this is a thought I came to while reading the looting thread

How efficiently do you handle Lone Star in your games, are they tough as nails and always get their mark? or are they easily corruptable and a minimal amount of covering your tracks will throw them off.

On top of that, How easily do they pick up on astral signatures and reconstructing the events of a gun-fight?

Personally, I play them differently depending on the neighborhood they're in, a rich area would have better payed and better trained officers while a poor area would get the trainees and gang-loyal cops, most of the time they're screwups unless it benefits them not to be

Seconded, they are a business afterall. I imagine them more or less fallible than the police today, they gather evidence in much the same way, only most have what we consider top of the line facilities today (read: What you see on CSI) almost at hand, with the current wifi technology available to all officers. I imagine they have major issues of understaffing though, too. Since as a AA-Corporation, the bean counters are more in charge than the real lawmen. Astral depends on a lot of actions by the PCs, but it tends to be muddled after a firefight. My thoughts anywho

I'm heavily influenced by Robocop when it comes to my handling of Lone Star.


Most of the LS cops in my game are basically good people who are trying to deal with a lousy situation. Some are corrupt. A few are very corrupt.

Individual precincts act as either franchise or corporate operations. Some are better equipped than others. All have a basic level of gear. And franchises, regardless of how cash strapped they are, must maintain the basic level of equipment for their officers.

Poorer precincts don't have the resources to follow up on every crime, but they'll collect all the evidence they can in case the likely prep falls into their hands at a later date. Wealthier precincts usually have access to detectives, both mundane and magical. FWIW, mage detectives are kind of infamous in my gaming circle as being people not to piss off.


What this means to my players is that, unless they're caught in the act, they're probably not going to be pursued for a crime. If they get caught however, well, that might be very bad for them.

I am running under the assumption that most of LS is corrupt.
This does not imply you can get away with a crime by just paying them when you get caught.
You better made sure you bribed the right officers up front if you need their protection.

That's what LS is in most of my games: A less obvious but unstructured protection racket.
With the problem of having a reputation to keep. So they will eventually let you rot to get in favor with their superior, the major or the media.
Or to cover up their own mess.

As for tracking efficiency. If there is some violence in the Barrens, noone really gives a damn. But if there is a high profile public crime, I make sure to throw 'CSI: Seattle' at my players.
It all depends if it is worth the effort. A dead prostitute is of no interest. Unless she catered to important persons.

If a crime leads to public awareness the chances are high LS will look into the case more carefully.
Same goes for magic. If noone really notices the crime - case closed.
If it made some local news - some midrange magician / detective having fun for a week or so.

I go with this line, myself, unless they do something really stupid. Like shooting people on the street for no reason, blowing something up that causes a lot of people to notice, doing a lot of movement of illegal firearms on their own to try to make money... Anything that would cause a size-able stir.

I should add that their solve rate is lower due to the increased volume of reported crime in the Sixth World as opposed to our own. I mean we have carreer criminals nowadays, but shadowrunners and people who are walking violations of the Law are not quite where we are at now.

I pretty much keep law enforcement at a corruptable level...so, you can normally bribe your way out of most things. Granted, if you have been tied to a murder or something, a lot less so, but getting picked up isn't normally going to happen unless you are in a really high security area. And most of those should have the runners stripped down to only legal stuff or trying to operate in it unnoticed.

As for magic tracking...unless the call comes in that hints towards magic, a lot of signatures are going to be lost by the time a security mage makes it to the scene. I do make it known to my players that you don't want to leave signatures around, but seeing that erasing a signature takes a number of Complex Actions equal to the Force, its not a huge issue to erase.

I basically make a world where my players know they are criminals and try and avoid the law as much as possible!

As far as ability goes: Lonestar is top dog. They have techniques we can barely dream of today, or things that are fanciful in CSI shows are commonplace to them. They have troubleshooter investigators who are worth millions of nuyen a year for their ability to pick apart a crimescene and figure out what happened. They have nanite swarms and virtual models that can look for the smallest bit of shed DNA and place it on a map complete with time-line and use that to recreate everything that has happened in a location to a disgusting degree of accuracy.

However: They are bound by a corporate beauracracy that makes our current judicial system seem sane. LS can't even GET to many crime scenes due to extra-nationality, WON"T go to many others because there is no money in it. Most of that nightmarish stuff above (from a shadowrunner's perspective) isn't even an issue for those reasons and more, those are used to keep the citizens of corporate clients in line, or turn Little Suzy Homemaker into a source of spare parts after she flips out and murders her husband, the VP of tennisshoes for Nike, LTD, a wholy-owned subsidiary of Saeder-Krupp (or whomever...) and flushes the body down the food processor built into the sink...

