Disband the FBI

[Mackenzie]

I think this has always been an issue for me as a police officer and I wanted to put it into writing officially. I am of the opinion that the FBI as a faction serves no purpose in the game, from a roleplay standpoint and from their actual history on the server. Thus, my suggestion is to disband the FBI and take their worthwhile elements into the LSPD as a singular law enforcement entity.

For starters, the FBI for some reason have the keys to the candy shop. Their members get all standard LSPD weaponry, and then in addition to that, have standard access to spas12s and sniper rifles. Why is this exactly? The sniper rifle is in their arsenal so they could view gang members from a distance, however this is never really done.

At the same time, the FBI have access to a recon van, which gives them the ability to listen in on conversations and view people without the need of sniper rifles from their concealed truck. This is another powerful tool that is not used in an meaningful law enforcement activities other than when Butford was leading up the agency and was abusing the truck to spy on the mafia inside their mansion, trying to charge them for weapons possession and then lieing about how they knew what weapons the suspects had been carrying. On the other hand, the LSPD actually deals with gangs on a day to day basis, and with the CRASH unit, could actually put this vehicle to good use.

The FBI also has a sea sparrow helicopter which is able to fire bullets at targets. This is intended for helicopter and vehicle chases to disable suspects from fleeing. Yet since the FBI is rarely involved in legitimate law enforcement activities, this is simply abused. A good example of this was El Mariachi and Bounty flying around in it spinning in circles shooting at gang members randomly. This is another vehicle that could be put to good use in the LSPD, but is restricted solely to the FBI and thus goes unused in its intended purpose.

The FBI also has independent authority that the LSPD is not exempt from. All officers in the LSPD must fill out applications, go on ride alongs and or have the approval of current members in order to be considered for membership. The FBI has no safeguards like this. They take who they choose, in some cases, members with no legitimate law enforcement experience on the server who are just friends of the leaders...such as Bounty! The rest of the membership are largely less active LSPD officers, who often just return to the PD or leave the game entirely.

The last issue is jurisdiction between the LSPD and FBI. For some reason the FBI, a Federal agency, feel they have the authority to involve themselves in the day to day police activities that define the role of the LSPD. They make arrests for civil and municipal matters that do not require Federal attention, which is fine, but in turn they expect the LSPD to refrain from involving themselves in activities they feel are within their domain of responsibility. This includes building cases against gangs and or criminal figures and dealing with illegal advertisements.

So why does this agency continue to exist? At no point in the history of my time as a police officer have the FBI made any arrest based on the job they have as a federal agency. They simply act as a higher level of the LSPD that are not held responsible to anyone else for their actions, given access to special vehicles and weapons and for the most part, are largely inactive and irrelevant. Now only active FBI members, Wayne, El Mariachi and I guess Bounty will disagree with me because they enjoy the benefits of their group..but the reality of the situation is that they are not needed. The LSPD is making a serious effort to become a more diversified, active faction within the server community beyond the day to day street patrolling that is done, and it would go a long way to have the admins only having to focus on the needs of one law enforcement agency rather than two. JOE FOR MAYOR

[Rho]

When I was in the LSPD, I said the only thing the FBI were useful for was fucking over the LSPD. My opinion hasn't changed. They're just a superfical organisation that are there to make the game appear more fuller than it actually is.

[Ari_Papadopoulos]

I don't have anything against the current FBI people, but I tend to agree that there isn't much point in splitting the organizations. That said, there could be. It'd be very nice if the FBI underwent a reorganization akin to the hitman one, and began to focus as a vehicle for cracking down on corruption and specific high profile gang targets.

[Finn]

I've never been in the LSPD, so bear that in mind when I say that it seems to me that the FBI are the independent badasses that probably wouldn't work as well if they had to answer to anyone. I say this with Agent Will Smith firmly in mind.

