Can powerful people be heroes today?

Everybody knows about Royals Who Actually Do Something and related tropes. Do they work in a modern setting? Can a modern influential person, like a celebrety, a buissniessman, a politician or even a head or state (or at least a close relative of any of these) dissapear on reregular basis to run around all alone on and beat up baddies). I mean people should start to wonder...

OK the setting is Urban Fantasy, but...

I don't see any reason why a character can't be both famous and a crime fighter, if that's what you're asking. Off the top of my head, here are a few ideas that might help justify the situation.

1: The character is so rich that they hire a double to perform their day to day duties, while they focus on battling criminals.

2: The character has a bit of a reputation for being a recluse. So while everyone thinks the character is just lounging around their mansion, they are actually out on the streets.

3: If the character is an important member of a business or a royal family, perhaps everyone else is in on it too? Maybe Bill Gates has his board of directors cover for him while he's out fighting crime. Or the British Royal Family has a tradition of producing superheroes.

But yeah, there's certainly no reason why it couldn't be done, if written well enough. I'd probably have to hear more specifics before I could tell you anything else.

Yes, you can have people in positions of power be crime fighters. For example: Batman or Tony Stark. Both powerful people who fight criminals.

However, there is a little bit of Fridge Logic with Batman-like characters: It would be much wiser to hire some other guy to suit up, and become his Mission Control. That way, they can spend more time doing the mental task while the other guy trains a lot (rather than one guy having to do it all). And, if the "muscle" is killed, society doesn't lose a leader and a crime fighter at the same time.

Of course, there are work-arounds to that (for example, they're fighting crime because "it's fun" rather than for particularly altruistic reasons). And for that matter it's so common nobody will question it.

Somewhat dissenting view: yes, kind of, but it won't have a real effect on the crime rate.

If the person in question is notoriously reclusive and has the money and the resources to set up what is essentially a private intelligence/security/criminal organization, they can conceivably leverage it to do what they want, including playing Batman. To personally go out in the streets themselves is exposing themselves to unnecessary risk, especially if they don't have plot armor. Legally speaking, it'd be illegal as shit, of course, and the proliferation of video cameras means that their risk of blowing their cover is dangerously high even if they aren't caught by an IRS audit—or if they leave a blood spatter for forensics to catch.

Despite what superhero comics might have you believe, street crime won't go down because of a handful of vigilantes. The premise that "if we punch the criminals hard enough they'll be deterred" is not proven to be correct; outsourcing that job to a vigilante not subject to due process, official oversight, or media scrutiny is a Bad Idea. The more so when you consider that for Batman to do what he does, he needs a huge technological advantage over the state and over his criminal competitors. That kind of tech gap simply doesn't exist in reality.

Aiding to that, I'd say one of the best portrayals to that scenario (wealthy man hires someone to serve as his superhero muscle) is Person of Interest, a series that has been described once as "what if Batman were two separate people".