See: 'solving' a crime is a vastly different beast than 'doing something about it'. Lonestar isn't paid much to chase Shadowrunners, and even their corporate clients don't want LS poking around into Run's on their property. What if LS tracks those runners down (electronically anyway) and determines that Client X also employed them last year against Client Y? Suddenly Client X has to pay extra to LS to keep from solving Client Y's little crime from last year... So best to keep LS out of the loop.

That leaves the municipal contract, which is a big share of Lonestar's wealth, but only indirectly. The City doesn't really pay any better than one of the half dozen clients within the city, but the contract itself is the source for many of the corporate contracts that really pay the bills. Since Lonestar is authorized to 'work' the public areas around the corporate enclaves, this gives them more functionality for serving their corporate clients as well.

Now the city DOES want crime rates lowered, DOES want major terrorists (Shadowrunners) to be caught. They might even pay extra for every solved crime of this magnatude. But most runs don't occur on public property, and very few crime scenes are thus available to Lonestar, thus the company doesn't put much effort into the task.

Now: If Shadowrunners DO get lonestar's attention, and DO commit major crimes within the jurisdiciton of Lonestar (municipal property...), then yeah, they are hosed....

...sort of.

First of all, Shadowrunners are (by canon, anyway) SINless. They don't have an official existance. Just because your DNA is found all over the crime scene doesn't mean they can then look you up and find your home of record. Second, many (most smart ones...) live in the Barrens and other places beyond Lonestar's official reach. Technically the Barrens fall under the municpal contract, sure, but thats a lot of territory, hostile, wild territory filled with people with nothing to lose and a lot of aggression...

And since your average Fake ID doesn't include DNA markers (accurate ones anyway), and the process of sorting all SIN transactions to check for reoccurances of any given DNA markers (or other specific identifiers, including facial recognition software, fingerprints and so forth...) is cost prohibative unless the crime is particularly high profile (kidnapped the mayor's daughter...) most of the time a Fake SIN will hold up for a long time... until the Runner draws attention to it... and are thus useful for bypassing Lonestar's ongoing 'hunt' for them.

Now: A 'random' Lonestar check of a given Shadowrunner's False SIN (provided they have done something in game that would give Lonestar a reason to look for that specific Shadowrunner (In other words, shootouts on public land)...) will only fail if the officer in question looks at something other than just the false SIN (presumably, the better the SIN... in other words, rather than a new rule, just use existing rules for beating fake SINs)... and also you have the potential for runs against Lonestar for the sake of getting rid of particularly problematic data...

Like, say the RUnner needs a new SIN after the last big blow-out, which occured during the exfiltration portion of the run, thus there is blood and bullets all over the city street outside the corporate area. In order to get that Rating Six SIN he's desperate for, his Fake ID contact tells him they'll need to sneak into the local Lonestar CSI lab to corrupt the database they are building of the shootout, otherwise he'll need Genetherapy to cover his tracks...

BAM! Complete optional run to justify in game behavior based on prior in-game behavior....

I have to go with kagentenshi's version.

Lone Star is basically a big gang which the city has given permission to bust heads as necessary, as long as it keeps the lawns of the rich people neat. An individual Lone Star officer just narrowly makes enough to support a Low lifestyle. He's poor, he's largely ignored, he's probably poorly educated, and now he has an automatic weapon. Lone Star the corporation only cares about keeping costs low while keeping the contract with Seattle, so in the nice neighborhoods, they make sure every crime has a suspect pinned to it, rich people are treated with respect and generally allowed to do as they please and so on. In the poor neighborhoods, they just keep stuff from blowing up, making sure the corporations can keep doing business. Providing 'justice' is not part of their charter, they just have to make sure that anyone who makes trouble is made so he will stop making trouble.

In the barrens, no one pays taxes and no one there votes, so the Lone Star is only interested if it can make money. This may mean selling gear to the gangs or what-not, but mostly it'll be enterprising individuals looking to use their badges to make a quick buck.

Lone Star doesn't care about efficiency or justice, although it does care about reducing costs and good PR. It will be more encouraged to find the person who actually committed the crime if doing otherwise will bite them in the butt, but otherwise any poor, SINless ork will do. Since runners are generally repeat criminals, however, they will see a slightly more effective and dedicated face of Lone Star than their poor neighbors will. For the record, Lone Star gets paid more if it takes people in, gets them convicted and holds them in jail, but in the case of runners, the bad PR means they're just as happy to shoot a suspected runner 'while resisting' as they are to actually give them a 'fair' trial.

