I told someone this was gonna be “the thesis” but I’m gonna try and make it short-ish.
Having an out of character mandate for MPs to follow the law to the letter isn’t beneficial to anybody. Marines don’t like it when cops are forced to arrest them for things that we don’t want to arrest them for, it’s a weird and inconsistent thing hanging over MPs’ heads, and a good chunk of the staff team doesn’t care enough about Marine Law to make good decisions on it.
I’m gonna split that up into little categories like a shitty YouTuber because it flows better I think.
Part One: Marines Don't Like it When Cops Are Forced to Arrest Them for Things That We Don't Want to Arrest Them for
One of my least favorite pieces of Marine Law, especially where it applies to rule 11, is this brief section on “Officer Ordered Arrests”.
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Basically what it comes down to is that a commissioned officer may order an arrest on anybody who is not above them in rank (presumably not above them in the chain of command either i.e doctor and 2LT CMO, but Marine Law is vague on it. “Marine Law is vague on it” is also gonna show up later), and members of the Military Police MUST arrest that person. It doesn’t specify how high a priority they need to make it or whether they are required to go down to the FOB or do a field arrest over it (this is later).
The reprisal for an officer making a “bad arrest order” that is to say, one in which the defendant is ruled innocent of all charges, is a prevarication charge which for the uninformed boils down to 20 minutes in the brig. The law states “They may arrest and hold that person for ten minutes after they have reached the brig while they gather evidence.”, followed by “Should the suspect be declared innocent of all accused crimes, the requesting officer may incur a Prevarication charge… …Any Commissioned Officer who explicitly orders the arrest of a person or persons may rescind the order up until the detainment of said person or persons.”
Marine Law is vague on this, but generally the way that this goes down in practice is that the person must be detained in order for the prevarication charge to go through on the ordering officer, MPs can’t just tell an officer out the gate the charge is invalid and arrest them. We may try, though, often to an “if you arrest me I’m ahelping” or similar response.
“If you arrest me I’m ahelping” is the crux of the issue here. These commissioned officers act as MPs, by proxy, without any of the OOC accountability that actual MPs have. Their orders remove people from the round just as surely as an MP’s baton, but the claim that the ability to take someone from the round requires an extra layer of security in the form of mandatory compliance just doesn’t exist for them. The MPs in this scenario are taking on a staff action risk based on orders that are sketchy at best, given how Marine Law related time locks have been stripped away from even the highest level of commissioned officer.
That’s just one law, on everything from contraband to assault in the form of mutually agreed on fighting, there’s plenty of instances of people in LOOC going like “I wish I didn’t have to arrest you but it’s mandated by staff”
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Chapter Two: It's a Weird and Inconsistent Thing Hanging Over MPs' Heads
This is going to blur a little bit with the third part in referencing specific incidents involving a staff members, but it’s used in a different way from that so I’m keeping it as is.
In this post that I titled weirdly because I thought it would be fun to do a series of recordings of me playing MP while LARPing that they’re body camera recordings, I walk into the brig and see another MP abusing an animal that had been brought back from the surface. Being an upstanding and staff-assisting CMP, I arrest them and send an admin PM about the topic. I cut the video there and I’m still not naming the staff member involved, but the ticket was closed as an in character issue despite the rules pretty explicitly saying otherwise. Why?
I’ll elaborate on the staff side of dealing with Marine Law tickets in a minute, but in this specific instance there’s a good chance it was arbitrated by a rule zero decision.
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Given my current position on the issue, I think this was actually a good ruling from a big picture standpoint of MP mandatory compliance stuff. That being said, at the time I was frustrated at the inconsistency displayed between different staff members when making these decisions that I’d ordinarily have no problem with.
You shouldn’t have to hope that the staff member taking an edit is cool with going to the highest-up person online to ask for it to be okay for you to, for example, wear the wrong hat (which had its own feedback threat in the past).
Taking it back to part one a little and forcing MPs to fuck with people for no reason, I remember an instance where an MP let a prisoner have their ID card during their sentence. This is against brigging procedures as outlined in Marine Law, though in the years this has been the case those machines have never stopped charging money to give prisoners food.
Seconds later, a staff member used a Provost character to remotely blast the MP over Almayer General chat, demanding they remove the ID from the prisoner’s possession immediately. It remained in character (sort of? Provost Joe personally hopping onto an unsecure radio channel to blast some random cop out in the sticks is questionable), this time, but the implied threat of a watching staff member punishing an MP for breaking a law in order to improve the round for somebody else still exists. Or maybe it doesn’t, depending on which staff member is or isn’t handling it.
I mentioned earlier how vague and inconsistent Marine Law is, and that problem is compounded by the fact that every new ruling is based on how one staff member felt about a specific player report that day (in this example, it’s now legal to effectively con a low level req employee into handing you government property for free after you were told you couldn’t have it by their superior, and leadership may take no recourse against you via the law).
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Season Three: A Good Chunk of the Staff Team Doesn't Care Enough About Marine Law to Make Good Decisions on it.
There’s going to be a lot of pictures and links to old discord messages and staff/player reports in this section, especially from current or former staff members. They aren’t supposed to reflect on the character of any one particular person even if I’m going into detail about a decision they made that I think was wrong, but there’s enough examples I feel that they are enough to reflect on the general opinion of Marine Law among people on the staff team for the purposes of making my point for this post.
That’s a lot of words to say “I’m not trying to be a dick but I think you guys are making mistakes more than you should be, please don’t ban me or delete this”. This part’s also going to be long as shit so if you aren’t a staff member or someone who cares about them or the way they do stuff you might want to skip it.
