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 Latest Video  The Game Visceral Games is probably best known for the Dead Space franchise, but they also made a few other titles. Dante's Inferno, Army of Two: Devil's Cartel, Sims DLC (the hell?): Visceral had a larger range of games than you would think. The problem was that by 2013 they were not turning a profit, even with the first two Dead Space games being critical darlings. The studio had and EA itself had put a ton of money into Dead Space 2 and while the numbers were good, there was no way they would recoup the costs. Before that Dante's Inferno had failed hard, and after that their Army of Two game would sell next to nothing. No idea about the Sims DLC, though. In 2014 Visceral unveiled their next title, a cops vs. robbers take on EA's major FPS franchise called Battlefield: Hardline. Almost immediately people began to question the wisdom of moving Battlefield's massive military vs. military fights to the streets of the US, as it implied that the cops and the army were close enough in equipment and tactics that it was a viable change of setting. The multiplayer is very much a Battlefield game with a few changes to the types of vehicles and weapons you have available and some fairly fun new game modes. It was a buggy, janky mess at launch, though, and because you super don't want that for your multiplayer focused shooter it didn't end up having a super long shelf life. Within a few months the population was down to hundreds at peak hours. It would end up being the last game Visceral would release before they were shut down in 2017 The LP I'm going to take you through the single player mode of Hardline. There's some interesting stuff there as Visceral decided to go with a different approach over how most FPS games play out where things sort of move from mission to mission which consist of quiet and loud parts and you are a near unkillable murder machine. Instead you play an average Miami detective who is massively outnumbered and outgunned at almost every turn. While you can go in guns blazing, flashing your badge and arresting guys is the only real way to be sure you won't be shot to death in ten seconds. The game treats its story like it is a season on a police procedural, which is easier to show than tell at this point. Missions are Episodes, and they'll take you to three or four locations that could be levels in their own right to follow the story rather than a set path. It's actually kind of well done from a mechanics standpoint. Why? If you haven't been paying attention, protesters are out nightly in any number of US cities to demonstrate against police violence. We've hit the point where the US media has essentially stopped covering this, but that doesn't mean it has stopped. One of the weird things about this game is that it doesn't predict our current time line by any means (the multiplayer is pure Copaganda, making the cop's equipment and ability to kill seem cool the same way other BF games do for the military), but the first half of the game shows that the writers were aware there was a reason people don't trust the police. Like, there is little sympathy for the cop characters from anyone in the game, including other cops. They straight on point out things they are doing are not legal to each other. This is also a fantastic opportunity to talk a bit about why this moment is happening and highlight some of the reasons people want police reform. If you want just the game, I will mostly refrain from bringing my politics into the videos, but I have several giant posts on different law enforcement topics ready. I will touch on the current protests in these posts, but the intent is to talk to systemic policing issues (from over extension of their duties to forced confessions and so on) rather than address what you see on the internet every night. Table of Contents               
Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Sep 25, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 21:36
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Saving for reasons.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:38
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I could never take this game seriously because of the title. "Battlefield" yeah okay buddy you're not in loving Kuwait shut the gently caress up.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:51
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Seraphic Neoman posted:I could never take this game seriously because of the title. "Battlefield" yeah okay buddy you're not in loving Kuwait shut the gently caress up. You are apparently not familiar with the police. https://twitter.com/bfriedmandc/status/499728733830676480
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Jul 20, 2020 21:59
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Thirty minutes in and you've dunked a half-dozen people for the crime of "standing around". Jesus.
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Jul 21, 2020 02:11
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oldskool posted:Thirty minutes in and you've dunked a half-dozen people for the crime of "standing around". Jesus. Yeah, being in space is an actual crime for most of this game. Killing people with no justification? Not so much.
