Thoughts on police response times?

[Halcyon]

4 hours ago, Peezy said:

Okay, going off this I say designate areas to officers since they all end up just constantly patrolling south LS due to the fact it's the most active part of the map when it comes to shootouts. If I'm not mistaken police are usually given designated areas IRL anyway, so it should be the same thing with LSPD. 

Please join LSSD or LSPD and confine yourself to an area much like you suggested, and see how it’ll play out. 

[Engelbert]

While it is true that IRL they have their designated patrol areas, people are forgetting, that on the server LSPD and LSSD don't have that much manpower to cover entire city and the county, so they mostly focus on most active areas, like bar and club openings or active gang scenes. Which is only good. Also I doubt responses are slow. Take Vinewood for example, there was a shootout few days ago. The time between first shot and first siren approaching was pretty short.

[CrazyJackey]

I role play as a member of the LSPD Gang Unit and have spent the last two to three months primarily focusing on areas of high gang activity like Davis and Rancho. You guessed right that I have experienced my fair share of shootings in the area and have occasionally been one of those units who respond within 10 to 20 seconds of it occurring. I have a gun sound mod which allows me to hear gunshots a few blocks further than the vanilla pack and it is so loud/clear that I can pinpoint the general area of the shooting and can determine whether it's a small/large caliber or semi/fully auto firearm being used.

 

Yet with what I just said, in these last two to three months I have probably responded to only one or two shootings where I was able to find the shooter and catch them.

 

I'm not kidding here. I would be around the corner, hear some shots being fired, I'd be there sometimes within 10 to 20 seconds and all I see is just a large crowd of individuals running like cockroaches back into properties and a few corpses on the ground. Some of those corpses you can kinda tell were armed with some sort of firearm yet they were looted for their firearms. About 95 percent of the times when I respond to shootings even at that speed, I mostly only ever find casings and corpses. I respond to these shots fired calls not necessarily anticipating to actually catch the shooters in the act but to see which gang's corpses are on the road for my report.

 

There was one particular day where I was participating in some operation that involved a house party on Grove street. I was in a marked police car, three deep, sitting on Grove Street watching the party. People can see us and we can see them, it's clear that the police were watching the party. For 30 minutes I see some dirt bike with two people on it constantly circling the party, they'd even occasionally stop and look at us just sitting there. I knew they were up to no good. "Hoodies, mask, no plate, dirt bike? Most def some shooters" I was ready for them, I was prepared for a shooting to occur. The shooting happened, I watched the crowd scatter I pull up looking for the shooters but it's extremely difficult to figure out who is a bad guy or a good guy when you have like 40 people running around. I knew what they looked like, what vehicle they were driving but it was still pretty difficult to find out where they are. Sometimes there's a possibility that someone is shooting but the gun/animation is rendering for me. There were also some undercover cops around the area that I had to be careful not to shoot in the back which I nearly did that day. 

 

Even though they were fully aware of our presence, they were so CONFIDENT that they were gonna escape the shooting that they went ahead a did it. They took their dirt bike to the Grove Sewers, drove it up the dirt hill behind the house, got off, ran passed two undercover cops and began to shoot. Literally if those undercover cops were not there I am almost certain they would have gotten away.

 

With these experiences in mind, do I really think the server has an issue with too fast of a response time in South Central? Hell fucking no. I feel as though we are too slow because by the time we arrive the shooters most likely took off on a sports bike with their AK47s in tow and the victims friends already looted the bodies for guns. All within a quarter minute. 

[Dom.]

I think the biggest problem people complaining about quick response time don't seem to get is the fact the map is a scaled down representation of Los Angeles. The map is scaled down - anything time relevant to distance covered needs to be scaled down, too. Sure, response time in South Central is 8-30 minutes, but the real life South Central also isn't six blocks. As a matter of fact, if you converted distances, GTA V's in game map is 14 virtual square miles, equivalent to about 48 square miles in real distances. Real life South Central Los Angeles is 40 square miles alone. See the problem here? Sacrifices have to be made.

[Evolution]

There are 2 problems here. Number 1 you have cops camping south LS because that's where the shootouts are and that's where you get to have "action" as a cop. Not saying that all of them want to RP this way, but there's a great number of them that only care for pursuits and shootouts.

Number 2, if you have cops using sound mods that extends their range of sound, that's essentially them having another advantage over your avg person. 

Those things combined, you end up with a cop driving through Davis, Rancho, Chamberlain before parking up in an alleyway somewhere in the said gang turf. And when a single shot is fired, they are there within 5 seconds of it happening. The whole system seems to be favoring cops way too much as opposed to your gangs. No wonder a great number of players are afraid of getting into any sort of illegal stuff, because it's very easy for them to get punished. 

