RoboCop

Alexander James "Alex" Murphy, more commonly known as **RoboCop**, is a Detroit, Michigan police officer with cybernetic enhancements. After being murdered on the job in 1987, he was revived by state-of-the-art robotics technology and continues to protect and serve the city.

## History

### Background and Creation

Detroit citizens and police alike have long suffered from rampant crime, to the point that in the 1980s, city government contracted the Detroit-headquartered megacorporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to privatize the city's police department under their name. OCP was deemed suitable for taking control of the police force because it is one of the military's top weapons providers and is known for entering markets typically regarded as non-profit or exclusively government-controlled, such as hospitals and space exploration. However, OCP had larger plans and hoped to completely privatize all of Detroit, with the eventual goal of establishing a corporatocratic municipality called Delta City, completely independent of the United States government.

Security Concepts, the OCP division in charge of overseeing the police force, felt that the all-too human officers could get more done with some nonhuman assistance and looked into programs for robotic law enforcement. The eventual choice was junior executive Bob Morton's "RoboCop Program," which involved outfitting recently-deceased police officers with cybernetic augmentation and placing them within a special law enforcement unit of their own. The plan to get officers into this program was making current and new recruits sign a waiver allowed OCP to do whatever they wish with their bodies if they die; determining suitable candidates based on aptitude and experience; and placing said candidates in dangerous areas where they were more likely to die. Almost all of these highly unethical and illegal activities were unknown to the public at the time.

Alex Murphy, a Miranda Award recipient with a reputation for bravery and a strong sense of duty, was one such candidate, and as part of the process he was transferred to "Old Detroit," known among city police as an extremely perilous and crime-plagued part of town, in 1987. He was quickly slain after following a gang of bank robbers into what turned out to be a hideout for gang boss Clarence Boddicker, which is what the public was told (tragically leading his grieving wife and young son to move away forever). However, Security Concepts immediately got to work on him and managed to revive him while programming him with an onboard computer that endowed his memory and gave him a lifetime of experience, as well as cybernetics-enhanced reflexes to match. In a very short time, Murphy returned to active duty as RoboCop.

### Glory Days

RoboCop became a media sensation as he proved to be extremely successful at stopping crime during the summer of 1987. That same year, he also managed to destroy Boddicker's drug operations and kill him and his entire gang, as well as OCP senior executive Richard "Dick" Jones, who was behind Boddicker's operations for his own financial gain - all while the Detroit police went on strike in response to OCP's constant and intentional endangerment of officers, which resulted in a spike in crime.

There were further attempts by Security Concepts to create other RoboCops after the enormous success of Murphy's transformation, but all resulted in the newly enhanced officers going insane and killing themselves from being unable to cope with their new existence. Any remaining desire to make another RoboCop effectively ceased with the transformation of "Cain," a dealer known for introducing the highly addictive and deadly designer drug "Nuke" to Detroit (Murphy destroyed Cain's operations as well). A declassified OCP file detailing the notes of company psychologist Dr. Juliette Faxx shows her beliefs that Murphy's successful acceptance of his cyborg state was a result of his devout Catholicism, which forbids suicide, as well as his strong sense of duty.

Despite making OCP millions and escalating public opinion to the point that OCP could start the Delta City project, RoboCop ironically became the megacorporation's undoing. In 1993 he discovered that the company was trying to force out the citizens of Cadillac Heights to make way for urban development, and anyone unwilling to leave was killed by Urban Rehabilitators (an armed force created by OCP ostensibly to assist police). RoboCop then led a rebel force that eventually encompassed Detroit's police service; defeated the Rehabilitators and the Otomi ninja robots provided by OCP's partner in the Delta City project, the Kanemitsu Corporation; and revealed every criminal act done by OCP, causing their stock to plummet and the company, once seemingly too big to fail, to file for bankruptcy . With the company's iron fist finally defeated and run out of Detroit for good, the city and its police force hailed Alex Murphy as a true hero and an example for police everywhere.

### Growing Concerns

Committing arson on "Devil's Night" has been a Halloween Eve tradition for vandals and criminals since the 1970s, and from that time to the 1990s the amount of destruction only increased. 1994's Devil's Night was particularly brutal and tragically resulted in the murders of Eric Draven, lead guitarist of rock group Hangman's Joke, and his fiancee . The public and the police could no longer tolerate so much annual devastation and Angel's Night was created in response. From 1995 onward, as many as 40,000 volunteers would patrol the city on a mission to stop more destruction by fire . RoboCop was an enthusiastic proponent of this new program since its inception, but his response to any lawbreakers and would-be arsonists in the first Angel's Night of 1995 marked the first instance of public concern over what is perceived as unwarranted excessive aggressiveness.