The Gokcen Demir Flashbang Incident was the first big indicator I personally got of staff’s attitude towards these rule 11 cases that kind of got me thinking the topic didn’t interest them. At the time it was fairly clear-cut, MP threw a flashbang into the CL’s office because they slammed the window in her face when there wasn’t an active threat present (they were going after a survivor’s gun, but the gun was located in another room and was never found due to the scramble following the flashbang), not acceptable conduct for an MP.
While discussing this in Last Round Chat, I was surprised to learn that the player who did it was not only an admin and the appeals overseer (if you believe management’s take that MPs are supposed to be in character moderation for LRP shenanigans, that’s kind of my boss), but one of the councilors for Commanding Officers who are above every single MP in the Marine Law chain of command. This revelation took things from me discussing it in Last Round Chat and leaving it to history and filing a report, because somebody in that position of special trust ought to have some idea of the laws they’re in charge of making decisions about.
If you’ve read the report, you know it was approved and the good enough time frame it was approved in, but you also know that the verdict was left private in the same manner as the verdict of a staff report. I don’t want to speculate, but I think there’s good reason to assume their punishment was lighter than the punishment a regular player would’ve earned because, to put it simply, the staff team didn’t want to deal with rule 11 Marine Law stuff affecting one of their people any more than we want it affecting us.
Next on the docket, Boris T. Love vs. William Crimson is a 20 reply mess that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Here’s the very, very short version.
Dude gets arrested pre-first drop, riot ensues. Because of the riot and the fact one of the MPs responding was brand new, dude spends 15 minutes or so with the cops barricaded in the dropship bubble so the rioters wouldn’t get to any MPs or prisoners (they had picked up some of the rioters by then). Fifteen minutes is longer than any MP is supposed to spend detaining someone without charges, but it wasn’t like the cops involved could carve a magic path through the rioters without dousing themselves in flashbangs and trying to answer ahelps on their way out.
It was ruled originally as griefing and a Marine Law violation. I won’t post details of the discussion with management about it because those were never made public, but I was there and it sucked.
Why did this happen? There’s no Marine Law mandate someone be processed within a certain amount of time, let alone while under the duress of an active riot in progress. In my opinion, the staff member, sort of on the opposite side of the same coin as the other example, didn’t know the laws they were arbitrating very well.
You can find a bunch of current and former staff members saying stuff to the effect of “I don’t want to deal with Marine Law stuff” in the discord if you search. Here’s four from the last 6 months clipped out and linked in the footnotes.
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I want to paint these people especially in a positive light. It’s GOOD to come out and say that you don’t really like dealing with this topic or having it as an issue to work around. I think it’d be easy to get to a point where you don’t have to, especially when it comes to drawn out reports and arguments over single lines of the law. These aren’t the only examples, either. Lopitz has like 5 that I haven’t included here.
That completes the players, MPs, and staff threepeat I set up earlier, but I’ve got more stuff that doesn’t really fit the outline. Mostly in the form of responses to concerns people might have and my actual solution to the weird minimod situation.
Volume Four: Bet You Thought I'd Post a Policy Feedback Threat Without a Solution, Huh?
Just remove it, full stop. From MPs, at least. Synths and SEAs have other people in charge of their law compliance clause and I don’t have the experience to make any claims about it.
The main, and most obvious worry people will have is the potential for a lack of mandatory ML compliance to enable MPs to abuse other players. To that I’d say that griefing remains against the rules, which is really plenty for the obscene cases people are thinking of when they say this (this is how almost every other server regulates their sec department by the way).
A lot of lesser abuses come from people bringing up bad MPs of the past like Laurencia Beck, as though her failures reflect on them as whole. Laurencia Beck got her MP roles re-instated multiple times. Nobody acting as an MP facilitated that or made it happen. The mandatory compliance rule failed to prevent someone with a known pattern of misconduct from being allowed to return to that pattern, not to mention the rule against griefing people. No amount of “MPs must follow the law” would’ve prevented someone from removing her jobbans after the fact.
The next thing to address after bad MPs is bad command decisions. Who do you call when the CO or the CMP without a CO makes a bad call and there’s nobody above them in the chain left to address it? We’ve had an in character solution to this for forever in the form of the Provost Office.
Love them or hate them, they allow staff members who DO want to work with Marine Law do so without inconsistent out of round action or ridiculously long player reports. They even get the option to give it a lot of effort (physical Provost team) or relatively little (fax machine).
The last issue I’ll address here is one management has brought up in the past. MPs are used at the time of writing as “in character moderation” so as to remove the load of dealing with some low level offenders without staff intervention. Due to the above things I’ve mentioned, I don’t think mandatory compliance under penalty of a potential job ban (we can argue escalation but that’s what it says on the rule) is necessary for them to fulfill that purpose. We don’t expect management to sometimes de-staff moderators for not filling out forms correctly and sometimes do nothing for the same offense.
I really don’t see any problem with removing mandatory compliance right now that cannot be solved with the anti-griefing rule and other things that already exist but are much less obrusive.
I could go on for even longer about things from malicious compliance versus mandatory compliance to old PRs from devs wanting to change MPs up that have and haven’t gone through, but I don’t think they’d do much to help make my point and this post is already getting too long when you extend it. So this is all I’ve got for now. Sorry it’s mostly stuff that I did or experienced, I lowkey wrote it in like 2 hours because somebody told me I should write all this shit down in a formal feedback place.
