Fellow officers,
As a police officer, it is your duty to ensure the safety of all citizens. This concept also applies to accidents, making it your responsibility to find out what might have caused them. Police Simulator: Patrol Officers offers you a deep set of content and lots of tasks when handling accidents. Today, we're going to give you a few insights into the process!
But let's take a look in-game, first!
How does an accident look like in Police Simulator: Patrol Officers?
Patrol officers of Brighton serve an important role in gathering evidence at a motor vehicle accident scene. Your duty's range is pretty wide: Typical tasks include interrogating nearby witnesses and involved drivers, documentation about caused damage, helping injured citizens, executing drug tests, and much more. As you see, your job is invaluable. You're important. Yes, you!
Of course, not every accident is the same. We distinguish between Minor Accidents and Major Accidents. The difference is defined by both the gravity of the damage and the number of involved citizens.
As part of our advanced simulation system, accidents are either created completely organically, happening right in front of your own beautiful eyes, or via callout in which you'll receive a call for assistance. Regular callouts are meant for minor accidents while emergency callouts will seek help for major accidents. The entire system is so dynamic, even we can't predict them:
„Dynamic accidents happen out of the traffic simulation through various balancing and environmental influences. Even for us developers, it is not predictable where and when accidents may happen.“ - Florian "Flo" Reichhold, Programmer
Multiple reasons can lead to accidents. For example: Driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. drivers ignoring traffic rules like red stoplights, rear-end-collisions, pedestrians ignoring traffic rules like jaywalking, and other stuff.
When the damage is over 9000
I'm sure you've watched the clip above, right? In that case, you've definitely seen the need to call for a tow truck as the car was quite damaged and also badly smoking. Please press F to pay respects.
The car is clearly not in an operational state anymore. In this case, you have to call for a tow truck as you want to clear the scene as fast as possible - otherwise, you're risking quite a traffic jam. Imagine not towing the car away: After a few decades of just standing there, it would quickly become a tourist destination. Yes, that's one we can refuse.
Mostly, Brighton's tow truck service is reliable and fast. But there are situations where they might take a while because no tow truck is available at the moment or the wrecker cannot easily reach its destination. In those cases, the tow truck service will tell patrol officers that it
might take up to 24 hours, and patrol officers are allowed and advised to leave. We are in constant communication with the tow truck service to improve the service even further in the future. Still better than a few decades.
Helping your citizens
Sometimes, it's not just the cars taking damage - pedestrians can get injured, too! You know what to do: Call for an ambulance to let them receive the help they badly need.
Oftentimes, injured or hurt persons cannot make an own decision whether or not they want to call an ambulance or be treated. For example, when they are unconscious. In this case, a first responder and paramedics operate on the principle of "implied consent": The circumstances imply that a first responder can assume that a person would consent to call an ambulance and being treated by
paramedics, if they could.
Just assume the best possible scenario.
Let the investigation begin!
Car damaged. People hurt. But who's at fault?
This is where most of the work begins: It's time to investigate! One tool that turns out to be quite useful is the Photo Camera, available as equipment via the tool menu, with the main purpose of securing all evidence.
Once you have arrived at an accident site, equip the photo camera and aim at the damaged car parts. When aiming, an icon is displayed which evidence that can be photographed - go take a picture! Icons only appear if the autozoom and the player position are sufficient. All evidence photos contribute to the progress of handling accidents. Not all evidence is needed to be recorded to get a sufficient accident report - but it's recommended to capture them all for generating a complete report.
„We initially designed to have a first-person view for better immersion when capturing photos, but decided against it and went for an over-the-shoulder close-up view to be more consistent with all other patrol officer tools.“ - Jitesh Panchal, Design Director
Okay, report, got it. What does the report contain?
Not just taking pretty pictures, of course. In the callout UI, you can see a progress bar that shows the current status of the accident investigation. To let the report progress, you can...
- Interview pedestrian witnesses
- Interview driver witnesses
- Ask for ID of witnesses
- Take pictures of evidence
- Perform drug/alcohol tests
- Take a look at license plates
The more accurate the report is, the more shift points will be earned for giving out reports. There are multiple states of report completeness: Poor, sufficient, extensive, and complete. The more, the better.
If you think that you have to arrest one of the involved drivers, you should give them the report before calling for an arrest transport. Otherwise, the report cannot be given to the citizen anymore.
Time for questions...
An accident is anything but silent - someone will probably notice it. In Police Simulator: Patrol Officers, nearby pedestrians are an extremely important part of your investigation!
These pedestrians stand on the sidewalk, for the patrol officer to come over and ask some juicy questions. Interrogate them to find out clues and how the accident happened. Once the accident investigation is resolved, they will leave even if the officer didn't let them go, as by the law of the fourth amendment, they are not officially detained and free to leave. You can also ask for their ID as in Brighton, witnesses are legally obligated to identify themselves if asked for their ID by an officer.
In this game, accident witnesses are being automatically "detained" without any proactive detaining action of the officer, even if that status might not be legally correct. As mentioned previously, they are not officially detained. Still, this way allows for a much simpler way of handling witnesses.
We've improved the whole concept of interrogations quite extensively throughout development:
„For accident interrogations, we first had a system in place which didn't differentiate what caused the accident, so that accident witnesses would only respond with generic phrases. For better gameplay depth and roleplay possibilities, we established the 'advanced traffic accident interrogation' system, which introduced multiple accident causes. Witnesses now tell the driver what caused the accident. And drivers might even lie about it.“ - Thomy, Project Manager
What's happening with the drivers?
Good question! Of course, drivers must also be interrogated - after all, they're the owners of the car. I mean, self-driving cars are a thing but they're probably not cruising through the streets completely alone. Oh god, that would be scary.
Drivers are also counted as witnesses. In contrast to pedestrian witnesses, you are allowed to
frisk driver witnesses and order them to perform a drug test. When you let them go, they will either return into their car and drive away or walk away should their car be too damaged for driving. Make sure you finish your accident investigation prior to letting them go!
Frisking means - as described here in more detail - that you can scan the suspect's visible garments with their hands to determine if the person is an illegal item. This is only allowed should you have reasonable suspicion that the detained person shows signs of driving under the influence of alcohol or illegal substances. Dilated pupils, red eyes, or green crumbs on their clothes are quite a hint that this is indeed the case.
Wait, DRUGS? ALCOHOL? Yeah, that's not good. You can order the drivers to perform a DUI test if they were involved in an accident. Fun fact: Unlike other police departments, Brighton's police uses Breathalyzers instead of Field Sobriety Tests.
More to come!
Here's a fun fact from behind the scenes:
„While development, we had some bug reports describing "accidents" as "crashes" which led to confusion between game crashes (bad!) and accidents (good!) - we now have established a clear differentiation of these terms.“ - Benjamin "Benni" Barz, Lead Programmer
Well, let's be thankful for that.
So, you're ready for an investigation? When Police Simulator: Patrol Officers launches in Steam Early Access this Spring, you'll be able to!
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