In the twenty years since, public concern and complaint has only grown with his body count. More and more people, including ones he has arrested and ones he has saved, have testified that more often than not his first course of action has been violence. Criticisms have also been leveled at his arsenal, which includes a Cobra Assault Cannon and a "gun arm" that contains both a machine gun, a flamethrower, and a missile launcher. These are holdovers from his inception, when Detroit was far more dangerous and police were more likely to face heavily armed criminals (at least partly due to OCP's intentional mismanagement), but critics argue that those times are gone and he does not need what are essentially military-grade weapons for patrolling the streets. Statistics seem to show that a mere ten years after RoboCop's creation, crime has drastically decreased in Detroit.

### 2008 Clash with Detroit's Punk Movement

Detroit's punk protest movement began in 2004 with the re-election of Democrat Josiah "Jed" Bartlet as President of the United States. His election in 2000 was initially heralded with great enthusiasm after two decades of Republicans in the White House, but by the end of his first term many who initially supported him felt that he hadn't done enough. Constant clashes with the Republican-controlled Congress stymied him to the point that some felt that nothing really changed - especially after Bartlet initiated yet another war in the Middle East for even more ambiguous reasons.  People upset with these election results held demonstrations against Bartlet, the government, the war, and the poverty crushing Detroit, and all this in turn led to the formation of the Class of '13, a loose collective of protesters who rebelled in both large and small ways.

This movement is distinguished by extensive use of graffiti art and even poetry found in bathroom stalls and along the walls of dilapidated and abandoned buildings, which are sadly all too common in the city. Examples include relatively harmless if nihilistic slogans such as "I once was lost and never was found"  and "The center of the earth is the end of the world;" more incendiary and vitriolic phrases along the lines of "I'm not part of a redneck agenda"  and "Demolition, self-destruction, want to annihilate this age-old contradiction;" and ambiguously hopeful expressions such as "Happy ever after is in the hands of fate." They typically refer to Detroit itself as "Murder City" (a mockery of the nickname "The Motor City") and to the current period of American history as "the Era of Heroes and Cons," and they create Banksy-inspired illustrations as a creative outlet of their disillusionment and discontent.

Of course, not everyone is willing to settle for passive-aggressive vandalism art: more idealistic activists (and more enraged ones) set up events of their own, plenty of which are protests. One such protest, supposedly led by the enigmatic "Whatsername,"  occurred the day after Election Day of 2008, spurred by the fear that nothing would change after Bartlet's hand-picked successor Matthew Santos  beat Republican candidate Teddy Bridges . Quite a few people, including Whatsername herself, took the podium to speak about their own experiences of struggle in the Era of Heroes and Cons, with crises both abroad and at home, within the government and in the social sphere, all while in the midst of a terrible recession. The mood was hostile and highly volatile. Booing and screaming grew louder and increased in occurrence. The merest spark could set off a full-scale riot.

Then at some point RoboCop came in with his arm cannon already locked and loaded, and the crowd fell into hysteria. Though he only came as a prevention measure, meaning he just wished to observe and make sure no one turned violent, he then saw a reason to get violent. The skirmish with the protesters was brief but disastrous and culminated with the Class of '13's banners somehow being torched by his flamethrower.  He was immediately held accountable by both the public and the police department, and he has been blamed for inciting the crowd to violence when his job was supposed to be prevention.

## Influence and Legacy

### On Detroit's People and Police Department

Despite his spotty record with the public, RoboCop still remains rather popular in his home city and across the country. Many Detroit police officers who took the job since his first public appearance cite him as an inspiration. His former partner Anne Lewis, now deceased, spoke of having a good relationship with her partner and said he was still very human even under his exterior and programming. Axel Foley, a former Detroit police detective now retired and living in Beverly Hills, expressed strong admiration for RoboCop's ability to get the job done, but also joked that he "knew it was time to get out of town when Robo was on a case."  In 2011, a crowdfunding campaign raised enough money for a commission of a statue of RoboCop in commemoration of his service to the city.

### On Medical Technology

The robotics used to revive Alex Murphy from near-death has been universally received by people in the medical profession as the next great innovation in using artificial augmentation to save lives.