Also, aren't they capable of keeping the police in check? There weren't any FBI on when a cop shot me to death without explanation or provocation, only to explain next time I met him that "politely waiting outside of the police parking area to speak to an officer after their meeting ended" is not sufficient reason to continue living. It would be cool to make the department answer for when they do crap like that, and since I notice that 911 kind of dismisses you when you report an officer ("I'm sorry, that is an internal affair. Please use this line for emergencies only," or something to that effect), I figured that's where they'd come in. Unfortunately, I never really see the FBI used this way, so I guess that puts me right back where I started.

Welcome to Earf.

[Jackal]

Absolutely. In my opinion the FBI serve no purpose. They don't do... anything. They have a lot of RP potential, and I've had a ton of fun roleplaying with them, well when I say them, I mean Mahoney. Other than that they really don't seem to do anything at all. The LSPD would make far better use of their abilities. I totally agree with blending the two into a singular faction, then just giving the rank of FBI Agent to certain officers. They'll get the spiffy suit and the roleplaying opportunities, but still be a member of the LSPD.

[Chris Hansen]

As a victim of many crimes, the FBI has always been there to help me. When an LSPD officer tried to drop me off a bridge, an FBI agent came to my rescue, and the officer was fired after continuing to come after me. Every time a car full of idiots begins shooting at my news van for not letting them on the news, the cops never help, but the FBI always will. With some of the questionable newer officers in the LSPD, we need the FBI now more than ever.

It just be raining black people in Los Santos.

[Juke]

FBI needs to be disbanded or completely reconstructed

The only reason the FBI is decent now is it has the best cops, but it has the best cops doing nothing

[Carey_Mahoney]

As some who played in both factions, I hate to do it but I have to agree. The FBI really should just be merged with the PD and have the agents put in as upper echelon officers.

[Wayne_Thompson]

I don't care anymore.

[Chris Hansen]

I don't care anymore.

Wayne Thompson for Mayor.

[Elroy_Jones]

I don't care anymore.

Im the new FBI head honcho.

[Matt_Groeing]

I don't care anymore.

Im the new FBI head honcho.

I call the directors place! I'm alredy a cop!

[Al_Yu]

If that post wasn't ironic I hate you.

[Thesoldier]

Didn't I make a thread like this when we first started

[Casadina]

Whenever I'm on, which isn't too much lately, I almost never see any highly wanted criminals since most officers tend to wait until the suspect is caught before putting any wanted points on them. My personal rule always was wait until wanted level 5 before offering regular assistance. If the suspect was being an overall jackass, escaping by helicopter, or motorcycle, I'd switch to the sea sparrow. I've only used it twice for that, the rest was for some RP things which didn't involve shooting. The exception to help being offered was if the suspect was attacking police, in which case I always felt FBI had a good enough reason to offer assistance, sans sea sparrow.

I've done spy work, but on Yakuza it's impossible to use the recon van since their HQ disables it, and Mafia never talks about things out in the open anyways. I've been wanting to stick an alt in a gang purely as an undercover agent and stacking a LOT of charges when building up a case, but from what Wayne was saying, FBI would be getting that ability without needing to make an alt. Plus I'm sure I'd get complaints for metagaming yet again. I'd do something on hitmen, except they're so blatantly open with who they are that if I did, it'd be hard to separate the meta from what my character would know. I had a hard enough time just trying to slowly build up to where Will Smith figured out where a single material pickup point was, and still had idiots tell me they took screenshots and would get me banned for metagaming.

If you ask me, FBI needs to trim down a lot, have a very small amount of people (having more FBI than LSPD on is ridiculous), and have some strict rules and direction. As well, FBI needs to take a page from the game this is based on and do some secret government style things for its own brand of corruption.

[Mackenzie]

Fair points Cass. I think it would be a good first start to restructure the entire FBI and bring them in as an accountable department. I would suggest in light of Mariachi being fired the entire department be cleaned out and built over just like the hitmen (which as far as I know, has been successful). Keeping it small, like a gang rather than LSPD size in terms of staff would be good as well, and on top of that I would only take LSPD officers who have at least a certain time period of experience.
Regardless I would urge the admins to consider coding the recon van to be usable by both factions, rather than requiring an FBI agent to drive it and giving the LSPD the sea sparrow (or just remove it entirely)

[Jackal]

I just use my FBI character to show up, flash my badge and roleplay dramatically. Mahoney showed me the awesome ways an FBI agent could RP, so that's all I do. Also, when it's like 3 AM and only two Cadets are online and there are like five wanted criminals, I'll provide 'Federal assistance'.

