It was the Warren Court’s decisions dealing
with criminal justice, like the Miranda case,
that made him the ire of conservative politicians,
and a resultant scapegoat for society’s
problems. Remember those exploding crime rates?
It wasn’t the lack of economic opportunity,
or access to guns, or funding cuts for all
types of social services, nope, it was all
the fault of our man Earl. As Michal Belknap
writes “Before Warren became chief justice,
few politicians would have thought to blame
the Supreme Court for the crime rate.” But
blame they did. And the criticisms lobbied
at Warren fuel the satire and commentary driving
both Dredd and Robocop.
So, why all the hate? It’s because Warren’s
court laid forth an entire new set of protections
for our constitutional rights when dealing
with the police, affirming the right to remain
silent, the right to a lawyer, the right to
have that lawyer present during police interrogation,
and protection from the use of illegally-seized
evidence. Critics, like a former New York
City police commissioner, argued that these
protections stifled law enforcement, weakening
a police force that was already stretched
dangerously thin.
Unsurprisingly, pop culture reflected these
anxieties, most obviously in cinema, which
depicted endless streams of “good-guy”
hero cops who refused to play by the pesky
Warren-style rules of policing. You know,
the loose cannon who could just get the bad
guy if it weren’t for all the red-tape in
his way.
In this context, who would be the ultimate
answer to Warren-era restrictions, the ULTIMATE
unencumbered cop?
How about a guy who has perfectly internalized
the criminal justice code and can thus be
trusted to enforce the law fairly no matter
what? Sounds kinda like this:
- (RoboCop) Serve the public trust. Protect
the innocence. Uphold the law.
- (Michael) Or this:
- (Dredd) In code 36-13, the first degree
murder of a street judge...
- (Criminal) Let me guess. Life. (Screams)
- (Michael) Judge Dredd imagines a cop freed
from bureaucracy, an officer so-thoroughly-trained
in the law he doesn’t need a “balance
of powers” to justly administer it. A cop
who doesn’t have to worry about activist
judges, because he IS the judge. Who won’t
be stopped by sympathetic juries, because
he is the jury. And of course he’s also
the one handling the punishment.
- (Newcaster) Killed in summary executions
by Judge Dredd.
- (Michael) Dredd is the platonic ideal of
a cop. He isn’t driven by emotions
- (Dredd) Emotions... there ought to be a
law against them.
- (Michael) And doesn’t have any friends
that could create a conflict of interest.
He has simply memorized the law, and will
dole it out without any bias or compassion.
He is to inner-city policing what your Roomba
is to mid-sized apartment vacuuming. Of course,
this is the target of the film’s critique.
Without a balance of powers, who is to save
Dredd when he’s on trial? His own biceps?
(Dredd grunting)
- (Michael) Earlier in the film, Dredd arrests
the lovable Rob Scneider, who was just trying
to avoid a shoot-out.
- (Fergie) They were killing each other in
there!
- (Dredd) You could've gone out the window.
- (Fergie) Forty floors? It would've been
suicide!
- (Dredd) Maybe. But it's legal.
- (Michael) Once they later team up, he can’t
even give Deuce Bigalow a casual “my bad”
because:
- (Dredd) The law can’t apologize!
- (Michael) Robocop also incorporates many
of the defining traits of Warren’s critics,
especially the eventual successor to Warren,
Warren Earl Burger. I know, it’s too many
Warrens and Earls. Before he took the other
Earl’s job, Burger complained about a drawn-out
legal process where criminals could bank on
their “free lawyer” getting them off on
a technical loophole. Of course, many of those
loopholes were civil rights protections concocted
by the Warren court - like the hypothetical
drug dealer who gets off because the cops
don’t have a warrant.
We see hints of this narrative in Robocop,
like a slimey criminal defense lawyer in the
intro
- (Lawyer) Attempted murder? Well it's not
like he killed someone! It's a clear violation
of my client's civil rights!
- (Man) Make it aggravated assault and I can
make bail, in cash, now!
- (Michael) And a guy screaming that he’sa
“repeat offender" -
- (Man) I am what you call a repeat offender,
I repeat, I will offend again.
- (Michael) Ostensibly because the justice
system can’t legally lock him up for good.
One man who catapulted his career straight
into the white house by criticizing Warren
was one Richard Milhous Nixon.
After an explosion of violent protests and
riots swept the country in the “Long Hot
Summer'' of 1967, soon-to-be-presidential
candidate Richard Nixon published an op-ed
titled “What Has Happened to America?”
