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Nobody here as far as I can tell is “bashing” Paizo.
People with concerns are asking questions because we would like Paizo’s words to be backed up with actions. That concerns get addressed. I’m an Adventure Path subscriber, I want to know they content I’m paying for has gone through critical analysis and sensitivity passes and that it isn’t just going to blindly uphold the fiction of police without addressing the reality.
There are some topics games don’t have the tools to tackle.
I don’t want to read or run an encounter where players have to protect the rights of property owners over citizens. I don’t want a situation where players can kill civilians or criminals like it’s a 1980’s copaganda movie, where “McGarnagle gets results you stupid chief!”
I like Brooklyn 99, I like Hot Fuzz, I like Vimes and the Ankh Morpork City Watch, but Paizo is not perfect, the standard they need to be held to is high. It’s not fair the Good Guys have to be held to a higher standard.
But Paladins don’t get their powers for empty words, they get them for exemplifying the values they say they believe in. That’s true in life too.
You don’t get credit, you get responsibility.
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I like Brooklyn 99, I like Hot Fuzz, I like Vimes and the Ankh Morpork City Watch
We are sold a fiction on what police are for, we want to believe they protect and serve the people. When the reality is that isn’t true. At least not for all people.
Copaganda shows, and fiction sell this story of what the police are meant to do, but they also serve to keep people complacent.
I have friends who are police officers, I hope that if they were ordered to kettle a peaceful crowd or spray innocent protesters they’d defy those orders. I hope they are as good as they claim to be. But the fact is if an officer is aware of transgressions against the law and doesn’t report it, they are complicit. And there’s been plenty of footage of that.
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Well most of the things brought up here are things I havent really seen in any other ap (Exception being Hell's vengance which was very specificly the evil focused ap) So I'm not entirly sure why they would think paizo would suddenly decide to do that sort of thing for this ap (Especially one that does not appear to be an evil party Ap)
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Most APs are pretty supportive of straight up murdering many of the people who oppose you.
Now, those people that the AP supports you in killing are usually legitimately terrible, your actions are often partially self defense, and you often lack any other options (many take place, at least partially, far from civilization, for example), but rather definitionally an AP where you're the cops you have the option of taking enemies alive most of the time, and a game featuring, as protagonists, cops who kill whoever they want without due process and get away with it would be pretty bad for obvious reasons.
To a lesser degree, there's also all the stealing everything that isn't nailed down (and some things that are), again I don't have moral problems with that when you, a private citizen, do it in abandoned temple miles from anywhere after killing the cannibal cultists who live there...but given what civil forfeiture is and how it works in the real world, I'd feel much more uncomfortable doing that as a cop in a city with laws.
So, basically, by being an urban campaign, and importantly one where you are actually officers of the law, a lot of typical PC behavior is suddenly much more reminiscent of real abuses of power by police, and thus really problematic.
I don't think Paizo is going to ignore these very real issues, and even what we already have on AoE seems like they've got some solutions in mind in that regard (especially in terms of taking suspects alive), but they are common threads in APs that would be deeply problematic in a game where you're the cops.
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I would like to think the Civil Forfeiture point is less of a thing in 2E. From taking a look at trying to convert APs from 1E and also looking at the WBL tables in 2E there is substantially less loot in this edition meaning stealing everything off of people shouldn't be necessary
Also, I don't know a lot about Civil Forfeiture as it seems much more prevalent in America, but isn't but of the issue that there doesn't need to be hard evidence just a suspicion. I feel like if you were taking things off enemies in this AP it will be connected to you knowing (and presumably being able to prove) that they were using it for criminal activity...
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ENWorld's Zeitgeist (great AP) went to a lot of effort to try and minimize the grosser aspects of being a cop.
The PCs are paid a salary and are audited repeatedly to minimize looting. Nonlethal damage has no penalty to use, and the books encourages it. It notes that torture doesn't work. The in universe police are also portrayed as boorish and not prepared to handle things like the special agent PCs.
It also helps that rather than an actual cop, you're basically a teen's idea of a secret agent, taking out international conspiracies, mad scientists, and thieves guilds, though it remains to be seen what the contents in Edgewatch are.
The players guide will probably answer a lot of questions.
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It's going to be Copraganda. Any way you slice it, this AP is going to be Copraganda, and Zimmerwald, who I would say is bashing Paizo on this subject, is in my opinion correct in his characterization in the basic premise of policing and how that contrasts with the way it gets depicted in media. Even "non lethal force" is...questionable in real world application versus how it gets depicted.
