Use of Force
 

In policing, there is a topic that is always at the front--the application of proportional force. The officer is trained in many ways to de-escalate situations, including those where use of lethal force may be required or justified. How and when an officer uses reasonable force to control a situation is something that I guarantee keeps them up at night. The bottom line is that an officer must be able to adequately explain (and live with) every application of force, if a suspect/citizen believes their rights were violated and excessive force was employed by the officer.

Regardless of the acronym, SWAT, HRT, SRT, etc.--there is always a Monday morning quarterback or someone with oversight, second guessing decisions when these questions arise. In SWAT, it's the game programming. In SOG's situation, it's Jessica or the human Web Admin team. While Jessica may accuse an officer of excessive force, often the truth of the situation is very different. I won't go into potential situations, because I don't want this article to ramble on. We've all been under Jessica's accusations. We've all had situations that have gotten away from us and we made, what we believed to be the best decision in the heat of the moment.

This article is also not about the flaws of the penalty system, there is a thread for that. What I wanted to discuss here is strict adherence to well-accepted use of force policy.

In my opinion, less lethal gamers have been getting the benefit of rarely drawing attention from Jessica or the web admin team. I think there is one huge advantage that most less lethal users have been leaning upon to ensure success--the use of less lethal munitions prior to requesting compliance from an armed suspect.

In policing there is no distinction between when an officer may use lethal or less than lethal intent against an armed combatant. The check boxes for their use are the same. An officer may believe it's safe for him/her or surrounding people to use less lethal instead of lethal in an attempt to save the life of the suspect. It's a judgment call made in the moment based upon guidelines. I will not add length to this article by outlining the decision tree for that. Most would probably not care, since this is a game after all.

To boil it down for our purposes, officers are compelled to warn all suspects of the use of a less lethal weapon, just as if the officer were using a more lethal weapon. That means that shooting a suspect from behind or from face-on with a beanbag, pepperball, pepper spray, baton launcher, nade launcher, or tazer REQUIRES a compliance order. If no compliance order is issued, the officer is in violation of use of force guidelines for most credible police forces including teams like SWAT.

This is a call to action for all less lethal gamers to evolve the realism within your chosen tactics and issue compliance before pulling the trigger. You may not receive penalties either way, because the game does not punish you for shooting first and asking questions later, but I believe you will now be subject to being killed more often, which will give you a finer appreciation for those who make those decisions every day in the line duty. It will add some pucker factor in your game play as well.

Discuss.

Ha! good one )))
There have to be way to set Jess to add penalties if there were no shouts made before shot

I do agree with you SAS_Random on most of it, if not all. As I'm canadian and trained in Quebec, we do have some differences with U.S. use of force continuum. Overall, it is very similar. The main difference is how the population reacts to the use of force.

The use of intermediate weapons (less lethal options) is always preferred to lethal force, but is not mandatory. It can happen to jump from "Officer presence" to "Lethal force" in 2 seconds depending on the situation. Also, keep in mind that if the suspect represents a risk of grievous bodily harm or death, you should always have a lethal option ready to be deployed but that does not restrict you of using another technique/tactic.

I agree that communication with a suspect should always be present during the whole intervention. Although, just like the force options, it is possible to neglect its use if needed. I would be comfortable to explain why I used an intermediate weapon without any compliance order if that warning could have forced me to use lethal force. Keep in mind that if you do not identify yourself as the police, a suspect could be justified to use force against you.

Use of force is all about your perception and tactical consideration.

As for this game now, I do agree that giving a compliance order before using any force is closer to reality and gives a bit more challenge to the game.

P.S.: I joined my use of force wheel translated in English.

Agree but swat 4 is not realistic on so many aspects e.g. Opening doors one way. Therefore as you said, garbage in the first place equals garbage out.

The problem is that players know and constantly exploit the game design opposed to playing like an actual swat team. That will never change on a public server in an old flawed game. I don't know what you intend to achieve from the post. Raise awareness yes, change it no.

I often use less lethal to avoid penalties I must admit. Plus we have discussed this, I enjoy the challenge it brings, particularly with the beanbag bug. However, I do use lethal also, particularly on the bigger maps. This also has challenges. Both me and Wes got Jessica penalties yesterday from the bugs and game logic.

I guess my point is... Happens. That's the game at the end of the day. Everyone can have their opinions but the best consistency is to play the game as the game wants you to play. That way everyone knows what is accepted by the game logic and not ones opinion on how to play.

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Great discussion so far. Your tactical wheel diagram is excellent. It shows how important communication is to any situation into which officers inject themselves. It also accurately shows that passive resistance is met with soft to average physical control. I guess that's why I would say, as far as the game restrictions, that to me, using melee is a less violent option to gaining compliance with a civilian than use of the tazer electrodes, only in the fact that electrode removal can be a bit uncomfortable. It seems the game skipped over the necessary option of physically forced compliance of a grab and shove to the wall or ground. I would say that force increases on this path...presence, compliance, melee, stun, taze, fire to disarm/injure, fire to incapacitate, fire to neautralize.

I have evolved my game play from first playing Single Player with the AI, to playing MP online because the officers do not even stack up properly. In order to keep them alive, often the lead has to enter rooms first, etc and so on. The game provides 4 stack points at each entry and the moron that selected them is a dolt. It really only gets worse from there. I moved to online and it was complete chaos on one server, completely unreasonable less lethal usage on another, and shoot on sight in another. There has never been a happy middle ground philosophy.

This is why I wanted to start a separate team from SAS several years ago based as close as we could to use of force guidelines. I lost interest where I could not dedicate as much admin time to gaming as I had in the past, and that concept died on the vine, so to speak.

When SAS first adopted S4, although they shot all suspects, they were highly organized and had stayed close to true SAS tactics as they could. We started playing SWAT3 and Rainbow Six and used the same tactics for each--more or less. The only suspects that survived were the ones that immediately surrendered (as I would do if SAS troopers were bearing down on me).

I wanted more, but the games available just could not accommodate. I began to adapt my tactics to the police side and even got the SWAT branch of SAS to limit the killing to non-compliant suspects. We never used less lethal, so how the game reacted to less lethal did not detract from my experience. The more exposure I had with teams like ETS (not to say this style is not enjoyable to some) it really began to get under my skin how much use of force doctrine for police is being violated by these high and mighty "tactical" players that don't seem to know squat about application of force.

My play style, if you pay attention to what you are really seeing and not the scoreboard results, is as close as the game allows to realism. Do I take liberties from time to time, yes of course because ultimately, I'd rather stay alive in the game and continue to play instead of watching others from view mode. My character gets incapacitated every session because I'm living on the border of the no action / lethal action bubble. As soon as lethal is authorized, it's a showdown between me and the suspect. I'm not looking to change SOG at all. I'm just asking that perhaps SOG players may be interested in the added challenge of evolving less lethal tactics to be closer to reality. Experiment with it. I guarantee you will have some fun and excitement that may have left the game experience.

Some realistic movement through buildings might not hurt either ;-) but that's a topic for another day.

Thats one of the reasons I keep playing airsoft more than Pc games now! As it doesnt have game limitations! Sometimes we got lil kids who played a lot of COD tho. But we got also games for hardcore fans like me with strict age rules/gear and tactics that could be used + teams only and no solo stuff ( yeah even snipers got partners )

Keeps things exciting and eliminates bullsh_tery.