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Jul 21, 2020 02:25
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good lord lazyfire what is this game
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Jul 21, 2020 04:12
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Dash Rendar posted:good lord lazyfire what is this game I'm glad you asked because it means I had to finish off the wall of text below: Copaganda My favorite portmanteau right here. I mention Copaganda and call Battlefield Hardline an example of it in the first episode, but don't really explain what I mean. The problem is that there are a few types and talking about it in the video would be more boring than anything. There isn't a ton to unpack, so this is going to be relatively short. Media loves, loves, loves the police. If you turn on a major network between eight and ten in the evening you will undoubtedly be seeing a police drama. Chicago PD, CSI, Law And Order, Blue Bloods, Hawaii 5-0, SWAT, FBI, and all the spinoffs for the various franchises saturate primetime. Then you have movies. For example, this game desperately wants to be Bad Boys. It doesn't work, but you have a metric ton of other films it could try to be where cops are the heroes, often capable of nearly anything (like launching a car at a helicopter) simply because they have a badge. And here's the thing: most are action movies that really emphasize the use of weapons by the heroes. Go ahead and Google “police movies” and you get hit with posters and trailers with the characters holding pistols, often directly at the camera. Why mention all this? Because much of the media about police is tacitly informing the viewer that THIS is what the cops do in our society. Law and Order always ends with the perpetrator being found guilty after a lengthy and through investigation. In reality, the solve rate on murders in New York is something like 64% if you exclude domestic violence incidents (which ups the closure rate by over 10%), and I can't say that means 64% of murders end in charges, as you will see in one of the links below, Chicago's police bumped up their solve rate by simply closing cases last year. These shows also make it looks like violent crime is rampant when it was at historic lows nationwide for most of the last five or so years, despite having nearly the same number of police on the street as during the high points. There's also the well known phenomenon where because of police dramas, CSI in particular, jurors have come to expect “smoking gun” scientific evidence where none exist, but have also been manipulated into thinking something IS a smoking gun because hair or fibers or something were found, so that one cuts both ways. The point is that Copaganda instills a sense of what the police are and what they are capable of in our culture. TV police procedurals often sanitize the practices, or show that street level cops and detectives who deviate from the norms are doing it because they have some preternatural knowledge that the guy in front of them is guilty and are JUST GETTING RESULTS, CHIEF. The TV shows that follow(ed, I guess) actual police do the same thing. COPS ran just about forever and the police departments who had officers on had editorial authority on the episodes and segments for the duration. I really suggest listening to Headlong: Running from COPS, a podcast series that does a deep dive into these shows, as it explains just how false the “reality” of the show is. If a suspect was found not guilty or there was a break in procedures by the officer the show doesn't say anything or offer a follow up, it just shows what the police and producers agreed on for these arrests. Live PD, a similar show, went on hiatus after it turned out they had recordings of Texas police tasing a man to death that the producers essentially buried for over a year. So where does Hardline fit in to all this? So far I've been talking about solve rates and CSI effects and COPS, but as you watch this LP you are not going to find a ton of parallels to the ideas above. Hardline is a game that glamorizes the police's equipment rather than suggesting the practices and procedures of the police are right and good. As a matter of fact, the single player mostly about police corruption. The multiplayer is where the copaganda kicks into high gear. Armed helicopters fly through the sky while criminals drive armored up trucks and police pursue them in former army hardware. Because it's a Battlefield game you can drive said hardware through people's houses (worth noting that there is less possible destruction in the mansion and major city levels, but the residential neighborhoods and desert town have way more available destruction). Tear gas, tasers, grenades, fully automatic weapons and swords(!) can be brought to bear by both sides in the cops vs. robbers conflict. I'm a big believer that violent games do not make people violent, and Hardline isn't an exception. It's the bending of reality and normalization of what we would have to consider extreme tactics, weapons and equipment the game presents that cause concern. Does your town of 3500 people need a mine resistant truck? I can't think of a scenario where that makes any sense, yet it happens and most of the time the local media does a fluff piece on how awesome the thing is and never asks “when are you even going to use that?” By contrast, The LA School Police faced backlash because they obtained grenade launchers a few years back and then returned them after that came out in the news. Games like Hardline ignore the concerns and debates about the arsenal available to police and their use of its components in favor of the cool factor, by admission of the game's producer, which helps drive the narrative that the police need this equipment the same way CSI has caused viewers to think of forensics as a necessary part of an investigation or that detectives always get the bad guy. That warping of expectations and reality based on false assumptions is copaganda. Polygon discusses the politics of Hardline Vulture explains the danger of police media Chicago PD just lying to look good Record number of crimes in NYC in 1990, record lows today. Same number of cops, roughly. The CSI Effect Live PD is terrible Free Mine Resistant Trucks For Everyone!
