This Is The Police: Responding With Absurdity and Excessive Force

This Is The Police:

This Is the Police: An Internal Review

This Is The Police: Jack Boyd Tells His Story

This Is The Police: Responding With Absurdity and Excessive Force

This Is The Police: A Coup of A Conclusion

Before work starts, the player selects their music. This Is The Police offers a variety of classical and jazz music. The music changes between the three Acts. Initially Jack Boyd owns records, but after the first incident, he returns to find new music in the shape of cassettes. A similar reset happens after the second incident, with CDs replacing tapes. Both times the game removes the old music, and introduces new songs. This is an odd choice, that Boyd passes through three generations of technology in 180 days. It's also disappointing, because why limit the player's musical choices (Act III has much fewer options).

During the day, the player sees the city and faces of their officers. Every so often the map is marked. These marks represent calls to the police station. Each call has a title and short description. It describes what the caller told the 911 operator. Most calls are crimes. But the player also receives calls from City Hall, the Mafia, and the community. Responding to calls from City Hall and the Mafia builds reputation with those institutions. Community calls reward the player with money. The player chooses which officers to send on patrol. The description is the only measure of the danger of a location. There are no numbers to evaluate the difficulty of a response. The player has to decide on the cops to send based on the description. What matters in resolving calls? I assume it is the responding officers' professionalism. But does the number of cops matter? Their energy? Or their rank? I don't think so, but This Is The Police doesn't explain the rules of how calls work; what elements determine the outcome. After responding to a call the player sees a result; suspect arrested or suspect escaped. Also if any civilians or cops were killed. Over ninety days I developed a good understanding of what was required for successfully responding to a call. At first This Is The Police was difficult. Officers would die, or would fail their missions. By the end of the first Act, I developed the judgment to know the force necessary to succeed.. In the second Act, I achieved a 95% success rate for calls I responded to. And then, on the 169^th day, I responded to a call about a lone shooter at Freeburg High School. I responded with my best officers. Their professionalism was 1440, 1115, 1030, 765, 380, and 280 (I was astonished when they failed – and were slain). For comparison, my highest professionalism was 1700. The next highest I ever had was 1475. The average professionalism was 400, with a handful of officers in the 800 to 1,000 range, but many from 200 to 400. A walk-through on GameFAQs recommends 8 officers and SWAT. I don't remember if I sent the SWAT team.

In This Is The Police the player has a SWAT team (and a Paddy Wagon). Initially these resources can only be deployed once per day. Success unlocks upgrades, like additional deployments and a more powerful SWAT response. I have a vague idea of what a SWAT team does in real life, but no clue what it achieves in This Is The Police. I sent the Wagon if a complaint included a number of offenders, and the SWAT team if it sounded like an exceptionally dangerous situation. To make this more confusing, the call center chooses who can respond. The call screen can limit the player to between two to ten officers. The call screen can prevent the player from sending the Wagon or the SWAT team. Why does it limit the player? The limits alters how I think about the call, making it seem more or less dangerous. It removes my agency to judge the situation myself.

Freeburg is loaded with dangerous situations. But some calls are false alarms. For example, a person calls the police because they saw a stranger enter a neighbor's house. In reality they saw a friend checking in on a sick person. As I accumulated experience, I was better able to distinguish false alarms from crimes. If the description sounded too crazy to be true, it probably was. The player wants to avoid responding to errors of judgment. It wastes energy, removes cops from being able to respond to a real emergency. Every responding cop receives +10 professionalism when they respond successfully to a call, and loses 20 professionalism when they fail. Responding to a false alarm doesn't change the professionalism.Calls are resolved by sending officers. Upon arrival, a quarter of calls require the player to make a decision. For example, officers respond to a burglary. When they arrive the game says, “The police see a man waving a gun around. Do the police: A) Demand the man surrender, B) Tase the man, C) Look around for the real criminal, D) Go up and hug the man? While not a real choice, this is a good example from This Is The Police. The game likes to include absurd choices. How does the decision affect the outcome? Does it determine it, or does it add (or subtract professionalism value)? I favored tasers over guns, and it normally succeeded.

Sometimes, when officers arrive at a location, This Is The Police asks if the player wants to send reinforcements. Does it offer this option because there are not enough cops/professionalism? Or is this a scripted question? Does adding more cops provide an additional bonus? I don't think any of it matters. I rarely sent reinforcements, and yet my officers successfully resolved situation after situation.

Later, as the city of Freeburg descends into chaos, officers refuse to respond to calls if they feel their numbers are insufficient to the task.

Once the player has a good handle on the unexplained system of how calls and responding works, the player will successfully resolve 95% of calls, presuming they've trained enough cops to handle the incoming volume. This ease in mechanics and strategy places This Is The Police only a step above idle games. Despite its transparent ease, even if the player has a good handle on how the mechanics function, random deaths occur. Compared to the reliable dullness of success, this is a positive. But it's disturbing that I find unexplained death and loss enjoyable, because the game is too easy.Detectives play a lesser part than officers. Every so often, without warning, the player is alerted of an investigation. The player assigns detectives to the case. Each case includes a brief description of the victim, and a theoretical cause of their suffering. Witness statements aid the player's investigation. Detectives find clues. Clues are pictures. To solve a case, the player takes the pictures and arranges them in chronological order. The detectives discover false frames, and the player needs to choose the correct ones. The player can't input a wrong answer. They are free to rearrange the frames an unlimited number of times. Most investigations average five to seven frames. When the frames are presented in the correct order, the player sends the detectives and officers to arrest the criminal. Solving investigations awards the player money, and on rare occasions, affects the story.

The depiction of police can't go unmentioned. This Is The Police relishes excessive force. In the third act investigations feature interrogations and torture. There are only like two of these scenes, so it seems like an abandoned mechanic, similar to the press conferences. The player, failing an interrogation, tortures the victim with electricity, water, tools, and heat. These mechanics don't show violence, but set an ominous tone. While responding to calls the player is never punished for beating the crap out of criminals. There is zero penalty for sending too many officers, for sending SWAT, or the Wagon. Nor is the player criticized for decisions made while responding to calls. There is no such thing as an innocent bystander. This Is The Police never chastises the player for tasing an innocent person. Everyone at the scene is guilty. In the course of their duties, the officers never kill a suspect, but they mauled some of them. The player never has to deal with courts, or the presumption of innocence. Whatever means the cops use to arrest their prey is justified. Maybe the writers assume cops always use just enough force; that they never employ excessive violence. Similarly I was ordered to make a series of strange arrests. These were not false alarms. I ordered officers to arrest; a phone sex worker for being ugly, a person selling cigarettes in a parking lot, a woman selling tickets to heaven, sun bathing nudists, a peaceable assembly at town hall, and satanic temple parishioners.

It's unclear if This Is The Police supports the Thin Blue Line theory, or highlights the absurdity of the American penal system. More likely, Weappy Studios which is based in Belarus, is too obsessed with Dirty Harry movies.

A conclusion soon...

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