LSPD, Realism & My Removal

[Kenshi]

2 minutes ago, Henning said:

It's incredibly disheartening to hear this especially since as far as I'm aware this is the second time in which changes were attempted to be made to PD and members within the faction basically threw a tantrum in an attempt to stop leadership/staff from making said changes. I was unaware that Roozles was making changes but I will admit, looking back on the last month or so I was impressed by the changes in attitude I was seeing. Sad to hear that said previously mentioned group still has it's claws in PD.

 

Let's all be very clear, The Los Santos Police Department has major issues with P2W mentality. It's not all of PD, but there are plenty of very active member who's OOC distain for Illegal RPers blatantly bleeds into IC. Those players are an active cancer within the faction that will only continue to cause larger and larger rifts within the community. For as long as those players are allowed to retain their position within the faction, their bitter and jaded attitude towards criminal RPers will continue to effect more and more people. 

 

There are no doubt bad apples in the illegal community, but at least we have the honesty to admit it and we actively try to correct those within our ranks who have cancerous mentalities towards RP. The same can't seem to be said about PD. 

 

 

Where do you draw the line at "What's healthy, playing to win" and what's "Toxic, I hate this gangbanging donkey and I'm going to do everything in my power to find him, lock him up and laugh at him".

You win some, you lose some. But am I automatically cancerous because I want to exhaust all options to catch someone? Why should I deliberately dumb myself down ingame, or handicap myself when the other person doesn't because of the uniform I wear Icly?

 

[Zani]

I will put my two cents in. I won't call any names or directly bash anyone but I shall give my honest opinion.

 

Collectively, I have been a part of the faction for approximately 3 years. Truly, this Los Santos PD faction was the greatest faction I've ever been a part of up until now. From before the recent administration kicked in, we saw the build up of a transfer of power from one Chief to the next. From the beginning, several command and staff members were not happy with the change. I won't be a conspiracy theorist, so I'll just simply state that we had resignations occur in the high ranks. Immediately, certain policies were put into place that only increased our paperwork and were a logistical nightmare to keep up with. Then, we saw several supervisory/command members be boosted up into positions of serious authority within the faction. As was mentioned, this group of individuals were intended to be placed into these positions, meanwhile there were plenty of other qualified faction members who could have done the job and who may have rightfully been able to claim that position though were not given it. The nepotism was an immediate problem which the entire faction knew about. Slowly, this group of individuals stretched their direct authority over several different bureaus of the faction. The first was policy management, then heads of Command/Supervisory Staff. Then, this group took over the department handling recruitment. It's no secret that they wanted key individuals to get into the faction, thereby removing certain processes of recruitment and creating an easy examination. The entire structure of the department had also changed to become a cutthroat system. Primary and secondary divisions where, if you held a command position in a primary division, you also had to hold one in a secondary division. This was a great cause of demotivation and I do not believe it was the right change to make. I believe that other smaller changes should have been made before going to great lengths to completely restructure the department.

 

To go further in depth of how the changes affected the department (me having been the Asst. Coordinator of the division) ;

 

Field Training Program had previously maintained authority over recruited officers until they were past their probationary phase. We had a system. Field Training Supervisors handle probationary officers, above them were Station managers which supervised FTS and handled things such as promotion reviews and investigations, and above them were both the Asst. CO and the CO itself. After the change, the hierarchy became horizontal. We were only allowed Field Training Supervisors and then the ACO/CO. This ruined the organization and system we had, and put a strain on the entire division itself. On top of that, our authority over the probationary officers was removed; the division solely aimed to bring out the best of our recruits no longer had authority to issue disciplinary when seen fit. We had to investigate and push all findings to a line manager. All these changes came so suddenly without proper communication. The leadership of the faction was not in good standing and did not work effectively or efficiently. It worked things in a rush and pitted people against themselves and one another. Recalling the incident of one police supervisor in the faction, he had to step down after the department's restructure due to the entire primary/secondary assignment implementation.

 

To sum up, the nepotism/favoritism, lack of communication, and cutthroat implementations into the faction have caused it to spiral downwards. That being said, I have only seen a drop of roleplay quality in the faction myself. Don't take this the wrong way. LSPD has many great roleplayers and once in a while you will have your bad apple. I am against anyone who says that the LSPD is filled with roleplay failure. Though, I witnessed a slight decrease in roleplay quality among incoming members. I have also not witnessed any true roleplay quality changes within this faction.