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Jul 21, 2020 15:42
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I admit that I love the police procedural genre but I always understand there is a healthy amount of abstraction that must be done. None of the poo poo you see works that way in the real world. And regardless of the writers' intent, you will still pick up politics from the real world because, hey, turns out life is political. These dev quotes really bother me (though I confess the fascination with military hardware is alien to me) because they just sound like "haha police mrap go brrrrrrrr" just like they do when the developers try to whitewash war. Like in that one game where they whitewashed the Highway of Death incident. I might be reading too much into this, but it leaves me with a bad taste, especially here in America.
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Jul 21, 2020 22:56
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The one (well, one of many, but it stood out to me) thing that I found of note was the way in which law protecting the citizen are so regularly seen as hindrances to be by-passed as opposed to actual established precedence to prevent overreach in copoganda. It bridges the cognitive dissonance of police being both forces for the status quo and at the same time being a rebel against the 'man', i.e. the actual law.
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Jul 22, 2020 07:42
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Samovar posted:The one (well, one of many, but it stood out to me) thing that I found of note was the way in which law protecting the citizen are so regularly seen as hindrances to be by-passed as opposed to actual established precedence to prevent overreach in copoganda. It bridges the cognitive dissonance of police being both forces for the status quo and at the same time being a rebel against the 'man', i.e. the actual law. Civil Rights violations are actually a really huge problem in a large number of police departments. Last year large cities paid out $300 million or so in lawsuits over civil rights violations, false arrests and use of excessive force. New York City paid out about $180 million alone. You would think that the financial penalty and the possibility of losing your job and possibly going to jail yourself would keep officers from breaking department policy, but officers themselves are often not fired for their behavior and are not on the hook for paying out in these civil cases. I think that one of the areas where there should be agreement in the current discussion on policing is that there needs to be some sort of pain for the police in these civil cases, but there are a lot of opinions on how that should be enforced. Some think that the police unions instead of the city should shoulder the cost of the lawsuits brought against its members, others think that the police budget should sustain the damage when an officer goes to court and is found guilty. Still others think that it should be the officer's responsibility to pay damages. I think officers who end up losing civil suits need to be responsible for some of the cost, but the scale of some of these suits is insane. In 2014 the average civil rights violation payout was over $500k. Requiring the officers to carry some form of insurance and/or making it so the union can step in and pay out may also be viable options. The union paying may help stop the continued employment of a lot of problem officers, as the union is less likely to continue to protect officers who are frequently in trouble if there is a financial penalty for doing so.
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Jul 22, 2020 15:41
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Though we're an hour in, the Elmore Plaza is really where the game starts to hit the groove it rides for most of the duration. Nick has misgivings about things and then sneaks, shoots and drives like a psychopath until he has more misgivings at the end of the episode. Like I've said previously, the game really wants to be a cop show and so you get the hallmarks of that genre informing the structure of the single player. It also dictates how the story plays out. There's supposed to be something of a mystery around Hot Shot cocaine from earlier and the cartel war in Miami we're trying to get to the bottom of, but I don't think the game ever explicitly lays out how that all works unless you collect the evidence and watch Nick's analysis of the investigation. Outside of that, we get more suggestions about how the cops are brutal and corrupt in this game which sought to make the cops look cool and badass, so maybe beating suspects and starting gun fights is cool?
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Jul 22, 2020 20:47
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Seraphic Neoman posted:Like in that one game where they whitewashed the Highway of Death incident. I'm sorry they what
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Jul 23, 2020 09:23
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Crane Fist posted:I'm sorry they what The US did a big warcrime during the First Gulf War and the Modern Warfare reboot reimagined it in another country but with the Russians doing the killing.
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Jul 23, 2020 09:28
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overmind2000 posted:The US did a big warcrime during the First Gulf War and the Modern Warfare reboot reimagined it in another country but with the Russians doing the killing. I'm familiar with the highway of death but this is the first I'm hearing of it coming up in CoD and now I have to know more because that's just such a baffling thing to whitewash in your shootman game e: I've googled around a bit and just, oh my loving god some plague rats fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 09:34
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Crane Fist posted:I'm familiar with the highway of death but this is the first I'm hearing of it coming up in CoD and now I have to know more because that's just such a baffling thing to whitewash in your shootman game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD1Hzl2TjWw
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Jul 23, 2020 09:36
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What term could be applied to that? MICoganda sounds unfortunately anti-Irish.
