Limelight Forums

Hello all,

Forgive me if I am speaking out of turn here, or getting to ahead of myself, as I do not mean to cause any issues. However lately, (mainly this week) I have seen an abundance of law enforcement officers (forgive my language here) just pulling laws out of their ass. I have watched people get arrested for things that are not even set laws from the Acting President, or even laws in general. 

For instance, I will reference a PR made against Dutch and Cheet. Cheet was arrested for quote "Disrespecting an Officer" and "Failure to comply with a LEO". Now I understand that not everybody has law enforcement training, however it kinda gets annoying when a cop actually and whole heatedly believes that disrespecting him as an arrest-able offense. It is not even a detain-able offense. It is not an offense period. Just as well, you cannot arrest somebody for "Failure to comply with a LEO" unless you are giving them a lawful order.

For those who do not know, you can only issue a lawful order if you have the individual detained, and the order must be reasonable to affect the lawful purpose intended. Example being if you have somebody detained for let's say suspicion of burglary. You can give that individual a lawful order to sit down, to judge their compliance. Or you can lawfully order somebody to leave the premises. 

You can also only detain an individual if you have reasonable suspicion to believe that person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime. Directly quoted from the legal definition "A police officer stopping a person must be able to point to specific facts or circumstances even though the level of suspicion need not rise to that of the belief that is supported by probable cause. A reasonable suspicion is more than a hunch." I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people be detained, or been arrested in game with no actual lawful reason. 

That brings us to arrests. In order to place somebody in custody, and make a lawful arrest on an individual, you have to have probable cause. Probable cause is defined as "[font=Roboto, sans-serif]sufficient reason based upon known facts to believe a crime has been committed or that certain property is connected with a crime." Essentially meaning, you know beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a crime committed, and you have evidence to prove that the person you are arresting is the individual who committed that crime. [/font]

[font=Roboto, sans-serif]Now I understand that these concepts cant physically be drilled into the head of every player who wants to play as a LEO. However it just gets really annoying being arrested and detained by the police when in all actuality none of it would be lawful in real life. [/font]

[font=Roboto, sans-serif]I had a staff member earlier today tell me to just, "go to the president, make an official report there". Truly speaking though, what is the most that will really happen? Within time they can get right back on their LEO slot, and continue to make these false arrests. You cannot report it to staff because it is an in character issue, and nobody in character does anything about it unless it is an actual Law Enforcement RP Group (like MSP or MCSO). [/font]

[font=Roboto, sans-serif]I know I am just stating an issue with no suggestion as how to solve it, so I am not really being helpful.[/font]

[font=Roboto, sans-serif]So apologies again, it kind of seems like I am beating a dead horse here, and like the majority disagrees with me, I am just tired of getting arrested for nothing and I know it is annoying when it happens to other people as well.[/font]

I called a cop a poopy head irl and he just laughed it off, did the same in LL he put me away for terrorism. 

Its because all arrests are in character and more often than not there are laws like that in place so people just go with it, though i agree its dumb

This has always been a thing on the server (Even though it was way worse a few years back).
MSP has done a great job influencing good RP to the police force.

In my opinion it should be more clear in the rules how someone should act as a police officer and follow the current laws off the server.

Guess they rely on common sense or so - insulting an officer is an offense, though different people react differently to it. Arresting one for it is kind of lame though, but there are always those people that just like to arrest everything and everyone they see to boost their inner ego ^^

Don't know about other countries (but guess it should be similar?), but in Germany insults are obviously forbidden and one can either get a fine or arrested for it. It all comes down to the court.

I feel like if there was a system where you have to take whoever you are arresting into the court room to an NPC to request a warrant, which is then accepted/denied by the chief / press it'll stall players who arrest for the most of petty crimes, furthermore, a ticket system that actually saves players ticket history would help towards making it all realistic (maybe refreshes every week or something)

Usually when a cop arrests me, it's justified

*Laughs in Revolver Gang*

I roleplay police, a lot. I will speak here in all honesty, because I know I police wrong and I police right in this server. It's not me having a go, or anything like that, just giving a response as to what happens on the server and why I think it happens.

A lot of it boils down to if you're in a mood, if you like the person you're arresting, and how much you care about "corruption". I used to do this all the time when I was younger, however have since moved from it, but would arrest someone for "Disrespect", if I didn't like them and I can tell you now, that is how 90% of people police on this server. Most do it subconciously, but there is a minority that do it out of spite.

