He also beats up the Joker while he's in custody, because you gotta stop the badguy at all costs. And then there's Cops vs Protestors brawl in the other Nolan batman.

There is, admittedly, a precedent within the basic premise of the Batman story itself (and Frank Miller, author of the Dark Knight Returns comic is a noted right-wing libertarian) so in the case of that franchise, Nolan isn't inventing whole-cloth but it's also not something that's limited to just his Dark Knight films