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Jul 23, 2020 10:09
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Its even worse than the articles made it sound. Just loving unreal It's such an odd thing to pick for a whitewashing, as well. I mean it's not even the most RECENT massive war crime the US committed against that specific country
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Jul 23, 2020 11:22
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Samovar posted:What term could be applied to that? MICoganda sounds unfortunately anti-Irish. Most of the time you just call it milprop, there's not a great way to jam military and propaganda together like there is for Copaganda. Crane Fist posted:Its even worse than the articles made it sound. Just loving unreal I think they went with Highway of Death in the MW reboot because they know most of their target audience wasn't alive when it happened and wouldn't have the context for the title/setting.
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Jul 23, 2020 11:44
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I don't think I've ever seen a game whose campaign/story I enjoyed less. Jesus Christ.
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Jul 23, 2020 14:37
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excellent post/avatar combo
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Jul 23, 2020 18:02
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Does "Barney Miller" qualify as Copaganda? It was apparently considered one of the most "realistic" cop shows at that time by actual police officers, since it devoted more time to paperwork and the toll police work takes on relationships than car chases and shootouts. I'm assuming the Police Academy films have not aged well.
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Jul 25, 2020 04:28
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Quiet Python posted:Does "Barney Miller" qualify as Copaganda? It was apparently considered one of the most "realistic" cop shows at that time by actual police officers, since it devoted more time to paperwork and the toll police work takes on relationships than car chases and shootouts. Good question, and one I'm not totally qualified to answer. One of the interesting swings in recent weeks is that Brooklyn 9-9 got labeled as copaganda. It is notably a comedy show that doesn't even try to resemble real life police work, so you would think it has a level of immunity stemming from the ridiculous nature of the setting and characters. I think a lot of the backlash there is due to the normalization of ludicrous behavior by the police. Some of what they do are clear civil rights violations and someone watching may start to think it has to be based on something. I'm on the fence about the B99 stuff, especially as someone who has seen clips and not full episodes. My instinct is that an adult should be able to see through the fact that this is a sitcom and detached from the reality of policing, but I also have multiple people in my facebook feed who call COVID-19 "China Virus" and fall for the "Salute our Vietnam Vets" posts that are cast photos of Tropic Thunder. Adults are as dumb as kids, they are just older. Kids watching B99 may see these behaviors and think that cops are funny and good and that may inform their opinions as they get older, similar to how people who watched the X-Files growing up may be more prone to conspiracy thinking (I want a study done there, I think I am on to something). De-glamorizing police work, showing the daily grind an officer or detective endures, seems like a pretty non-copaganda case in my mind. Is Barney Miller kicking in doors wearing tactical gear when he thinks someone is breaking the law? No. Is he meticulously assembling a case and working within the system the way he should be at least most of the time? If Yes then this is more of what is needed in current police shows.
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Jul 25, 2020 19:09
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Long story short, the only good cops ever represented on TV was Police Squad!
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Jul 25, 2020 20:28
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It helps that I'm pretty sure a large chunk of the cast and crew of Brooklyn 99 have been saying "Yeah, the show needs to change" and donating a large portion of their paychecks towards defund/BLM groups.
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Jul 26, 2020 04:18
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Brooklyn99 does a great job of making its core cast look like a binch of selfish assholes. The episodes where they waste precinct time and money to play elaborate prank heist games while all the other cops watch in befuddlement are good examples of that. I mean, I enjoy the heck out of that show. It's at its best when it is weird and irreverant. I could give two fucks about the police procedure aspect of it. What I really want is more elaborate stupidity. It's the same thing I wanted out of Community what with their paintball episodes and animated one-offs and bringing in Keith David as a recurring character. I guess I just want Kieth David to be in everything.
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Jul 26, 2020 04:28
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Polaron posted:It helps that I'm pretty sure a large chunk of the cast and crew of Brooklyn 99 have been saying "Yeah, the show needs to change" and donating a large portion of their paychecks towards defund/BLM groups. This is cool to know.
