Cyrus Raven

''The word of a player when providing actual evidence (IC recordings, IC pictures, etc) is equal to that of an officer.'' - This is the entire point of my suggestion... The reason why (based on my experience) the cop RP is so bad is that they simply resort to things like ''Oh I saw a similar car at a similar time so he is the criminal'' when we should be moving away from this and actually having an RP heavy dialogue between the player and officer. Here is how I see a good scenario: Criminal: Officer, I did not hit anyone with my car, I don't know why you have me on my knees and in cuffs Officer: Alright sir, hold on, I will talk to you shortly, right now you are being detained because we identified a black car like yours at a scene on an accident ''Officer proceeds to do a bunch of /me and /do on the car and the suspect to determine the truth, during this roleplay the criminal cannot lie. '' Officer: Alright, after taking a look at your car and having CSI look at the car we have determined that there is enough evidence to proceed with an arrest, at this time you are being charged with assault with a deadly weapon. ''reads my rights'' Criminal: I want my lawyer. .... You get the point right, a much more fluid dialogue that allows interaction between criminal and cop and adequate time to establish the truth as opposed to using the ''EHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I SAW IT SO THAT'S THE TRUTH'' in every single case (I'm sure there are times where this is enough, I'm talking about more complex crimes). ''Yes, they are able to defend themselves, and even enlist the help of their friends to make their case.'' - This is highly divergent to my actual experience and that of others on the server. Generally speaking, asking for a lawyer or expressing interest in self-representation leads you nowhere but jail. If you act differently then I can only give you praise, sadly this is not the norm under my experience.

Nice, you managed to not engage at all with the topic at hand. However, you seem to be taking the RP above everything approach, to which I will answer. Ok fine, cops can be dicks because maybe criminals are dicks, but if I ask for a lawyer or hearing I have to be provided with one, simple as that. There problem solved.

When all of my experiences have almost the same outcome and lead to a single issue then what do you expect me to say? These are my experiences based on my time on the server, I am aware that they don't represent the entire police force, but at the same time my suggestion's main point is to add a legal system/ improve the jail system so people can't get charged with no accountability, I don't think that is very contentious unless you want to enlighten me? A few questions: Are players able to dispute their charges at the time of arrest ? Are players able to defend themselves or hire a lawyer ? Is the word of a player equal to that of an officer when it comes to providing evidence ?

I'll take this advice into consideration, but based on my personal experience only once have I been allowed to explain what happened to an officer, the rest of the times (about 6-7) involved me telling the officer multiple times what had happened and asking for a lawyer and/or further investigation and being met with silence or ''there is not much I can do'' and promptly being placed in jail. If we can make what you described the standard or a common occurrence it would improve roleplay a lot.

+1 I understand the need to make guns and ammo scarce to encourage more RP and less shooting, but I don't think that removing ammo is an effective way of doing this.

Ikr! I was legit mad when he did that, I'm willing to comply but then this guy shoots me because he thought it was the same person

And to be clear, I'm personally not against corruption RP, just make it so that people can hire lawyers of representing themselves and then if cops want to charge you for stuff that isn't true they then have to deal with a judge or fabricate evidence. I want a solution that seeks to enhance player involvement when it comes to being arrested and charged by being able to defend yourself and elevate the standard of RP between civilians and cops.

I don't even know where to start here. Most of your post makes me want to ignore it as it literally provides nothing of substance. ''t's unacceptable for police to punish you, but it's acceptable to go on criminal grind 24/7. *shrugs*'' 10/10 strawman argument, where did you get the impression this was the case from any of the posts ?