 

I know this was long and I say this with all respect. Of course, this could be heart breaking for anyone. I truly hope Roozles overcomes this heartbreaking time with ease and finds something even more enjoyable to do.

Edited January 11, 2021 by Saccs

[Zach..]

Not gonna lie, me and roozles didn't get along well for a while and I disagreed with a majority of what he did, but removing someone who has put time and effort into something like this is not how you run a community. Honestly, I'm shocked to see his behavior from the GTAW staff.

[Entity]

4 minutes ago, Undead said:

this. 

 

Nobody turned on Roozles because of his decisions suddenly during his time as Chief or because he wanted more realism. It was them vs the people they forced out for their own choices from the very beginning, when those people worked and deserved those positions. I never once submitted a report as I personally witnessed nothing that would deem one, but there has been numerous instances in which I knew someone who did and they were absolutely right to do so imo. 

That's completely normal though.

 

After a certain point, the RP is more political than it is practical. That's how it is in real life as well and not just for police department but for any public office. Most people end up in such positions based on political reasons and leave in similar circumstances. There's people who work all their lives and never get high because they don't know the right people and that's what realism is. This is just another example of people favoring OOC merit over realism.

 

It's obvious too - if someone is about to take over the leadership of the faction, they'd much rather have a team of likeminded people who they can trust and work with, maybe have a history with, instead of team of people they don't know, who might even work against them or, if anything, need a long time to get to know and work together with.

[Smilesville]

I have no dog in this fight, but I'll just toss in this observation:

 

If PD has longstanding problems, it follows that longstanding PD members be sidelined or removed to reduce the impact of those problems.

 

If you want to improve LSPD RP, people are going to leave or be forced out. Higher standards means fewer people qualify, naturally.

 

That isn't a statement on any potential changes Roozles wanted to make, about the merits of whether particular people deserved to be sidelined, etc. This is about giving a faction leader latitude to determine who should be in control around him with regards to their faction and implementing their vision through molding the culture of the faction.

 

From the outside looking in, this appears to be two friend groups disliking each other with one friend group having the ability to call on FM. My hope is that FM can dispel that notion by providing specific instances of objectionable behavior to help everyone better understand the removal at issue.

 

 

Edited January 11, 2021 by Smilesville

[Sebz]

We went down this same road on LSRP when FM booted Foran (Michael Houston) out of the faction. The faction was divided (as it is currently) but life moved on. The faction was given over to Hermy (Caden Lin). Once Lin came into the picture, the faction wasn't necessarily in ruins, he kept things moving and frankly, he didn't do anything that they removed Foran for in the first place, he changed the faction for the better.

I'll remind you that Foran was removed because he refused to conform to what LFM wanted of him. Foran had the faction moving in the right direction, the roleplay quality was good, the paperwork was borderline non-existent and the fun was never-ending. I'll be the first person to say that Foran and I were not friends, I did not like Foran as a person and frankly, he was very off-putting to me in general. I won't go deeply into reasons as to why because he's long gone from the GTA roleplay world and doesn't need to be talked bad about behind his back.

For those of you LFM members who aren't from LSRP, let me fill you in on what happens next. Faction management steps in AGAIN and removes the Chief of the PD. Caden Lin is swept out of his leadership position for little to no reason. PD had finally recovered from the last Chief removal and was settling into the new PD structure. This time, things were different, the support was almost entirely in Hermy's favor with great confusion as to why a removal happened in the first place. This summoned over 150 people to a single TS3 server demanding LFM explain their decision to remove Hermy from his position.

In that TeamSpeak channel, nothing much was said from a positive standpoint. LFM shut down genuine questions and concerns and silenced Hermy when he attempted to speak out about what was going on behind the scenes with LFM. It all simmered down, the TS3 cleared out and LSRP looked for yet another Chief of Police. Here comes Adio, and Mecca.

Adio and Mecca did good things for PD in their tenure as well, but many of these things came with a mixed reception. For example, Adio and Mecca pushed for the removal of boxing in suspects, bean bagging players on motorcycles at speed, and conduct in general. Adio and Co. lasted quite a while leading PD and I'll admit, things were going decently, but that didn't last forever, as once again, here comes a new Chief.