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Jul 26, 2020 04:28
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I did some reading up on Brooklyn 99 since I love the show. Terry Crews confirmed that the writers went back to the drawing board for this season. They threw out 4 episodes they already had written.
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Jul 26, 2020 05:41
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We're about to hit our first multi-part episode, and it is a long one. If you try to get all the evidence and hidden weapons in the swamp section of the level you will be tooling around in the airboat for over an hour and I don't think anyone needs that. Here's were we start to see some of the potential of the game go to hell. You get introduced to the grappling hook and the zipline in quick succession and these things were super fun in the right areas of multiplayer. Some maps were just built for you to get up on a roof or create a fast route from the top of a hill to the bottom. In single player they are literally useless outside of this area. Actually, I take that back, there is a section in the last level where you could make a case for using both, but otherwise they are just a useless tool better occupied by the gas mask if nothing else ( I won't be using that either because it muffles sound and puts a filter on the camera). I kind of wish you could unleash caged gators on the bad guys in this section if for no other reason than to say you can. I really like the parts of Assassin's Creed games where you can open up cages and have prisoners or animals do you work for you, but the game doesn't want to portray Nick as a psychopath who will let suspected criminals die in terrible ways just because he can. I guess that's something.
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Jul 27, 2020 20:23
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Lazyfire posted:the game doesn't want to portray Nick as a psychopath who will let suspected criminals die in terrible ways just because he can I mean, he's a cop, so that's already an uphill battle 
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Jul 27, 2020 21:06
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... Khai, how dare you sully that magnum opus of a Movie by quoting it. You only wish you could be a tenth as well written as a line that was improv. I bet the writers of this game thought they were being smart when they put that line in.
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Jul 28, 2020 05:54
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Lazyfire posted:but the game doesn't want to portray Nick as a psychopath who will let suspected criminals die in terrible ways just because he can. I guess that's something. This really is a very odd conflict they've set up at the heart of this game where it's a CoD clone that discourages you from killing anyone
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Jul 28, 2020 08:06
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Crane Fist posted:This really is a very odd conflict they've set up at the heart of this game where it's a CoD clone that discourages you from killing anyone Yeah, it would have been more interesting to see the first few hours of the game be about investigating something like a real detective would and then throwing that all out the window in the second and third acts as you became a rogue one man army or something. The game's plot twist doesn't force any sort of modification to the gameplay, and that feels like a lost opportunity in the end.
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Jul 28, 2020 11:42
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I've been trying to research Palantir for most of a week so my rant about what they do doesn't sound like the ravings of a madman, but jesus if they aren't good at not having much information about them available. Instead, enjoy a TL;DR on a terrible practice that should stop yesterday: Civil Asset Forfeiture On May 31st, 2008 armored gunmen stormed Detroit's Contemporary Art Museum during a fundraising event and quickly worked to subdue the 130 or so attendees. They were not gentle; in addition to the Hollywood trope “GET THE gently caress ON THE GROUND” shouts the gunmen aimed shotguns directly at patrons and when this wasn't enough to cow the guests physical means of forcing people to the ground were employed. Once the museum was theirs, the gunmen gathered everyone in the main hall and started a systemic search of their belongings. Oddly enough, everyone was allowed to keep their personal effects. Instead of jewelry, cash or artwork the gunmen stole vehicles, 44 in all. Wait, cars? Who steals cars from a museum? The answer here is the Detroit PD. You see, the museum didn't get a liquor license for their fundraiser and yet served alcohol and so, in a move a judge would later rule was NOT cool and good, the police department decided to send in the To oversimplify the main principle of CAF: The property being seized is guilty or involved in a crime which may be totally remote from the owner of that property. Say you are a bootlegger in 1929 and the FBI raids your supply depot. And so while the barrels of whisky and the guns with the serial numbers filed off are clearly illegal, the $100,000 in cash in the back room is just money. The FBI takes it anyway. The reason behind that seizure is context. Here's a literal pile of money in a warehouse full of crime material. So, while the barrels are logged in as evidence, the FBI considers the money to be a civil forfeiture. It doesn't go to evidence, instead proceedings are brought against the currency to state that it is, just by being there, guilty of a crime. Without having to go to trial all the FBI has to do is prove that it is more likely than not that the money was going to be used, or had been used, in illegal activity. The Funk Night (I could not work in that the museum event was Funk Night. Imagine having to sue your city over Funk Night) attendees who had their