In 1978 former San Francisco supervisor Dan White assassinated mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. There’s a movie starring Sean Penn about it.
What some may not know is the hyper violent comedy movie RoboCop from 1987 contains a sequence parodying this event.
The movie technically takes place in Detroit, renamed Delta City (“The future has a silver lining”) which is now owned by an evil mega corporation called Omni Consumer Products. In an effort to reduce crime they revived a dying police officer and stuffed him into a metal suit, aka RoboCop.
It’s largely a parody of the Reagan era, with moronic CNN style news anchors interviewing RoboCop at “Lee Iacocca Elementary School” to a series of escalating incidents on the “Star Wars Orbiting Peace Platform” that somehow results in a space laser burning down the city of Santa Barbara.
The above clip is clearly a parody of Dan White with an armed former city official holding the mayor hostage and demanding his old job back. And a cup of coffee, and a car that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage.
It should be noted, however, that the way RoboCop handled the situation may not have followed proper police procedures.