I think I just changed my outlook

I ARE teh Shadowrun thinker!

Though maybe quoting the entire post was a bit much (as much as I like to see my own words....)


On the corruption angle: Lonestar cops are corporate drones, not government ones. This has a direct impact on how you handle corruption, incidentally.

The Sixth world is a different one from our own. Think about how reluctant people are to lose their jobs now and multiply it a dozen times over. A corporate job isn't just a paycheck, its a life, its an identity. This is as true for a Lonestar goon as it is the VP of Marketing for Renraku.

This might suggest that Lonestar cops are uncorruptable. Far from it, merely that the face of that corruption will be vastly different. You are less likely to see shakedowns and protection rackets, as those would be viewed as 'in violation of corporate policy'... making the corp look bad (which, ironically, is something that the Dystopian setting as presented suggests is anti-thetical to the corporate drone mindset... you don't find Dilbert style employees in shadowrun...). On the other hand, 'solving' a criminal incident by accepting an on the spot 'bribe' in return for a simple 'walk away' rather than a full on bust may even be encouraged, as long as the corp gets it's cut. Bribes to desk jockeys to move paperwork to the top, or bottom, of a stack is fine. Ethics are redefined by 2070: As long as it doesn't prevent corporate activities or effect the bottom line, making a buck on the side is legitimate business, even expected.

A lot of the corruption will be of the white collar sort, beyond the realm of shadowrunners. Some executive gets a kickback for using a certain supplier, another pays a kickback as part of getting a contract to police a certain gated community.

The important distinction at the street level is that the Lone Star beat cops don't see themselves as enforcers of law and order, or paragons of justice or any of the 'white knight' cop attitudes that inform our modern sensibilities, but as the face of their corporation, as men with specific jobs to do. Lonestar, as a corporation, has little economic interest in preserving the antiquated ideals of the public servant mold, and would inculcate a more appropriate attitude in new recruits....


... though keeping the PUBLIC perception of cops is just good marketing. I imagine cop movies haven't changed much except for the branding....

In the games that I play in they are a lot better than the rent-a-cops they are portrayed as in most peoples games. Most of the AAA security rating areas actually have the WORST beat cops. This is where trainees and people with political connections end up. Remember a bad cop will get his partners killed. These guys are the face of a friendly LS and spend a lot of time dealing with minor infractions (shoplifting, assault, vandalism).
The more dangerous areas are where the real "cops". They are to busy with violent crime to deal with victimlesss crimes. Gangs that have protection rackets and sell drugs and run joygirls/boys are much more likely to be left alone; they actually help keep crime down because they don't want to scare off customers. They have to much to worry about with the violent crime; rape, murder, assault with intent. They might know who does 90% of the crimes in there area, but being able to prove it is another thing. They are all about keeping the status quo.

Then there is the HTRT. In our games they are nasty beyond belief. They don't scramble, they have assets in the air at all times. They have mages that run to the scene astrally at almost every call that come in from an officer. Within 5 min of any office down or needs backup, or even if their LS screamer goes off the HTRT is there.

Needless to say; were very carefully about attacking the cops. However if a ganger jumps us and gets killed the cops are much More likely to ask what happened and jot down "self defense" on his crime log. Provided we don't look like we are loaded to start WWIII.
Shoot little Mikey while playing with his toys however and your in a world of drek.

BRod:

You and I have very similar outlooks, have you been reading my notes again?

Nope. I just have a GM who is VERY punishing. Like I've said in other posts, 90% of our runs are more like Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels and Oceans 11 than the Matrix.

Lethality is very high in our game, which oddly makes it so that we have a lower body count.

Actually, it's very different for a VP for Renraku than it is for a beat cop in Lone Star, as Lone Star isn't an AAA corporation. It doesn't provide corporate housing, little, if any corporate schooling. If you decide you're tired of law enforcement, it doesn't provide any space for lateral growth. It doesn't provide dedicated hospitals for you to birth your children in, and is unlikely to have jobs your spouse is interested in. Being a specialized corporation, it really does operate like most other corporations in our modern world. Its employees pay for their own living arrangements which they, not Lone Star owns. They drive to work, work their hours, drive home and Lone Star no longer has much power over what their employees do at that moment.