cars stolen by the Detroit PD were not charged with a crime. They were, however, cited for “loitering in a place of illegal occupation” which is really weird because the museum was the host and venue. Instead the Detroit PD took an incredibly broad interpretation of a state Nuisance Abatement Statue and determined that because the people cited for a minor misdemeanor by being at an “illegal” event, that the vehicles of the attendees were, by extension, part of the violation and therefore could be legally held for ransom. Victims had to pay $900 to get their impounded vehicles back, if they were even allowed to. At least one person wasn't even given the option to pay the impound fee. Eventually, the ACLU would sue the police over this entire affair. Their brief is linked below and is worth reading to better understand how this works. The Detroit PD had a warrant that night, but the warrant lacked any mention of the patrons or taking vehicles or other possessions, which is a violation of the 4th Amendment. The event goers were actually sort of lucky in that they were allowed to pay impound fees. In most situations the owners of seized property either have to go to court and prove their property is innocent, or end up accepting deals where they get a portion of their seized assets back in return for either not going to court or sometimes are just intimidated, or too poor to do anything than to just let it go. The Funk Night incident is just one example of how the police have begun to use CAF since the start of the Drug Wars. After lying dormant for most of the 20th century after the Bathtub Gin Gentlemen lost their raison d'etre CAF was used for tax evaders and the occasional mob bust. The 1980's and the various failures of the Reagan Administration in the War On Drugs initiative led to a comeback for CAF. In '84 the Comprehensive Crime Control Act (written and submitted by a Democratic Rep. Jamie Whitten, for the record) was passed. This near-omnibus legislation included parole and Secret Service adjustments as well as a Third Strike rule for violent and/or drug felons, part of which was later ruled to be unconstitutional in 2015; not because three convictions is arbitrary, but because the language on what constitutes “violent” is ambiguous. The legislation also enabled a, and this is a joke line but also deadly serious, profit sharing system for local and federal law enforcement on seizing person's assets. Sometimes they flaunt it. For example: The New Yorker posted:In Tulsa, Oklahoma, cops drive a Cadillac Escalade stencilled with the words “this used to be a drug dealer’s car, now it’s ours!” The thing is that you can't assume the statement on the car is true. Because CAF requires no proof of guilt for an individual the police could have just decided it looked like a drug dealer's car. There are some horror stories about cases like this. Here's six paragraphs of New Yorker about one: The New Yorker posted:On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with big Potential!” This is the point, though. The asset is the criminal in these cases. The cars in Detroit were accomplices because they brought people to the event with the illegal bar. The money in the car in both cases from Texas were suspected in drug deals (despite no evidence in either). The house in West Philadelphia was a suspect because someone sold about six grams of pot at current market prices from the deck. Imagine being in your 70's and having the city say they will take your home because your failson sucks at drug sales. Drugs are the common theme in a lot of CAF cases because of the War on Drugs origins of the CAF revenue sharing bills. Because a number of police and sheriff departments rely on CAF for large segments of their budgets, some as much as 40%, law enforcement has a motivation to see drug activity everywhere they look. And the powers are vast. The IRS and DEA have seized money directly from people's accounts because they thought it was being laundered. The extreme examples of CAF being implemented against people who have committed no crime by the admission of the police departments that are charging their assets with a crime should be concerning to everyone in the US. There is this thing called the Fourth Amendment which states: The Bill of Rights posted:The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. There are two central issues with CAF as it exists. The first is that it can be deployed nearly at will. Cases where the cops threaten to charge people with serious crimes just to seize money or possessions are a dime a dozen. It's essentially mugging but through the legal system. The fact that you have to engage in a lengthy legal process to get forfeited assets restored to you in the best case is a hurdle high enough that most victims will not be able to clear it. The second issue is that because there is an incentive to using CAF the police will find ways to deploy it. Reagan even stated that, and I am paraphrasing here, you could see police funded by CAF sending people to courts funded by CAF that sentenced them to prisons also getting funds from CAF. That should be more worrying than anything. It tells you that there is a motive to use CAF to make ends meet. This was intended to be a rarely used tool, but thanks to the Drug Wars it has become a hammer in a world where every problem is a nail. Daily Signal ACLU Criminal complaint that is loving terrifying sometimes you sell your house and the cops charge you with crimes of the new owners The Cops Will Take Your Kids For Driving In The Left Lane Too Long Can't steal stuff from drivers thanks to the ACLU. Go To 8 Minutes to listen to the world's oldest woman host a roundtable about the 4th Amendment It's rare thing to agree with the Heritage Foundation
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Jul 28, 2020 19:44
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I'm guessing that it'll never get mentioned that Miami's finest are leaving a dozen or more people unconscious and handcuffed in prime gator territory?
