Well that's a constraint of the game's rating and audience. In order to keep the game family friendly and below an M rating, you can't actually do any awful things to innocent people. Remember you don't actually kill any one in this game, you defeat them. There are no kids to kidnap, no cute furry animals to stomp. The worst you do is rob a bank, and that's it.
In some ways, I think COV shouldn't have existed at all, instead they took the time and resources to build it into beefing up the hero content, which generally is poorer than redside(compare Virgil Tarikoss SF to Synapse TF, for example).