One of his scapegoats: judges weakening the
police’s ability to fight crime, a point
that Nixon would continue to repeat throughout
his presidency.
- (Nixon) I believe some court decisions have
gone too far in the past in weakening the
peace forces as against the criminal forces
in our society.
- (Michael) In fact, as Bob Woodward and Scott
Armstrong put it in “The Brethren”, Burger
was chosen by Nixon to lead the Supreme Court
specifically because of his ragging on Warren’s
criminal justice decisions.
While Robocop and Judge Dredd came out well
after Nixon’s impeachment, his “tough
on crime” and anti-Warren-court rhetoric
persisted well into the 80s and 90s.
(gunshot, man screams)
- (Michael) It’s no surprise then, that
Robocop’s cartoonishly evil backstabbing
criminals and Judge Dredd’s disintegrating
social order seem like a warning from this
Richard Nixon ad which tells us:
- (Narrator) In recent years, crime in this
country has grown 9 times as fast as population
- (Michael) And to vote like your “whole
world depended on it.” The idea that civilization
itself was being threatened by crime was,
and continues to be, a common “warning”
in political rhetoric. Criminals aren’t
your friendly neighborhood weed delivery guy,
a person trying to make ends meet, or someone
pushed into desperation by addiction. They
are irredeemable monsters, willing to betray
each other at a whim and destroy their own
neighborhood in the process. When the police
go on strike in RoboCop, the city quickly
devolves into violent anarchy. This kind of
rhetoric wasn’t limited to the likes of
Nixon. How the US was handling crime continued
to be of great public concern in the 80s and
90s.Law and order rhetoric resurged during
the Reagan years, and not because he starred
in a movie of the same name. 
Even Bill Clinton took a “tough on crime
stance,” and Hillary Clinton, in 1996, warned
of child “Super Predators” with no “conscious
or empathy.”
- (Hilary Clinton) They are often the kinds
of kids that are called "super predators"
no conscious, no empathy.
- (Michael) There is even a rumor that Hillary
screened RoboCop for the White House staff
and then told them, “now you go make this
happen.” That rumor was of course started
right now, by me, with literally no evidence
to support it other than that it would be
crazy if that happened, right?
- (Michael) Of course, she wasn’t the first
to accuse criminals of being inhuman monsters,
she was just putting her own spin on familiar
rhetoric. RoboCop takes this concept and pushes
it to 11, giving us the least sympathetic
villains possible. Before assaulting a woman,
2 men act like zoo animals,
(Men making animal noises)
- (Michael) While the dad from That 70s Show
uses a wounded friend to slow down a police
car. In Judge Dredd, the people who exist
outside the law are literal cannibals.
- (Dredd) I forgot to mention it. Your new
friends... they're cannibals.
- (Michael) Dredd even has a copy of “The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in
his locker - suggesting the stakes of the
war against crime are, in his mind, the decline
and fall of the Western civilization.
But these movies are ultimately criticizing
this narrative. Even policing with an iron
fist can’t save Judge Dredd’s megacities,
and the most inventive thing this guy has
to offer is more executions.
- The only solution is a tougher criminal
code!
- (Michael) And even if our criminal justice
system could clone perfect cops like Dredd,
it could do nothing to stop gross abuses of
power without a separate judicial system to
stop it. Meanwhile, RoboCop, through artfully
placed commercials, suggests that there’s
a perverse incentive for the media to report
on the chaos of the world, so that OCP can
deploy extremely profitable murder robots
to “save” civilization.”
The criminal justice system in both films
are willing to go to extreme lengths in the
name of stopping perps, even though they’re
inflicting a ton of collateral damage with
little consideration for the complexities
of criminal activity. These worlds, both full
of law enforcers, don’t seem very lawful
at all.
In other action movies of the time, vigilante
justice is a noble alternative to policing
-  “if the cops can’t get the job done,
I will!” The good guys kill the bad guys
and everyone goes home happy, and maybe wondering
if there are too many Warren-style rules obstructing
cops from doing their jobs. In contrast, RoboCop
and Judge Dredd are making fun of both the
tropes and anxieties of the time. These films
satirize romantic notions of good guy cops
in a world unencumbered by red tape.
They can also help us ask questions about
how and when our desire for “law and order”
compromises our other values like “democracy”
or the belief in a separation of powers in
the criminal justice system.
But what do you guys think? Are Robocop and
Judge Dredd brilliant indictments of tough-on-crime
rhetoric and policies? Let us know in the
comments. Huge thanks to our patrons for your
support. As always, thanks for watching and
sadistically murder that subscribe button.
And remember, I am the law. Later!