[Bounty]

They take who they choose, in some cases, members with no legitimate law enforcement experience on the server who are just friends of the leaders...such as Bounty!

Maybe it was because I have real-life experience with a federal law enforcement agency.

[Bounty]

Oh, and to the topic, I agree with a lot of what Wayne is saying.

I think most people can attest (and server logs will show) that I have actually arrested very few people -- I leave most of it to the LSPD, as I feel that FBI should only be involved with major wanted subjects, unless a crime is committed right in front of our faces and there are no LSPD around, or our help is directly requested.

Because of this outlook, there is generally less for me to do than I would like, so more oft than not I simply try to bring some comic relief to fellow gamers via role-playing, which is something I think any federal agency should be good for. Hell, our real-life federal agencies provide me with endless laughter on a nearly daily basis.

That being said, I do think there are opportunities for the FBI to be more useful. Three suggestions I would have for giving them a more clearly defined role would be to:

• Expand their responsibilities to officially include Internal Affairs investigations of the LSPD, setting in place a strict SOP for conducting any official investigation of an active officer. While role-playing among gangs is minimal, as Wayne pointed out above, the LSPD tends to role-play quite a bit, as they should, which subsequently lends itself much better to the concept of the FBI conducting a long-term investigation that includes reconnoiter operations, etc. Included in the SOP would be directives on what sort of evidence would be admissible, what prerequisites would have to be met in order to prompt an investigation, etc.
• Keep the SeaSparrow and similar vehicles in the game, but only allow them to be entered by an agent (if possible via coding) when there is a suspect with a wanted level of 5 or above, or when a specific /su has been made relating to an aerial violation. This would help narrow the focus of their use to their intended purposes.
• Allow FBI agents to use alts to go "undercover" and infiltrate gangs. Currently, alts are intended to be separate from the primary characters -- however, their use in this fashion is the only way of which I can conceive for any law enforcement agency to effectively conduct undercover operations. This would also add some very interesting elements to the role-playing environment among gangs and law enforcement officials -- for instance, the use of code words by undercover agents during confrontations with plain-clothes officers to signal arrests and/or alert to the fact that they are undercover agents whom should not be shot at during such encounters. It would also add further elements of consideration to whom among gangs can be trusted, etc., which mirrors in many ways the realities of such real-world evolutions.

On another point, I do not agree that all FBI should come through LSPD first, and not solely because I am an example of such a case. I see some fundamental problems with that prerequisite, primarily related to the perpetuation of the LSPD's institutional mindset in a separate organization that should have its own unique methodology and vision.

I also disagree that experience with the LSPD is required to be an effective agent. First and foremost, individuals should be possessed of good judgment, objectivity and the ability to express themselves with impeccable grammatical correctness. (The latter being of the highest priority.)

Objectivity, in my opinion, can in fact be negated by experience solely with the LSPD because of the often one-sided viewpoint that recruits are offered during indoctrination, which does not always translate into consideration for the fact that everyone on this server is here to play and enjoy themselves. (It's frankly not fun sitting in a jail cell for 20 minutes, and many who are convicted for that amount of time find themselves in such a position for unwarranted reasons -- I think sometimes that people forget we're here to have fun.)

In many cases, I think that there are some gang leaders who would make excellent agents in an FBI outfit that included some of the concepts I outlined briefly, above, simply because they seem to be more in tune with the gaming experience realized by the majority of players on the server; a majority whose composition does not include law enforcement officers.

For what they may be worth, those are a just a few of my e-pinions.

[Bounty]

Well, I've been busy with real-life commitments the past few days, so I'm just catching up with everything; but after reviewing some other threads, it seems that some of my above suggestions were not so original and are already being implemented. I approve! :D