Was he writing her report for her? "It wouldn't matter if I was," he predicted again, this time with equal part sorry, frustration and disgust. "You won't listen, will you?" They were pig-headed enough that they would take what he was telling them and analyze it to death, but not heed the warning he was giving them. People were going to die. More blood was going to be shed in his city, unless he could find another way to prevent it.
"Gotham is a war zone - but you're making a mistake if you think it's like any war zone you've seen before. You can't fight it with the same weapons." This was important, and he turned to look at her again, crouching so they were on the same level and she could see his masked face. "You might think you can come in here prepared - soldiers, guns, tanks - know that whatever you bring in, you're giving to the enemy. Nothing of yours is yours, nothing is safe. It's all theirs."
And that was just the way Gotham worked. People came in, civilians or policemen, and were corrupted or killed. Weapons were stolen, blown up, or otherwise used against the very people who thought they had acquired them to defend the city. To succeed in Gotham, you had to be patient, flexible, smarter than your opponent. You had to be a lot of things that involved working outside the confines of the law.
His suspicion that she was a war vet was strengthened by the emotion in her eyes when he mentioned the victims' histories, but her question wasn't an easy one. Batman shook his head. "I have no answer," he said, his voice less hard than before. Standing, he looked east where the asylum towered over the Bay like a crook-backed man. "I used to think it was me, but I don't anymore. Gotham's sickness has existed long before me, I just flushed it out into the open to finally be dealt with." He didn't know why he was telling her this.
She joined him at the ledge, saying exactly what he expected to hear from them. "You don't know them," he said. "How they became who they are. It doesn't excuse what they've done, but some of them have a chance."
Quiet for a moment, the patrol car below them pulled away. "My first year doing this, a man appeared, poisoning Gotham's water supply. Called himself the Joker. He was clearly insane - dressed like a clown; purple suit, white face paint, red mouth, green hair, dark eyes. Garish. He had what was known as the Glasgow smile - I don't know if you're familiar with the effect. Someone had taken a razor to both sides of his mouth to widen his grin. Common among Irish street games in Glasgow, hence the name.
"I eventually caught him, delivered him to the local precinct. One of the sergeants was newly married - just back from his honeymoon. He was one of the ones who used to be bad before Commissioner Gordon showed up; Gordon was still a lieutenant then. Gordon got him into AA, got him to stop gambling, even introduced him to his wife, who really made the difference. While in custody, the Joker got ahold of the sergeant's cell phone, and when he asked for his one phone call, he called the man's wife. Told her that her blood tests had revealed an incurable disease that would be extremely painful, not be covered by either of their insurances, and impoverish both of them, and that if he were her, he would just hang himself. By the time Joker told the sergeant and he got home, it was too late."
Batman had trouble recounting the story, as it represented one of his greatest failures. He had completely underestimated someone who would become his deadliest foe, to horrible consequences, and the cost of someone very dear to him. She needed to know that. "He was first held in a cell with four large, tough men. He killed them all with an air-based poison that shot out of his lapel flower and had no affect on him. On the day the transferred him to the courthouse, he got the pen out of an officers pocket and during the drive, stabbed him in the jugular through the mesh separating the officers from the prisoner. He then strangled the driver and took over the transport. I was there to prevent him from running over a boy on his bike but by the time I took over control of the vehicle, he had stopped. Joker had driven himself to the courthouse. He told me that he was 'having the time of his life.'