It's time for the future of law enforcement

To be fair- I think that is the joke, a major theme of robocop is an ultra capitalist right wing America where corporations run social services and are trying to create their own city. The film shows not only how these systems ultimately lead to hellish conditions for the citizens as services are ran to best serve share holders not citizens, but corruption, corner cutting (leading to the police strike as officers can’t safely do their job) and abuses like using the police force to evict people and mark them as criminals when in fact they just happen to be “undesirable” and or poor and in the way of the companies project.

The culmination and center piece is the titular “Robocop” who represents the soullessness of the company and the lack of ethics when business is so at deregulated and made central to society. A man, a human man whom the company literally owns, even in death, and not only is able but willing to resurrect him as a machine, taking away his memories and free will as suits their needs while capitalizing on his useful accumulated experience and skills. Robocop represents the devaluation and commoditization of a worker- showing the value of any employee to literally be that of a piece of equipment as they transform him into a literal appliance as a prototype for future officers.

The over the top violence of the film can be seen as just “action movie violence porn” but is actually a dual commentary both on American media culture of the time- but also in universe we are shown that the “cyborg” programmed by this corporation has been created in such a way that it’s directives don’t just fail to forbid- but actively assist in the use of excessive force in “quickly and positively” ending crime. It’s literally a parable of how corporations will do the quickest easiest thing regardless of ethics in order to meet a bottom line.

We also see that higher ups in the corporation are themselves criminals- and that the tools and systems they create to maintain law and order are specifically designed so that they cannot be used against them. In Robocop 1 the corporation enlists criminals to meet its ends and in 2 they use a criminal to create the second Robocop prototype- because they don’t care how they meet a goal only that they do. It’s actually stayed a relevant film but perhaps 2016-2020 its relevance has never been more so in showing us what a future could look like- at least in an exaggerated and hyperbolic sense.