Gibbs Brown is brought in to run the LSPD. Long story short: Gets removed for spreading Nazi-themed PD propaganda to those inducted into the command team.

TLDR: You keep removing chiefs, the quality of the faction will decrease. Our trust in you to make logical and reasonable decisions diminishes. Your explanation of the removal was not thorough in any sense. If this removal is entirely just, don't sugar coat it and don't leave out the small details. This community thrives on transparency and fairness. If GTA World is anything like the server it was modeled after, this may signal the beginning of a slow downfall. Whether you like it or not, PD is the INTEGRAL faction on this (and every other) roleplay server. If PD doesn't function, the server doesn't function. If this was genuinely for the betterment of PD, prove it. Right now all I see is an LFM team that couldn't handle the pressure and caved in without action being warranted.

[Briggs]

I do want to provide some insight to the resignation of a high-ranking faction member; Cascade (Samantha McGill). It continues to appear to be a common misconception among faction members and external community members that she was forced to leave the faction; this is false. Prior to her resignation, she was spoken to at length concerning her role in the faction, her activity and her stance towards the direction of the faction (additional realism). This was thoroughly discussed with Server Management and Legal Faction Management, approved by Nervous, and the decision to offer reassignment was not an impulsive one, but instead one that was subject to weeks worth of discussions and deliberations.

She willingly chose to resign, but has always been allowed to come back, and would have been with open arms should she have chosen to reinstate. Frankly, some decisions are more controversial than others. But I wish to stress that these decisions are typically incredibly complex in nature, and a great number of factors come into play, some of which you may not be aware. Oftentimes, shedding light on these details may be inappropriate, or violate the privacy of those faction members involved (in this case, Samantha McGill). That was not something that we were willing to do. 

In any case, despite our attempted transparency on the matter, inevitably, there are numerous misinformed assumptions about what happened, and that will always appear to be the case.

[Rauf]

1 minute ago, Briggs said:

I do want to provide some insight to the resignation of a high-ranking faction member; Cascade (Samantha McGill). It continues to appear to be a common misconception among faction members and external community members that she was forced to leave the faction; this is false. Prior to her resignation, she was spoken to at length concerning her role in the faction, her activity and her stance towards the direction of the faction (additional realism). This was thoroughly discussed with Server Management and Legal Faction Management, approved by Nervous, and the decision to offer reassignment was not an impulsive one, but instead one that was subject to weeks worth of discussions and deliberations.

She willingly chose to resign, but has always been allowed to come back, and would have been with open arms should she have chosen to reinstate. Frankly, some decisions are more controversial than others. But I wish to stress that these decisions are typically incredibly complex in nature, and a great number of factors come into play, some of which you may not be aware. Oftentimes, shedding light on these details may be inappropriate, or violate the privacy of those faction members involved (in this case, Samantha McGill). That was not something that we were willing to do. 

In any case, despite our attempted transparency on the matter, inevitably, there are numerous misinformed assumptions about what happened, and that will always appear to be the case.

Was that 'reassignment' not a demotion?

[vato1g]

Maybe not the best idea to bash members of the faction you led.

 

I have my issues with PD, but to say that the majority of people in the faction don’t care to roleplay is absurd. To not treat these reports/complaints as valuable constructive criticism but instead treat them as proof that PD “doesn’t roleplay” is an indication to me that your removal might have been justifiable.

 

While I will say that I enjoyed your tenure as chief, I feel like this post was in poor taste. 
 

just my two cents

[Nervous]

Well, well, well. I spent my last 3 months being spammed by "apparently 100 members" resigning if Roozles remains chief. Where are they now? Where are the 50+ complainers who spammed LFM with reports, stressing everyone out for? Suddenly everyone loves Roozles.

 

@roozles you know I respected your work to change the realism in PD and I hope the next leadership will keep doing the same work. It is extremely important to improve illegal roleplayers' quality of RP when it comes to their interaction with PD.

I can't thank you enough for all the hard work and pressure you've been under the past months, despite this unfortunate ending.

 

I'll not comment more about this as it's not really something I followed much this time, but turning this thread into a "FM removed me for my realism actions" is really a shortcut that disappoints me. We both know that wasn't the case, and it's a big middle finger to myself and others who did our best to work out the issues the past 3 months while keeping you as Chief. I spent countless hours on this, so honestly I expected more honesty from you here.