Firstly, I would like to thank you for the lengthy and well-thought response, I am glad to know that LSPD does seemingly have a quite lengthy handbook and procedures that advise and expect officers to uphold a high standard of RP. However, let me address a few points. ''To say we power game constantly is far from the truth.'' - What I meant when I mentioned power gaming is how civilians are unable to do anything if they want to dispute a charge by an officer. Now, as someone mentioned, you can go to IA for an IC issue or the forums for an OOC issue, but this shouldn't be the standard in my opinion. Being able to simply sit down in a room and have a talk with the arresting officer or someone in charge for a major crime is something basic of any RP server that has a police force, this is my main contention with the police force. Players should be able to talk to officers through a series of dialogue and /me and /do to determine what the truth is. I reject that a Hardcore RP server is able to imprison players with little to no RP while at the same time not allowing self-representation, court hearing, etc... I don't think that there is an inherent problem with corrupt RP or even cops RP'ing normally and making mistakes, this is an RP server after all. However, if you combine this behavior with the inability for players to control the outcome of the RP then it becomes similar to power gaming. ''Our PD handbook states that an officers word is enough to add charges. If an officer IDs someone as a suspect, charges get added.'' - This goes into what I explained above. This is a one-way street that gives cops total control of the situation. If there was a system in game where you can collect evidence from the car to see if it was involved in a hit and run or GSR tests on the suspect, etc.. then it would be fine, not much someone can do against hard evidence. However, as it stands an officer can charge you for virtually whatever he wants and you literally can't do anything at the time. You can't RP asking for a lawyer, you can't defend yourself, you can't even use /do to tell him the truth (from my experience officers usually ignore these or respond with something like ''I saw it''. Then the solution for this as some will say is ''Go to IA'', well excuse me but why would I waste my time IC or OOC filing reports for something that was done to me with little effort. This seems like a really backward mentality scenario. Would I purpose is that officers try and conduct their jobs using RP in a better way to avoid these issues. If you suspect me from a hit and run and you want to charge me with it then RP with me, use /me and /do on the car and ask ME the PLAYER if there is any damage to the car or if any blood can be seen and we as players will make an effort to answer these questions in RP and hopefully change the officers mind if the RP indicates that in fact I did not hit and run. What SHOULDN'T be done is ''Oh I think I might have seen you run someone over, so you're gonna get charged with assault with a deadly weapon and there is nothing you can do about it'' As for the rest of your post, I agree. New players are a pain in the ass and you are correct, sadly the norm right now is to get into fights and always run away from cops. However, just because this is a problem it doesn't mean that we should be normalizing these types of actions by the cops. What we should do is aim to elevate both roleplay standards from the civilians and the cops, together, to actually create a hardcore RP server that is representative of the reputation this server has and not this Arma 3/gmod standard we have right now. Glad to know this, as I mentioned above as a response to ImSuspensee I still believe the issue lies on the roleplay standard within the agency. I understand that you guys have a ton of handbooks and guidelines, but we also know that these might now always be followed even if someone has read them, if that was the case we would never have rulebreakers. I think it is great that IA has a place in the server, but at the same time, I think we should work on improving how the jail/legal system works alongside with how charges are added and the standard used, I would rather avoid this all togther as oppose to letting it continue and then have to take time to file an IA report for something that should be simple to correct.

I understand and the thing is it would be great if I could argue these points with a lawyer present or just myself, but the willingness for some officers to listen and RP seems to be very diminished. Having said that, I understand that my experience is anecdotal and it might not reflect the entirety of the police department, but since it happens to me some many times I felt like I had to make a suggestion on it. My main problem is definitely the lack of RP when it comes to contesting charges given.

+1 Forgot about this. There have been times where I will get my tires shot just because I was ''driving a similar car to an earlier suspect''. So having a Force Continuum in place would enforce a higher standard of RP. An example of this is a situation today. I got told to stop because I had a similar car and one of the cops shot me, now, in all honesty, he did claim it was ''mc'' in OOC chat after, but I'm fairly certain the reason he shot was because he thought I was driving away, when in fact I was only complying with the demands made by the other officer and he didn't want to look like an idiot. https://plays.tv/video/5c9f7a211ae5657791/10-10-police-rp-

