Police procedure field route
Use database scans, frisks, citations and restraints as an information loop instead of four unrelated actions.
Operational objective
The police role gives you four actions — database scans, frisks, citations and restraints — and they are usually described as a list. They work better as a loop: each one produces information that decides whether the next is justified. This page walks that loop in order, so a stop ends with a reason rather than with a guess.
Decision route
- Scan before you approach. The database answer changes what the encounter is — walking up first turns an information problem into a confrontation.
- Let the scan decide whether a frisk is warranted. A search performed because you were already there produces nothing you can act on and costs you the encounter.
- Treat a citation as the cheapest possible outcome, and prefer it. It closes the encounter, keeps the record, and leaves the city calmer than the alternative.
- Escalate to restraint only when the previous three produced a reason. Restraint used as an opener discards the information the loop was designed to generate.
- Close the loop by noting what the city did next. The value of a stop is often not the stop — it is learning which blocks answer a uniform by changing behaviour.
Failure review
- Running the four actions as a fixed sequence on everyone, which turns a procedure into a routine that teaches you nothing.
- Skipping the scan because the target looks obvious. Looking obvious is the one signal the database exists to check.
- Measuring the role by arrests. The loop produces information; arrests are one of its possible outputs, not its score.
!
Unreleased: what the database actually returns, whether frisks and citations have failure states, any consequence system for wrongful stops, and how NPCs remember being stopped. The order above is a way to use four demonstrated actions, not a claim about their outcomes.