I do agree this is the case for Knight Errant (or Renraku Red Samurai or what have you), which is why those guys are considered more dangerous to my runners than the average, cheap, LS beat cop. Those guys know if they screw up too badly, when they get canned it really IS the end of their lives. Lone Star officers just look for a new job somewhere else, maybe with Wolverine. It's still their house, their car, their kids.

To be fair and honest, I don't see having an efficent, capable lonestar as a particularly lethal inducing mechanism to the game. I'm assuming that while the PLAYERS may not have the facination with criminality that I do, their CHARACTERS have at least a passing familiarity with basic survival skills.

In other words A LOT of this stuff is 'behind the scenes'. God forbid, if I pulled every trick out of the toolbox it would take my players three or four sessions just to GET their first shadowrun... all that paranoia eats up time. I'd rather they just gave me a short blurb of their SOP paranoia and occasionally updated me with sidebars of what they are doing to maintain it than make it the focus of every run.


ANd while I stand by my general agreement regarding the positioning of lonestar cops in neighborhoods, and the evaluation of crimes, etc..

I think it is not cost effective to maintain HRT teams in the air at all times. Fuel/power is the most expensive thing about flight, and dealing with mental fatigue would reduce the effectiveness of such teams on top of things.

Now: What I can see is that 'on call' HRT teams are loaded and chemically 'suspended' into deployment stations at various sites around the city in high velocity drone 'aircraft'. When the 'call' goes up, the drone launches and simultaniously 'wakes' the team with an adrenaline cocktail. As far as they are concerned they just sat down a few seconds ago and the alarm went off. Intellectually, they probably know what's going on. They'll be at peak readiness, and probably VERY happy with their jobs (think about it, you go in, sit down. Nine times out of ten you stand back up and go home. That tenth time? Yeah, that's the shit you live for, the adrenaline pounding action...)

Depending on your standard 'insertion proceedures' they may not actually be 'sitting' but lying on 'drop sleds', hooked to rappelling harnesses, whatever.

Nezumi: To be honest, I've never been much on the supplemental information on corporations (or anything else) in the sixth world, so I may have missed that note. To me, if you rate (and that means more than the big ten, or however many) you rate for the 'corporate identity' package, otherwise you're a mom and pop, and there ain't much room for a mom 'n pop in Shadowrun.

Now: there is room for guys like the burger flippers and the stuffer shack manager... after all the fast food industry has made a science out of employing people in violation of laws and regulations by hiring and firing high turn over employees (high school students and the like) for years. I don't see there being a cost/benefit analysis decision that would make housing and 'corporate branding' such individuals cost effective coming... ever.

But Cops are different. There is a built in 'branding' going on already. Its EASY to make them corporate drones. Most police are in it for the duration, careerists and more. They already have an 'us vs. them' mentality. Adapt that, nurtchur it, slowly replace it with Lonestar (or whomever). Yes, provide coptowns and copschools... this is GOOD BUSINESS in the sixth world. Maybe LS doesn't qualify for Extranationality (though... I'd say they should... if they have contracts elsewhere, why wouldn't they? Did I miss something where Lonestar only exists in Seattle?)

In some ways this makes them superior to KE. While Knight Errant can always tap the bigger, richer Ares for support, they are a subsidiary, and therefore... without the big dog paying the bills, are actually smaller and weaker than Lonestar is mano e mano. In some ways, Lonestar corporate identity would be strengthened... KE might have access to all Ares property (as any ares citizen) but they are bound to occasionlly feel like squatters or poor country cousins to the parent corp.

But if I'm contradicting something somewhere that says lonestar cops DON"T have corporate identity lodged in their souls... alas, I'll have to be very sad...

...I tend to play them as somewhat desperate.

Based on the Seattle political scene as set in Runner Havens, they are on the hot seat. They need some good busts that give some them good PR and props from City Hall. I have KE salavating over getting the Metroplex LE contract so the pressure is on the Star to shape up. They still don't bother much with the Barrens (nobody in City Hall does) unless they are after someone really big & who's arrest could score them Big PR Points. In the A Neighbourhoods they have have always been tough, but now that approach is reaching into the B rated "Blue Collar" areas as well. Precinct commanders have mandates from management to clean up their act as well as the streets.

Recently the Star has been dealt a minor setback during a somewhat high profile luncheon when a cruiser slammed into the lobby of the New Edgwatrer Hotel taking out several officers as well as a couple civilians. Star IA is "investigating" the matter and both the Mayor and Governor are "concerned". At this point the Runner team involved are the only ones who have an idea of what really went down.

