In the 2002 reboot of Spider-Man, an instance of random urban crime is part of the titular hero's origin story, and later an excuse for a well-choreographed smooch, but Peter Parker quickly turns his focus to deranged industrialists, scientists putting their funding to dubious use, and black gunk from outer space. Christopher Nolan's Batman movies began in 2005 with a somewhat quaint world of crime syndicates and reached greatness in 2008 with a villain who explicitly treated the syndicates like a petty annoyance, ascending to become a major terrorist. It was Tony Stark's arrival as Iron Man that same year that caught superhero movies up to the American entanglement with the military-industrial complex and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Cape tries to bridge comics' origins and their future. Its hero is the kind of honest cop usually relegated to Bat Signal-operator status, Vince Faraday, exiled from the force when a supervillain called Chess kills a new police chief and frames Faraday for the crime. Chess also happens to be an corporate titan named Peter Fleming, who hopes to spike crime in Palm City (a beachy-looking stand-in for Los Angeles) in order to convince the mayor to allow him to privatize the police force and prisons.
The show is desperate to draw connections between overseas misadventures and American disorder.
"The Ark Corporation is paid billions of dollars to train police officers in Afghanistan while American cities are left to crumble in neglect," Fleming pontificates in industrialist mode, while Faraday declares his superheroic quest to clear his name "an unconventional war." But most of the crime we see in Palm City is either random robberies unconnected to Fleming's schemes, or high-level strategic violence that has no impact on ordinary residents of Palm City, like political assassination attempts on a prisons commissioner who is resisting privatization (Richard Schiff—aka Toby from The West Wing—cheerfully collecting his paycheck).
Saying repeatedly that there's a connection between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and urban crime doesn't make it so, or even make it seem remotely plausible. And given that Fleming secures the contract he wants to run Palm City's police force in the early minutes of the first episode, there's no clear reason for him to continue to terrorize the city as Chess, a masquerade that could wreck his business interests if he can't prove he can bring crime under control.
It doesn't help that The Cape, which uses devices like title cards to transition between screens as if we're switching panels, can't decide if it wants to be a crisp-looking action show or a moving comic. My guess would be the latter, given the inclusion of a gang of circus-themed bank robbers, Vinnie Jones with a crocodile-print face, and a theoretically secret assassin with a melodramatic college-girl level Tarot tattoo. It's basically a freakshow, a barrier to full immersion and belief in the series's worldview, with no new argument to make, nor anything new to show us, about crime, corruption, and the city.