Search Warrant / Raid overhaul - Police POV

Hello,

I saw there were two posts on this already and a large amount of posts about it in the community meeting scrolling through the text ( I couldn't attend), so I wanted to make a feedback thread about it that goes a little more indepth into the issue and primarily from a cop perspective (although I have been raided multiple times on crim as well).


Some context first - how raids currently work:
Currently the system is this;

• Police observe some crime, normally via collection of evidence (DNA, Bullet casings, pictures, testiomony, etc).

• Police prepare a subpoena for more information, normally property information.

• That subpoena is then reviewed by CID leadership, then SAO, then the DOJ before, if all goes well, is served to whoever can service it (normally Dynasty 8 for property records). Subpoenas have a medium-bar to meet in order to be fulfilled.

• On return, a search warrant is then formulated and goes through the same review process, except this time with a much higher bar to meet in order to be fulfilled.

• If all checks are met, the warrant then has to be decided on if it's a no-knock or a knock warrant.

  • No-Knock warrants mean that when we arrive at a property, we need to notify the owner the moment prior to us making entry. This notice typically happens via discord dm (remember this part for later) or via phone - or if neither of those are available, the warrant is left on the property in the storage closest to the door.
    

  • Knock warrants mean that we have to provide 15 minutes notice to the owner prior to us even being allowed to approach the property, this notice is provided via discord dm or phone. If the person cannot be reached on either we technically aren't allowed to make entry as per the current expectation.

• This entire process typically takes several hours of work preparing evidence and documents and typically takes up to a week for it to be reviewed, approved, signed and ready to go.

Here is the issue with the current notice system;

It is extremely difficult to provide notice to criminal that they are being raided. If we can discord DM them we will, but that is problematic in itself as it's literal metagaming - police cannot ping SRT to logon when mag dump seasons are occuring, so the inverse being true is a pain point - especially considering it's a rust base alarm that lets people wake up at their property, run inside and defend it.

Back when we did Knock warrants - the large majority of the time we would send the 15 minutes notice, arrive, enter the property and be greeted with a rust base with drop downs, fake walls, corridors, etc - or we would be greeted with an entire warehouse emptied out but a bunch of floating guns by the front door (indicating someone logged on, put everything on their person and then logged off inside the property).

It's easy to say "well that's metagaming, just report them" - but at that point from the perspective of the person doing it, what's the point of putting in all this work for it to be continuously metagamed.

When we used to do Knock warrants, we would fly overhead in Air-1 to make sure that didn't happen, but that's not even really viable anymore considering Air-1 has a 20 minute~ flight time before needing to land.

Furthermore, it's a large amount of time and effort for everyone involved - it typically takes 15 SRT/CID to do a raid safely, it takes an hour or so to brief and get ready, and then it can take up to an hour to actually fulfil the raid warrant, when Knock warrants constantly get metagamed or ruined it's a huge waste of time for everyone involved.

Finally there is no way for people to know ahead of time a raid is coming without the extreme risk of metagaming - the most recent raid on CBC was actually being planned to be executed while they were all online, I was not online for that raid (was at work) but was watching multiple streams, some of the cops and some of them when I realized the raid was coming that day.

As soon as the PD started getting their raid ready, they logged off - it's not really the fault of the PD or the CBC - it's just the unlucky nature of that RP, but PD can't really DM them like "yo wake back up we're coming" without opening an entirely new can of worms for PD and them.

If we had a way to notify them via email and lockdown the property they may have stuck around and could have been involved.

Proposed solutions

With the above in mind, it is clear to see there are issues with the system from both sides and the system is in dire need of a rework - my proposals are;

Raid Notice / Police Notifying Players

Police should be able to notify players of impending police action through in character means, I would sugget a new phone 'Email' app - where police can enter in a CID and send an 'email' to a players phone. It would work exactly as a text message does but it would be something only government employees have access to send via (PD, EMS, SAO, etc, to prevent abuse/spam) and that way it protects the privacy of someones phone number since all you would need is a CID to send the email.