Another reason people do it is because it is extremely easy to loophole laws, and chat shit to your superior getting them on your side in nearly any situation. Because of the rule "All arrests are IC", and we are hidden behind a screen with no policing structure, it means police officers know they can do what they want. And arresting people for terrorism although you only disrespecting the officer is allowed providing you're a "corrupt" officer. On the topic of rules and stuff, this is also a semi-serious RP server so people don't really care about basing it off what would happen in real life, they are only interested in joining and having some fun and annoying a few people.

Because there is no punishment to an officer making laws up, it means they know they can do it. But speaking of this, on the server, a president cannot cover every law in the world. Most President's do their best in covering the essential laws, but at the end of the day it boils down to policing with common sense, which again, because people are hidden behind a screen with no punishments or anything similar, people don't use or care about. They just want to annoy and ruin peoples days.

A simple solution to this would be to have a police whitelist in place, with a structure and a form of punishment to the officers that do not police with common sense, or police actual laws. But with that would also need to come an official set of laws that officers can enforce because else it can become messy, and confusing for a lot of officers and sometimes it's difficult to differ between what is law and what is common sense (especially for newer officers who haven't experienced playing as an officer before, or for that matter experienced the type of RP LL offers). Only problem then with implimenting these features is the server then leans more towards SeriousRP which isn't what people join for. It has been a semi-seriousRP community since it opened 4 years ago so (sadly) I doubt it'll be changing any time soon.
There has been attempts made to bring some order to this and MSP (a group I helped run), and MCSO, both do an excellent job at bringing structure and proper police RP with punishment and promotion to the server and when they are on shift with their officers, there isn't an issue. 

TL;DR
It boil's down to lack of experience in players, them being protected by the rule, and the lack of structure within the in-game PD.

(Mar 29, 2020, 10:54 PM)BasicallyMental Wrote: [ -> ]Because there is no punishment to an officer making laws up, it means they know they can do it. But speaking of this, on the server, a president cannot cover every law in the world. Most President's do their best in covering the essential laws, but at the end of the day it boils down to policing with common sense, which again, because people are hidden behind a screen with no punishments or anything similar, people don't use or care about. 

90% of the time I enforce what I know, which I understand many people cannot base off of that, like you mentioned, they do not have much experience. 

I also acknowledge it is a Semi-Serious RP, like I said, I don't expect the playerbase to have case law drilled into their head. I do believe however that there should be a more in depth set of base laws, like perhaps a penal code (we call them RCWs) that you can directly reference, so there is no question.

I think a revamp of the perma-laws would fix this issue.

Why is jaywalking illegal but murder not?

I understand your point, but it could be because a number of things.

For starters, there's a pretty low hour-requirement to become a government position on the server. Next to that, something I find awesome but also something that could create confusion (government-wise) at times, is that there are players from all over the world playing in our community. Certain things are a criminal offense in certain countries, whereas in the States, it would not be.
Though, to back some roleplayers up, I have encountered many times where I had to give someone about 5 lawful orders to do action-x and they ended up not following it. The whole R&O often happens too and is one of the most common laws I detain and/or book someone in for.

A whitelisted government and/or a higher hour-requirement could be a helping factor. However, this will probably not happen on the long run yet, so newer players have to rely on those with (real) experience or at least knowledge in roleplaying government positions. An updated permanent law-set would help as well, however, I think we should encourage the (Vice-)Preisdent more to make up custom, detailed and realistic laws.

Though in the end, we, as aforementioned players and/or members with (real) experience, also have a duty to then guide them in the right direction when something happens that's not entirely realistic.

At limelight, a police officer gets shot with a M14 Battle Rifle for pulling over someone driving 150mph trough mainstreet.
At limelight, 90% of criminals have access to military-grade weapons.
At limelight, 90% of citizens break laws on a regular basis.
At limelight, you need an assault rifle out the entire time, otherwise, you will get shot, hostaged or killed for performing entirely normal stuff.
At limelight, you need an assault rifle out the entire time, otherwise, people will simply not listen to you as there are no consequences but to wait a maximum of 15 minutes.
At limelight, the people do not care if they get killed or not, making shootings a normal occurrence every 2 minutes on a full server.


I highly doubt that one can compare real-life LEO procedures to a place like limelight nor are officers on LL to be blamed for their behavior most of the time.

If only there was some way we could train people to learn how to play government roles before they had access to the these powerful tools that can ruin a majority of the current online population....like...a...greylist? No, that's not it. Bluelist? No, that still doesn't sound right.

(Mar 30, 2020, 03:24 PM)Gungranny Wrote: [ -> ]If only there was some way we could train people to learn how to play government roles before they had access to the these powerful tools that can ruin a majority of the current online population....like...a...greylist? No, that's not it. Bluelist? No, that still doesn't sound right.

It's almost like, the obvious solution is being ignored :/ because hey, what's change?