But there is something to be said about getting to play in a place where the stories we're told actually work the way they're suppose to. Whether or not this is going to be appropriate is going to have to be answered by each table. Maybe in 7 months when the AP is fully released, the world will be in a better place to tell such a story.
Besides, short of just not releasing an AP entry in July (and probably August) and moving around their schedule, I don't really know what they can do about it at this point.
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I think this is an AP i’d like played with ABP instead of needing to collect items but that really can be done at the table level. The problems with policing in the United States are as old as the United States, so doing this AP wrong would have been a problem a year ago or likely a year from now (although the scrutiny and pressure for change have never been higher). But doing the AP right, as discussed above, feels every bit as appropriate now as it would be a different time. Communities really are looking at ways they are policing, over policing, and under policing specific groups and considering changes that might have felt impossible a year ago. Why is exploring that in fiction/games inherently inappropriate?
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There are lot of legit reasons for city guard AP even outside exploring police force related ethical questions, since city guards are often kind of opponents for pcs since pcs tend to cause problems for them so pcs being the city guard is interesting perspective flip :(
Though on sidenote, I do wonder how much cultural perspective on AP would have affected views on it even before the current protests started. Like over here police doesn't have particularly bad reputation, but I noticed for years prior to this that in lot of different countries police have enough bad reputation that people believe police to be inherently bad
It's going to be Copraganda. Any way you slice it, this AP is going to be Copraganda, and Zimmerwald, who I would say is bashing Paizo on this subject, is in my opinion correct in his characterization in the basic premise of policing and how that contrasts with the way it gets depicted in media. Even "non lethal force" is...questionable in real world application versus how it gets depicted.I strongly disagree with this. There are good police officers and even good policing policy. Both are less common than they should be (at the moment, in the US, vastly so), but they're not impossible or a contradiction in terms, and I think the idea that they are is actually pretty toxic and detrimental to fixing the problem in the long run.
Our society is predicated on having governmental authorities with access to weapons to enforce the law. That being the case, cops are not going away. The kind of fundamental societal shift required to remove them, while theoretically possible, is just not gonna happen any time soon.
My criticism isn't actually with any individual officer, but the institution as a whole. Beyond that, suffice to say I disagree with some of what you say, agree with other parts, but I'll leave it at that so we don't wander further off topic.
If I wasn't clear earlier, I also don't think it's a bad thing to have a story that models how police are supposed to work. But at a fundamental level, that is exactly what copraganda is, how IT works, and I don't think we gain anything by pretending otherwise. Some tables are going to react strongly against it, no matter how benign. Other tables are going to think they should react strongly, especially once the concept of coproganda is explained to them.
For myself, I don't anticipate any particular issues, but I'll certainly be careful if I ever have a chance to run or play this.
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Police abolition is possible, hopefully in our lifetimes. Hell, Minneapolis is openly talking about disbanding their force.
We don’t need to talk about police like they’re an inevitable fact of the world.
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Some sort of security force is though, I feel like a lot of people are talking past each other regarding this while only half-saying what they want.
Dismantling the current corrupt system and replacing it with something much more beneficial and safe for citizens is perfectly viable. Replacing the police with absolutely nothing where there’s no checks on anything, is not (I doubt anyone is actually asking for it, just a communication issue).
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My criticism isn't actually with any individual officer, but the institution as a whole. Beyond that, suffice to say I disagree with some of what you say, agree with other parts, but I'll leave it at that so we don't wander further off topic.
If I wasn't clear earlier, I also don't think it's a bad thing to have a story that models how police are supposed to work. But at a fundamental level, that is exactly what copraganda is, how IT works, and I don't think we gain anything by pretending otherwise. Some tables are going to react strongly against it, no matter how benign. Other tables are going to think they should react strongly, especially once the concept of coproganda is explained to them.
I'd argue that anything that portrays the organization of police as a whole as deeply flawed with protagonists fighting against those flaws isn't strictly propaganda of any sort. The Wire, just to pick one example, is a show integrally involving police officers, and has police protagonists you like and want to succeed, but it's also pretty much a damning indictment of a lot of aspects of how police forces work.
I suspect AoE is gonna be a bit more optimistic than that, but the point stands that such things are possible.
For myself, I don't anticipate any particular issues, but I'll certainly be careful if I ever have a chance to run or play this.
Yeah, that's totally fair.
Police abolition is possible, hopefully in our lifetimes. Hell, Minneapolis is openly talking about disbanding their force.
Yes they are, and firing an existing police department totally works and can really help (at least a couple of small towns have started over from scratch this way to very good effect), but what do you replace it with?
Rather inevitably, you replace it with a new organization (or multiple organizations) which have the power to arrest people and at least sometimes carry guns.
