I feel any 'start here' Dredd suggestion has to be one of those, not one of the epics or twisty internal political ones.

Fundamentally, I think Dredd's the same genre as the Beano stories where the parkie is chasing the kid. Dredd spends far more panels going 'get back here, you little scamp, you deserve a good hiding' than is generally talked about. This is an amazing default Dredd page:

Found these in a charity shop, £5 each. I'm not much of a comics reader but feel I should read at least some Judge Dredd - are any of these not-awful places to start?

The half-page Daily Star strips that Wagner and Smith did are the absolute distilled essence of Dredd.

Yeah I would say “somewhere between Judge Child and Apocalypse War” - the creators know what they’re about and you get a lot of basic case stories of high quality