One way to solve this problem, if PD/SD leadership wants it solved that is, would be to limit gang areas to only Gang units and Metro units, unless it's a backup call. You shouldn't have your fresh P2 who's a Traffic unit being parked in an alleyway in a gang area, but that certainly seems to be the case right now.

Gangs have to spend a fortune to get weapons, only for those said weapons to be seized by PD within the first shootout of them using it. In my opinion, odds are stacked up against gangs so much, that 9/10 there's no point into even committing criminal activities that involve weapons.

Edited April 4, 2021 by Evolution

[TheSenate]

I'll give my input here as someone who works in the 911 system in California. The biggest factors in the short response times on GTAW are the size of the map (it doesn't even take 10 minutes to go from Paleto Bay to South LS) and the lack of realistic traffic. The biggest thing that slows me down IRL, even if I'm just going a couple of blocks code 3 (lights and sirens) is traffic. We can't just gun it through the streets, we have to drive in a manner that is safe, and really all the lights and sirens are good for is stopping traffic at intersections so we can pass. 

 

Most calls for law enforcement are not dispatched as code 3 IRL. The vast majority of law enforcement responses are code 2 (cold response, no lights and sirens). So they drive to the scene like anyone else would, getting held up in traffic or at red lights. The reason being, in real life we only use lights and sirens in the event that "life or limb (or property in the case of Fire and LEO)" is under threat. If you're calling to report something that already happened and the dispatcher can confirm there is no active threat to life, limb, or property, law enforcement get sent out code 2, and it generally takes them like 15-20 minutes to get there with normal traffic in urban areas. However, if something critical is happening and it gets dispatched as code 3, the dispatcher will assign the call to the closest units and they will (optimally) be on scene in only a couple of minutes. 

 

A lot of these things aren't a factor on GTAW though. There isn't any active dispatcher who is assigning units or managing who goes code 2 or code 3. There is hardly any traffic compared to the real world (especially LA). It is also important to factor in that the police officer to civilian ratio on GTAW (as well as all roleplay servers) is absurdly high compared to real life. Meaning more units are available around the city and thus, you have much shorter response times. 

 

EDIT: I'll also add that I don't think the issue here is really the speed of responses, that's something you'll never fix. The real issue here is the level of response. Cops on GTAW have a lot of freedom when it comes to posting themselves where they think they'll find action and responding to calls they think will be interesting. People get bored sitting around and they want action. So when it's been an hour or two since the last hot call dropped and someone calls in a car break-in, everyone goes "FINALLY" and slaps those lights and sirens on and runs hot to the call. Resulting in something to the effect of seven patrol cars running code 3 plus a helicopter and a supervisor all showing up in less than fourty-five seconds.

 

You could solve that by having a dispatcher who, when they're on duty, along with the supervisors, see the 911 calls pop up (calls are hidden from non-supervisors when dispatch is online) and they assign the calls to appropriate units. Thus preventing the overwhelming response on certain calls.

Edited April 4, 2021 by TheSenate

[Mediva]

I would say there is only so much that can be done with this. Police Patrol High crime areas thats just how it is. Police also aren't going to sit in the station all day doing nothing. I would suggest not being so blatant with your crime plan it out be more complex with it. Try distractions, or doing it not so in view that kinda thing.

[For Ever]

I think the police response times are relatively realistic. As TheSenate mentioned, code three responses are for mostly requests that're life threatening and require immediate response, whilst code two responses are more occasional. In your case, where you fire an firearm ("firing a shot", quoted from the original post) has been used, it really shows that there's threat to life and well, in many occasions, Police would need to respond immediately. I recon in my city, the police would make it to any part of the city in a minute if there were shots fired there as they'd respond with lights and sirens, but also, my city isn't as big. In most cases, police patrols are scattered around the city, but focused on certain areas. If there's a call from an area, a patrol unit that is designated to it responds. That leaves the other units to respond ONLY when it turns into an emergency situation or further back-up is required, this leaves units to other spots, so even if there's two traffic stops going on in North Los Santos, South Los Santos still has patrols that're ready to respond to shots fired situations etcetera. I personally think the city's quite small, you can get from East to West in quite little time, even with 800 players in-game and well, it's not easy to change. Implementing NPC drivers would make responses queue up, but at the same time make the current traffic system very hard to understand. NPCs stand infront of the lights whilst regular players do not. Also, I recon this could be avoided, but an NPC's car might be the same as a players car and if PD is chasing a players car and a NPC comes in the play, it's very hard to make the difference out of these two.

 

I really feel like there's not much to discuss about this whole topic. Police Department frankly has the upper hand in terms of reacting to different situations, but that's, in most cases, how it's supposed to be. Police Department is destined to win most of the situations through role-play measures, and the response time itself is an factor that really helps them to it.

[Gervin]

shits ass

Edited May 2, 2021 by Gervin

[Wuhtah]

Going to lock and archive this thread as it has become inactive. Feel free to PM me to bring it back!