Y'know what an organization that can arrest people and carries weapons is? It's a form of police. You can try and weasel around that by calling it something else, but that's semantics, not reality.
We don’t need to talk about police like they’re an inevitable fact of the world.
They're absolutely not, but they're an inevitable fact of our society. Are you intending to abolish the current government as a whole? Because if not, we're going to have some version of police, and frankly even if we did do that, if we replace it with a new government we probably wind up with police in some form.
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When we are talking about the purpose of the police in the real world, we are really talking about whether or not laws should exist, and if they should, then how should people be held accountable for following them? This is a perfectly valid theme to explore in roleplaying games and I personally have always loved ones like hells rebels where you get to actively side more with resisting oppressive laws from a position of romanticizing chaos (literally, as an alignment) and prioritizing doing good over conforming to social conventions.
However, that too is a romanticization of something that can go horrifically wrong in the real world and conceptualizing law and chaos as fundamentally pure forces in the universe is just as unrealistic as doing so with the concepts of good and evil in the real world. Even if I personally think that policing, as it exists in every city in America I have ever been, which is a whole lot of them, is fundamentally and critically flawed beyond salvation, I am very interested in exploring, though fantasy, how characters in similar situations can exist within those systems and attempt to do better, knowing that the consequences of failure in that imagined space are not real. That sounds fun and rewarding beyond pure escapism, and the ability to explore and test alternative structures, even beyond what feels possible today has always been one of the most appealing aspects of role-playing games to me. I have no idea how well this AP will enable that or not, and I have no illusions that every single aspect of the writing is going to be a problem-free philosophic endeavor, but I appreciate the effort on the part of Paizo and am looking forward to having the opportunity to play it and provide constructive feed back if necessary.
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I understand now that there are several posters who wish for the abolition of police IRL and do not want to see a rosy-tinted portrayal of police in an AP. Nor a glorifying of awful cops actions in the name of conformism.
I am honesty interested in how these posters would alter the Agents of Edgewatch AP so that it respects their views.
I think it will help me better understand these views and ideals.
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I think the important thing to keep in mind is to separate "Law" as in "what rules the powerful have set up in order to protect their interests" and "Law" as in "Lawful Good" as in "those rules that have been set up to benefit society as a whole."
There's probably no campaign where I would hammer on "you must be Good, and you must act like it" than a campaign where the PCs start out with positions of authority. Indeed a "y'all are cops" AP would have to be a Good over Law sort of thing.
If you think about it, one of the reasons the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is much more palatable than other fictional police departments is that Vimes is a "justice is more important than law" type who is acutely aware of how the law is abused to perpetrate injustice.
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Police abolition is possible, hopefully in our lifetimes. Hell, Minneapolis is openly talking about disbanding their force.
We don’t need to talk about police like they’re an inevitable fact of the world.
Police is organization that enforces the laws. By definition as long as laws are being enforced, there is gonna be police.
Its kinda like declaring that all governments and politicians are evil :p Abolishing government is just gonna end up in new government
I'm sure you didn't mean "get rid of police and replace them with nothing", but I don't think it helps to make "Police" a dirty word and call it something else when replacement is in fact just "Police, but without corruption"
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As long as our civilisation is based around the idea that people follow norms, there needs to be someone to enforce these norms, because somebody will inevitably violate them.
Dissolving state-side law enforcement will only end up with gun-blazing anarchy of people enforcing the law on their own and that will result in the strong and rich being able to outgun (or out-crossbow) the poor and the weak. That will look even worse than the worst of what we're seeing now.
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I have hard time imagining society without police or government that doesn't resolve around small isolationist communities though... Like thousands of people together making agreements that benefits everyone and not just majority doesn't sound likely to me. Without some sort of system that would work to do so, which would again just be some form of government. Then again, maybe I'm underestimating idea of direct democracy, but kinda hard for me to see that working even in small communities and it being just for everyone.
Still though while this is interesting debate subject, aren't we getting off topic if we start debating theory on government and society? :p
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I want to preface my post with my agreement that there are systemic issues with many of the police forces (and large portions of society in general) within the U.S. that definitely need to be addressed.
However, abolishing police forces altogether is IMO an unrealistic/unworkable concept outside of a small, ideologically homogeneous community that has limited interaction with outside groups. Even then, history has shown that there is a danger that some authority-figure/clique will give in to temptation and start abusing their power.
In a larger, non-homogeneous society, allowing "self-appointed" enforcement of laws leads to even worse structural problems. Such as right-wing "militias" in place of the current police forces. Or "corporate security" taking over "company towns" like we had in the U.S. a century ago. Or organized crime/gangs completely controlling neighborhoods without any effective counterweight.