Additionally, anytime the door is used by the police breach method, all key owners should get an alert "The door to property XYZ has been forced open!".

'Emailing' people through discord is an awful RP experience. It's hard to find peoples discord handles, some people don't like RP DMs, some people have DMs closed and some people OOC rage at you via DM.

Property Lockdown
If the desire is to allow people to defend raids, then let police have the ability to 'lockdown' a property and prevent anyone from entering/exiting it while it's locked down. In RP this could be explained as police monitoring the property and it being too hot to go in/out of.

If your property is locked down you're much more likely to be on alert something is coming and you can prepare for it. Make the length of the lockdown determined by the warrant, the judges can assess how much time they think is reasonable for a property to be locked down when evaluating the warrant. Obviously for Danny Default who just stole a police gun, we don't really need a lockdown - but for a bigger property on a gang block a lengthier amount of time may be appropriate.

In my opinion this step is critical for any kind of 'online' raids or trying to let people know a raid is coming. It has to be give and take, if we're giving away the element of surprise to accomodate a 'better' online experience then we need to not have to deal with people dumping warehouses the second they find out (obviously if they find out through RP - ie; someone leaks it, then fairplay).

There also needs to be some consideration / allowance for some element of surpise though, having to tell people "WE ARE ON THE WAY - GET YOUR 5 READY" is not healthy for the server, getting raided in the first place is extremely difficult and if you can just recruit a gang of arena shooters to infinitely defend your property and never get caught with a stash of guns then it's just going to be a never ending cycle of random shootouts. Maybe make defending a raid a new DOJ charge, ie; Capital Obstruction of Justice, so the stakes are extremely high and you have to decide if its worth going on a HUT to defend a property.

Recently Scene indicator on MDT

Previously when the old phone had the online/offline indicator, some people would wait until the indicator for them was green before sending notice so they could online raid them. We have no way of telling if people are online or offline currently. If the desire is that people are online when raids occur, I'd suggest adding a 'Recently Seen?' field to the MDT and have it state "Seen Recently" if they are online or have been online within the last few hours or "Not seen recently" if they have been offline for a certain amount of time.

This obviously comes with the drawback of police knowing if people are online, but I see no other way to fairly do 'online raids' without OOC DMing them and acting like a Rust base alarm.

Property Locations attached to the MDT
The reason why most warrants are no-knocks and happen at seemingly random times is because it takes extremely long from start to finish to find the property you're looking for. This information should be accessible by PD by default, everyone pays taxes on their properties so the government should have a listed contact address. If you want a super secret trap house that's still possible, but the drawback is it's not in your name.

If we had access to view what properties someone owned on their MDT, similar to their cars, turn around time for searches would be significantly quicker and could virtually be same day or within the hour of the crime occuring. The bottleneck is entirely due to needing to subpoena, wait for three different bodies to review/approve the subpoena, waiting for D8 to be online to serve the document and then repeating the process via search warrant.

We're all on different global schedules and having to go through this huge, lengthy approval process is why raids seemingly happen days/weeks later at random times, because as soon as they do get signed we try to hit it straight away. By adding the properties to the MDT we can do things in real time and change the review process to suit that expectation.

Garage Access
Another issue we face, is that if we are trying to access garages or cars at properties - we have no way of doing this, this means that in the rare occasion we do want to look at a car, we have to delay everything until the person is in custody and we force them to pull the car out for us, this can mean the search is delayed for weeks at a time and is to the point it's not really worth doing - this is why sometimes searches will happen at 3am/4am EST because we will randomly run into them in shift three when it's actually 7pm/8pm for the police doing it.

This has been a long wall of text - but there is clearly some disatisfaction from the criminal side about how search warrants work, i think with the above changes or something similar taken into consideration it would provide a more enjoyable experience for everyone involved.