Dear Eclipse Community, It is my first time posting on the forums, although I have been playing for the last few weeks. As many of you, I come from an extensive background of RP servers. From GMOD light RP servers to SAMP hardcore RP servers like NGG, PLA, SARP. The reason why I mention the above credentials is because I, like many of you, have been playing for a long time on RP servers, specifically hardcore RP servers, so it comes as a surprise that a hardcore RP server like Eclipse who has such a strict entry requirement for players would then be able to foster probably one of the worst police forces and RP system for police that I have ever seen, even compared to light RP servers. Let me elaborate. There is NO accountability for the actions of the police force. The way the Police force is run right now essentially means that a player more often than not is forced to accept any crazy charges the police conjures up and he/she has no way to fight these in RP. This essentially means that at the moment if you are charged with something that you know 100% OOC you DID NOT do, you have no way in RP of contesting this. Very very few cops will ever engage in /do or /me to figure out the truth of a matter and investigate a situation, most of them just bring you to DOC or mission row, slap you with whatever charges they were told to give you and bam, you get 120 mins in jail for something that you didn't do. Example: A gang member gets into a chase with the cops in a black dominator, he manages to evade the police and escape. However, 2 minutes later the police find another black dominator (me). They start chasing the black dominator and because I have outstanding tickets I will also attempt to run from the police. Eventually, the cops manage to perform a PIT maneuver and disable my vehicle, I get out of the car, get down on my knees and am put in restrains. After the usual quick /me and /do to frisk, cuff and place me in the back of a cop car I get brought to either DOC or Misson Row PD. I get placed in a cell and when I ask the officer for my charges he tells me ''Felony Evading x2, Assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder of an LEO'', to which my reaction is one of disbelief and anger. At this point, I am smacked with a 20k fine, put in jail for 120 mins and everyone moves on with their day while I rot in jail. Does anyone see a problem with this example ? How in the world in a HARDCORE RP server, is a player UNABLE to defend themselves, ask for a lawyer or even interact with an officer to dispute the charges. Why is it that cops can essentially PG your charges ? The problem lies in the RP standard of the cop force. Generally speaking, most cops want to get into a chase or gunfight, put you in cuffs and bring you to jail all as quick as possible, there is NO semblance of an attempt to RP with the player and to find out what happened by RP'ing forensics, Gunshot residue tests, Dashcams as evidence, etc... Having said all this here are the suggestions I purpose (Keep in mind that these aren't mutually exclusive, pick and chose the ones you want to support/implement) Enforce a higher standard of RP by overhauling the police SOPs - Make it clear that officers should have very compelling evidence to charge someone - Make it clear that officers should analyze the suspect, suspect's vehicle and suspect's possessions for evidence linking him to the crimes he is being charged with - Make it clear that officers are to have dashcam recordings as proof in order to arrest someone for a certain charge (if you don't have recording software then it is your DUTY to ask players through /do to acquire the truth as players cannot lie in a /do) Add a legal system or some sort of system that allows players to dispute charges. Either by introducing a public defender system, allowing the players to defend themselves, or contract another player roleplaying as a lawyer. Reduce the fines and/or jail time for players who decide to NOT contest the charges and to accept their jail time, thus giving the player a choice of whether they want to RP defending themselves and potentially taking a while or if they just want to get it over with. LAST SUGGESTION: If all of the suggestions above get denied then the last thing I would suggest is to do SOMETHING to fix this. If you don't like the suggestions I made feel free to make any other in the comments or come up with a few solutions between members of staff. I'll repeat it again, it is UNACCEPTABLE to be known as a hardcore RP server and then have such a low RP level in the police force combined with a jail system that offers no options to the players and powergames them into accepting whatever fate is decided for them. P.S. Whenever I mentioned the police force being bad or their RP being bad I don't necessarily mean the players are bad. What I mean is that the way the police force has been told to act through their guidebook combined with the lack of ways people are able to RP their charges has resulted in a shit police system.