It had previously been tested with some success in the early 1980s, when Maxwell Smart, a secret agent for a US government-contracted intelligence agency called CONTROL, was left extremely disfigured and on the verge of death during a bungled espionage operation . OCP, a supplier to CONTROL and other American-affiliated spy programs, offered to use Smart as the first human test subject of their new cybernetics technology, and Smart was able to continue serving with CONTROL. The goal was to make Smart function as he did before the accident. However, the “gadgets” he was equipped with would frequently malfunction and his neural networking was faulty, creating a clumsy and often bumbling cyborg . Despite reassurances from fellow agents that Smart has always been clumsy and often bumbling, and the likely possibility that trauma induced by being unable to accept his new state of being may explain his performance, OCP scientists concluded that they needed to seriously augment people with their tech instead of just making them normal again. They went back to the drawing board with all the lessons they learned from this experience, which helped make RoboCop a highly effective policing machine.

Since the collapse of OCP, the technology and procedures have been allowed to become widespread, which has saved countless lives. Notably, they saved the lives of a pair of aspiring French DJs, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter. The duo, known under their recording name as Daft Punk, were severely injured and put into comas on September 9, 1999 when their sampler exploded.  French doctors worked to save them, and the only viable option was to use the same technology that OCP used with Murphy.

This was initially seen as a tragedy for electronic music because the creators of the revolutionary house album Homework might be unable to create music anymore with their roboticized state. However, as with Murphy, something must have remained, because they released *Discovery*, praised for its incredible conveyance of emotion, in 2001, and they continue to record and perform today. Daft Punk has also written songs about the experience, such as "Touch" (featuring posthumous vocals from a previously unreleased song by rock musician Winslow Leach ) from their 2013 album *Random Access Memories*.

## References

1. ↑ *RoboCop* (1987 film)
2. ↑ *RoboCop 2* (film)
3. ↑ *RoboCop 3* (film)
4. ↑ *The Crow* (film). I chose the film over the comic (started in 1989) because it was released in 1994, when the most devastating Devil's Night occurred.
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 *The West Wing* (TV series). Jed Bartlet is the Fictional Replacement of George W. Bush and Matthew Santos is one of Barack Obama.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 *21st Century Breakdown* (album). The Class of '13 is mentioned in "21st Century Breakdown" and "American Eulogy." The graffiti quotes are taken from the songs (in order): "21st Century Breakdown," "Horseshoes and Handgrenades," and "See the Light." The nickname of Murder City is from the song of the same name and the Era of Heroes and Cons is also from "21st Century Breakdown." The mention of graffitized artwork comes from the graphic style of the album and singles' packaging and marketing. The description of the banners burning during an event in November is taken from a line in "Viva la Gloria!", and the title character of that song is conflated with the unidentified "Whatsername" from Green Day's previous politically-charged rock opera *American Idiot*.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 *American Idiot* (album). Jingletown, mentioned in the photo caption, is the suburb from where the album's protagonist Jesus of Suburbia hails. The graffiti quotes are lyrics taken from (in order): "Jesus of Suburbia" and "American Idiot." "Whatsername" is a character in the album, present in the album's booklet and the song of the same name. She is conflated with Gloria from the politically-charged rock opera Green Day made after this one, *21st Century Breakdown*.
8. ↑ *Commander in Chief* (TV series). Teddy Bridges is the Fictional Replacement of John McCain. In real life, McCain was mocked for being so old and some expressed concern that he would die in office - which would mean Sarah Palin would fill his seat. In the show, the equally elderly Bridges died of a stroke a year-and-a-half after his election, allowing his (far more moderate) female vice president Mackenzie Allen to become president - though Bridges wanted her to resign so it could go to the ultraconservative and amoral Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton.
9. ↑ *Beverly Hills Cop* (film series). His statement about getting out of town is a reference to how *RoboCop* was released in the same year as *Beverly Hills Cop 2*.
10. ↑ *Get Smart* (TV series). After fifteen-odd years of "missing it by *that* much," his luck had to run out sometime ...
11. ↑ *Inspector Gadget* (TV series). The eponymous detective is played by Don Adams, who previously played Maxwell Smart in *Get Smart* (TV series). They're essentially the same character, so I conflated them.
12. ↑ Thomas Bangalter told the story in an interview. The exact quote: "We did not decide to become robots. There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots."
13. ↑ *The Phantom of the Paradise* (film). Leach is played by Paul Williams, who provided vocals for this song. Homem-Christo and Bangalter first bonded as teens over watching this film more than twenty times in theaters.
14. ↑ "Touch" (Daft Punk song)

## Additional Notes

1. ↑ This can be seen in Murphy's police file, as shown in *Robocop* (1987 film).
2. ↑ All this information about Devil's Night and Angel's Night are real, with the exception of the bit about Eric Draven and his fiancee from *The Crow* (film).
3. ↑ The crowdfunding for a statue is totally real, I swear.