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Jul 28, 2020 21:57
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Short episode today, but lots of story importance at the end, so I can promise it pays off. This one is also an example of the "cop show" approach to things. We just got out of the swamp right before this, now we're at this stadium and then we have a third act in a different location entirely. So the game has running story, the episode has it's own arc and they mesh by the end. It's a good concept and would have worked a lot better if the game's story wasn't such a mess. We'll also get to see one of the forced shootout segments of the game. There's only a couple of them in total, but you often don't know when you are going to be getting one and if you show up with like, the zip line and taser as your equipment and a sniper rifle as your main weapon you may have a tough time. Most of the time you can get to a weapon box just before them or if you die can select different equipment, so it's not a catastrophic issue, but a little annoying when you try to do something different and get hit with one of them out of nowhere.
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Aug 1, 2020 17:55
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This was the level where the "arrest as a stealth" mechanic really stretched to its breaking point. Specifically those 4 guys near the end. Draw one guy off with a case, yell at the other 3 while the 4th is just a few feet away.
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Aug 3, 2020 05:38
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You know how you can tell this game was written by writers with almost no law enforcement input? A cocaine ring is growing pot in the basement of the warehouse they store the thing they smuggle cocaine through. The actual study of drug smuggling and distribution is fascinating and one of the things that they would never do would be to combine 1) two illegal operations into one area and 2) standardize the distribution. Sending drugs out through consumer goods is a pretty tried and true method, the Jalisco poppy/heroin bosses would move product through the US by hiding it in toaster ovens and mini-fridges and such (Dreamland by Sam Quinones documents a lot of this), but they didn't standardize it in one thing, which makes it harder to track and intercept. Even the American police could figure out when they find coke in multiple waffle dolls. A single truck crash could expose the whole ring. I guess that isn't such a huge problem, though, as law enforcement is already on the take. Maybe that is why they are so brazen about their distribution. Or maybe I'm just overthinking all this.
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Aug 5, 2020 00:22
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You know, seeing a multifaceted guy like this, it almost makes me wish this was a better written game in general. A cop on the take who will defend other cops the moment that poo poo hits the fan, even while said cops are trying to arrest him? That's one more dimension than the Usual Battlefield Villain (TM).
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Aug 5, 2020 05:02
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Concerning CaF, I have some relatives in Russia who were in the police force during the 90s. When I told them about Civil asset forfeiture in the US, they told me to stop watching "Russia Today" because nobody could be stupid enough to essentially legalize extortion by the police which will, give it 2 years at most, completely corrupt any police department. Much facepalms where had after the figured out this is actually a thing. Concerning police corruption, according to my relatives, 10% of a department will be always honest, 10% will be always corrupt, and the remaining 80% will go with where the wind blows. If a police department is lucky, and by random luck has the 10% honest people in positions of authority, the department will decay much slower should it face Russia in the 90s like conditions. If by bad luck, the 10% who are always corrupt even when this isnt a good idea, are in positions of authority, then the department will create Russia in the 90s like conditions for its local community. Russian police in the 90s exorted a lot, but it wasnt formally legal of them to do so, and straight up extortion by low ranking police officers declined significantly after they started getting paid regularly again in the early 2000s. Did you know that some police departments are/were 100% CFA funded? That actually blew my mind and I am a hardcore cynic.
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Aug 6, 2020 11:21
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