Supervillains and Traditional Law Enforcement

Someone in the previous thread asked how local and federal government felt about superhumans.  This was such a good question, I thought the answer deserved being moved to its own post.


This is briefly answered in I Did Not Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence. I'll try to go into it with a little more detail, here.

Basically, the government is scared of superhumans and relieved to let them regulate each other. When one single person can have the power of a giant bomb, and there are thousands of these around the country, law enforcement becomes prickly. Conventional attempts to deal with them require you to either accept massive collateral damage, or go heavy on cruel and unusual punishment. When super powered communities fall into a relatively peaceful pattern, neither the government agencies nor the electorate want to interfere with that. An analogue is when organized crime takes root, and locations decide fighting them is more trouble than it's worth.

There are bad and unfair aspects to this. Superhumans are above the law in many ways. They're not going to get arrested for, say, reckless driving, or violating building codes. They don't have to face their bank accounts frozen for criminal acts, unless a superhero makes a point of dragging the villain in and revealing where the money went. The minor damage caused by breaking these laws, given the small number of people doing it, is considered a price easily worth paying to limit the gigantic damage that could be done if powers were used unrestrained and with malice aforethought. As long as heroes are willing to fight villains, and everybody is willing to keep damage to civilians to a minimum, the government is willing to limit themselves to doing the sweeping up afterwards. It is very convenient to let the hero take the blame when a villain is dragged off to jail.

Side note: It is extremely hard to keep supervillains locked up. People like Bull can walk through any wall you can build. Some mad scientists can create an escape tool out of a spoon and a mattress. If they don't break themselves out, they have friends who can do it easily. It's an unsolved problem.

No amount of superhumans the government can hire can come close to what's lurking in the 'civilian' population, and like conventional weapons, enough force to reliably stop someone like Lucyfar or Chimera (or Mech, who has broken a lot of laws in his vigilantism!) brings us back to neighborhoods destroyed and hundreds dead.

All of this is self-reinforcing. Government cracking down makes superhumans more violent, which forces the government to crack down harder. The government turning a blind eye makes it easier for self-regulating communities to maintain a peaceful tone. In LA in Penny's time, the hero and villain communities are actively friendly with each other, despite how seriously most of them take their roles.

This is far from a perfect system. For example, built into LA's friendliness is mob justice with execution as the penalty for breaking the rules. The superhuman community itself is weird, a separate culture from main society with a lot of social pressures. Both superhumans and the government cling to this system as a thousand times better than the alternatives.

(Added aside:  There is an entire separate hero/villain community devoted to less obvious bureaucratic, financial, and cyber crimes.  Beebee has dipped into it several times.  I am unlikely to ever do more than hint about its existence in any book, but it might interest you to know it's there.)