The ultimate solution probably requires more of a change to U.S. cultural attitudes than changes to the police forces themselves. However, there are examples of organizations that have at least somewhat successfully, with sustained effort, improved their handling of ethnic/gender/race issues. The U.S. military has it's warts and still suffers from some members holding bigoted/chauvinistic attitudes, but it's generally pretty egalitarian/tolerant; at least in my experience on the active duty side. However, the military has been working on this for over 70 years (since President Truman's executive order in 1948); it may take as much time and effort to do the same with the U.S. police forces.
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I don't think "abolishing the police force" means "doing away with some sort of centralized problem solving group", just doing away with "there is one office that does everything, which is heavily armed and permitted to use force at their own discretion."
If it's something like "my neighbor's dog is vicious" or "someone is having a mental health breakdown" or "someone is struggling with addiction" or "two people in a relationship are fighting" in each of those cases you would want someone to intervene to resolve that problem other than "someone whose has had the bulk of their training in the use of deadly weapons." Indeed someone with expertise in animal behavior, mental health, addiction, or conflict resolution is a lot more useful in those situations respectively even if they have zero knowledge of weapons and their use.
Most problems in a community can be resolved without resorting to deadly force, and for those situations that require it the person trained to use deadly force can primarily just be the bodygyard to the specialist in the relevant conflict who is calling the shots.
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I don't think "abolishing the police force" means "doing away with some sort of centralized problem solving group", just doing away with "there is one office that does everything, which is heavily armed and permitted to use force at their own discretion."
This critique is somewhat shallow, because not every country and actually gives police heavy armaments and the same country doesn't arm its police all the same way. American police, for instance, obtain heavy armaments through a fairly recent (I'm pretty sure it's post-Cold War, but it may date from the '80s) military-surplus procurement program. SWAT is only a somewhat older innovation, of the War on Drugs as it ramped up during the '60s and '70s. Meanwhile, other countries refrain from giving beat officers firearms at all.
Not that the latter condition impedes police from always being better-coordinated (and sometimes even more numerous) than whatever mobilized constituency they're facing off against, rendering the mobilization wholly impotent and insulating representatives from it.
Nor is over-armament the only or even the most ingrained issue in policing. The political role of the police in infiltrating, provoking, and persecuting "subversive" groups (read, in roughly chronological order: black liberationists; trade unionists, anarchists, socialists, and communists; anti-imperialists; women's liberationists; gay liberationists; Muslim congregations; immigrants-rights groups etc.) goes back much further and is foundational both to the federal police in America as well as certain large and influential departments like the LAPD.
What is to be gained from the shrinking of police department personnel and budgets, and reallocation of funds and responsibilities to other local government departments (for your examples, animal control and social services) is not the decoupling of state interventions in society from armed force. It is its own gain. Large, flush police departments are too powerful in local governments, able to steer ever more funds to themselves by inertia and, as stated above, to protect representatives from their constituencies.
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Yeah, from my perspective a police force with surplus military equipment is just really absurd idea to the point it feels unrealistic to hear its actual real thing over there.
Edit: How the heck I missed Zimmerwald's post? I don't think I took minute to write this post ._.
But yeah was replying to cabbage's post. Have to also say that from my perspective, I've never viewed local police as "people trained to use lethal force"(I'd assume they are trained to use guns yeah, but I've never thought that is their defining trait). Like one reason I've always found American police force so shocking is that they really differ from what I've personally thought police are like.
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But yeah was replying to cabbage's post. Have to also say that from my perspective, I've never viewed local police as "people trained to use lethal force"(I'd assume they are trained to use guns yeah, but I've never thought that is their defining trait).
An ancillary problem of police over-armament is that police often aren't trained, or are only barely trained, in the use of their shiny, expensive toys. But because they're shiny and expensive and because officers are only human, they can't help but deploy them anyway. So you get absurdities like police deploying humvees and APCs to a less-than-hundred-strong demonstration in suburbia just in case it turns into Watts or LA out there.
I call this an ancillary problem because a handgun is too much armament for most situations, and indeed because (as the late Mssrs. Floyd and Garner can attest) police can be lethal with only their limbs and mass.
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But yeah was replying to cabbage's post. Have to also say that from my perspective, I've never viewed local police as "people trained to use lethal force"(I'd assume they are trained to use guns yeah, but I've never thought that is their defining trait).An ancillary problem of police over-armament is that police often aren't trained, or are only barely trained, in the use of their shiny, expensive toys. But because they're shiny and expensive and because officers are only human, they can't help but deploy them anyway. So you get absurdities like police deploying humvees and APCs to a less-than-hundred-strong demonstration in suburbia just in case it turns into Watts or LA out there.
