Prime directives

"Serve the public trust"
"Protect the innocent"
"Uphold the law"
(Classified)

Mild-mannered Police Officer Alex Murphy was serving with the Detroit PD when its funding and administration was taken over by the private corporation OCP. Murphy was a devout Irish Catholic and a family man, living with his wife, Ellen, and his son, Jimmy. To provide a good role model for his son, Murphy began practicing the gun twirl move of his son's hero, a cop named T.J. Lazer portrayed on a television show. Murphy’s psychological profile stated that he was top of his class at the police academy and possessed a fierce sense of duty. This dedication explained why Murphy didn’t exhibit the negative attitudes and statements shared by his fellow officers when he was transferred to the Metro West Precinct, the most violent area of Old Detroit. The police dissatisfaction was a result of OCP’s free-enterprise marketing and efficiency, mismanagement, which lead to the deaths of many police officers in the precinct.

Murphy was partnered with Officer Anne Lewis, a veteran of Old Detroit. During a pursuit and subsequent raid against a crime lord named Clarence Boddicker in a steel mill, Murphy was severely wounded by gunfire from Boddicker’s gang. While surrounded by the gang and asked for his opinion of Boddicker, Murphy defiantly maintained his sense of duty and ideals of justice by stating, “Buddy, I think you’re slime.” While Lewis was incapacitated, Boddicker executed Murphy with a gunshot to the head. Murphy was transported to the hospital emergency room where he died and his remains were used by OCP in the construction of RoboCop.

RoboCop's body, while incorporating portions of Alex Murphy's living tissue, is largely electronic and mechanical. This interior structure is protected by an armored shell composed of "titanium laminated with Kevlar" making RoboCop incredibly resilient against both bombs and bullets, as well as extreme impacts such as being hit by cars and falling off skyscrapers. As demonstrated in RoboCop, the body armor can sustain thousands of armor-piercing rounds before damage begins to appear on the armour itself. It is also highly resistant to heat, as in RoboCop, he was unaffected after being caught in a gas station explosion and in RoboCop 3 when he was briefly set alight. His visor is made of the same material and a black strip of bulletproof anti-fog glass which protects the cranium apparatus and eyes. The visor also has an undercloth of Kevlar which protects the neck and covers up any wires etc. It should also be noted that the visor conceals most of Alex Murphy's face inside it.

In RoboCop 2, RoboCop's right arm contained a display that alerted personnel to his health status. RoboCop's hands also contain actuators strong enough to crush every bone in a human hand. His right hand also contains a spike which is used to retrieve or display data from any computer bank with a corresponding port. At the end of the first film, the jack is also used as a stabbing weapon against the antagonist Clarence Boddicker.

RoboCop implies that only Murphy's head or brain was used in the construction of RoboCop, as Morton states that "total body prosthesis" was an agreed-upon parameter. It is unclear in the first two films whether or not RoboCop's human face is merely a replica of Murphy's, as it contains a scar in the location where Boddicker shot him in the head, though he himself tells Murphy's wife (in RoboCop 2) that "they made this to honour him." After touching it, she says, "it's cold." In the script of the same film, it was initially planned that Cain and crew would remove Murphy's face during their attack on him, to reveal a Terminator-esque skull underneath. In RoboCop 3, Dr. Marie Lazarus, RoboCop's chief technician, stated that Murphy's face was indeed transplanted onto the mechanical skull, and that it is not a replica. In the first film it is mentioned that RoboCop eats a "rudimentary paste that sustains his organic systems." In RoboCop: Creating a Legend, a bonus feature on the RoboCop: 20th Anniversary DVD, it is speculated that Murphy's face was removed from his corpse and implanted on the cyborg's head to give RoboCop a sense of identity. This psychological disruption RoboCop may have experienced is explained from the basis that a person whose memory has been erased would still possess the memory of being human and would suffer a psychotic breakdown if that person saw the reflection of a robotic image instead of their original image of humanity.