I call this an ancillary problem because a handgun is too much armament for most situations, and indeed because (as the late Mssrs. Floyd and Garner can attest) police can be lethal with only their limbs and mass.
There’s some lovely charts going around that contrast how much training police are required to get versus other industries. Hair stylists have something like a 7x higher amount of hours logged needed.
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Yeah, in America it's bizarre how being a librarian requires a post-graduate degree, being an elementary school teacher requires a 4 year degree, and being someone who cuts hair requires 1,000-2,000 hours of training, while a police officer requires about 120 hours, almost all none of which is applicable to situations where violence (or the threat thereof) is inappropriate. Yet these are the people sent to deal with almost every problem that doesn't involve "something is on fire" (the fire department, for the most part, is fine- when there's an arsonist in the department, the rest of the people there see this as a *bad* thing.)
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I keep reading about the term "Policing by consent" here in the UK. I don't fully know what that means. But I do know it is different from the US style
I also know we don't have officers armed to the teeth and don't seem to really need them.
Perhaps part of this is due to the 2A in the US. But that isn't going anywhere.
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Disbanding A Police Department IRL
Players will have a lot of examples of alternative dispute resolution techniques.
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I keep reading about the term "Policing by consent" here in the UK. I don't fully know what that means. But I do know it is different from the US style
That's the thing - in principle, American policing is "by consent." We just don't use the term. But it's basically a social contract theory of legitimacy. Public opinion (read: posh newspapers that were largely owned by Robert Peel himself, because the British press was a sewer before Murdoch ever shoved his stick in) demanded professional, full-time, civilian police from the state as a matter of property protection, so it got it. Americans at the time already had elected local magistrates (as opposed to sheriffs and JPs who in Peel's time were appointed) and didn't need to double-dip on theories of democratic legitimacy.
Today, of course, we are enlightened and realize that having elected magistrates means absolutely nothing, that wealth and power will remain where they are regardless, and that dictates from on high will be implemented no matter what public opinion is.
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I think a thing to keep in mind for both a law enforcement AP and a better world is that restorative/reformative justice is preferable to punitive/carceral justice. That is, if person B has wronged person A it's preferable to enable person B to make amends to person A than to punish person B in hopes that will make person A feel better.
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Disbanding A Police Department IRL
Players will have a lot of examples of alternative dispute resolution techniques.
Disbanding a police department is totally doable, not easy, but doable, and has had great success in several other places. Rebuilding from the ground up is a solid way to remove systemic issues and corruption. I'm all for them doing it in Minneapolis, since their department appears to be just generally bad at what they do in most ways.
But there will be a new police department to replace it (or possibly several, focused on different things or areas). It may not be called that, but there will be people to enforce the law, on behalf of the government, and at least some portion of them will be armed...and that's a form of police.
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But there will be a new police department to replace it (or possibly several, focused on different things or areas). It may not be called that, but there will be people to enforce the law, on behalf of the government, and at least some portion of them will be armed...and that's a form of police.
Yes, conflict resolution comes in many flavors, only some of which are armed. Non-violent conflict resolution has a long history, but many Americans aren't familiar with it.
I think this AP will be a good place for players to begin learning and practicing some of those unarmed, nonviolent techniques.
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Yes, conflict resolution comes in many flavors, only some of which are armed. Non-violent conflict resolution has a long history, but many Americans aren't familiar with it.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not sure what the ideal rate of armed to unarmed is in the way of police (and think it varies significantly based on the societal milieu they operate in) but models other than 'all of them have guns' are certainly viable.
I think this AP will be a good place for players to begin learning and practicing some of those unarmed, nonviolent techniques.
I'd expect it to have a lot of deescalation and nonviolent techniques, yes. I would not expect the PCs to be unarmed, though. Well, not meaningfully, anyway (Monks and most spell casters are never without an option to use lethal force, after all).
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But there will be a new police department to replace it (or possibly several, focused on different things or areas). It may not be called that...
Indeed! Like, you know, the Edgewatch.
I see the AoE as a chance to play the exemplars of positive change in the police force of Absalom, working against corrupt grognards or self-serving loose cannons, not with, for, or as them.
And so, if Paizo structures and frames its adventures reasonably well, it would not be profiting from glorifying police violence, but from glorifying a vision of humane police reforms. Looking forward to Paizo's upcoming statement to confirm my expectations.
Even then, the abolitionists will probably be upset, but I just don't see them presenting a strong argument. I wonder how many of the abolitionist crowd have any large-scale management experience.