Keep in mind, Lone Star officers narrowly get paid enough to cover a low lifestyle for one person, and Lone Star doesn't offer a lot in the way of bennies either. I don't see a lot of leverage there to properly foster a strong loyalty to the corporation, however it is a perfect environment for fostering abuse and corruption.

Undoubtedly you have access to information I don't regarding all this as I prefer to extrapolate the setting from a few books as possible... but:

If, as I postulate, Lonestar is capable of, and in fact does provide corporate housing and a certain minimum level of benefits then a 'low lifestyle' paycheck can go farther than apparent. My understanding of the 'low lifestyle' bit is, admittedly from Dumpshock, a view based at comparing the 'annual pay' number for a rookie officer to the 'lifestyle' costs in the book, yes?

As far as the 'single person' part of the comment: Starting in the '80's at least, if not earlier, our economy has trended to 'Dual income' families... I see no reason why corporations of any size would seek to change the cost of labor to reflect non-working family members (spouses).

Also: I never suggested a lack of corruption, just a change in the face of that corruption. Certainly in my shadowrun, everyone is corrupt to one extent or another. If anything the existance of Aztechnology, Tamanous and Toxic Shamen actually weaken this idea. By having over the top, worse than everyone else, bad guys you forget that no one, not even your criminal buddies, is really 'on your side'... they are on 'their side'.


Its like this: Lonestar Squadcar A drives around the city as part of the municipal contract to 'preserve the peace'. They see some street thugs breaking the window of some mom-and-pop store. Now, neither the thugs, nor the store owners are clients, so there is no direct reason to intervene or not intervene. Now the guys in the car have some options: They can fulfill the municipal contract that even their bosses prefer to give lip service to and maybe get hurt in the process... or they can ignore it and hope that it doesn't make a stink in the news.

As far as their bosses are concerned as long as no one reports a lone star cruiser ignoring a violent crime in process on a busy city street, then nothing needs to be done. In fact, the squaddies may be under orders to call up in 'edge cases' to get PR guidance in these circumstances... but probably not. Its cheaper and more effiecent to give them mandatory classes on a regular basis instead.

However, if the Lonestar cops pull over and threaten the thugs loudly, then pocket some nuyen to let them walk away, then all is well. They stopped the crime in progress, didn't cost the company any money or bad PR (nothing damaged, no paperwork to file or perps to cage), and made some nuyen on the side.

They can even report the bribe, pay whatever the corporate (or possibly city...) tax is on income, and don't even have to hide it. They may even get a 'good job' from the desk sergeant.

No one even views it as corruption or even wrong. In fact, the store owners could come out during the stop and 'bribe' the officers to take the thugs to jail, starting a small bidding war for a short term corporate contract, of which our squaddies might get a 'finder's fee' off of, as the two groups attempt to outbid eachother on the spot.

Capitalism at its finest...

Hmmm....interesting stuff. I gotta say, I buy into a lot of it. I've always viewed LS as a business entity first. That means they're in the business of increasing shareholder value and they do that by contracting out law enforcement services. From that point on they have to walk a fine line between increasing profit (lower expenses, increase income) and having a quality "product". Since their product is enforcing the law, they need to do a good job at that or they won't make the sale. So I see LS as being very concerned, at a corporate level, about keeping their customers happy -- in this case, that's the Seattle Metroplex government.

However, they also must increase shareholder value, which means maximizing profit. To do that they need to, shall we say, pick their battles. There is no profit in scooping up every last petty thief, pickpocket, purse snatcher, or drug dealer off the street, booking them, processing them, giving them a court date, sentencing them, and perhaps housing them in a jail for 4 months before letting them go and doing it all over again. So how do you maximize profit? Well, IMHO, that means you pick your battles and walk that fine line I first talked about.

You arrest and book almost all the crooks in the high-priced neighborhoods: those are the kinds of areas that create bad press if you screw up. You arrest and prosecute the hardened criminals, the violent offenders (murderers, rapists, big drug dealers) because if too many of them are running loose, the quality of your product goes down and you've got unhappy customers. But with the small stuff, you do the bare minimum to keep the customer happy. So you bust heads, you bribe, you work with organized crime, you keep a lid on crime with the least cost to yourself.

Shadowrunners are expensive liabilities to LS. They're well armed, intelligent, dangerous, and potentially useful people. As long as the runners are keeping to themselves, not endangering LS's charges (the civilians and infrastructure of the metroplex), and staying off of the front page of the newspaper, I'd say LS is more than happy to let them be. Think of how much it would cost for them to take runners on toe-to-toe! Wrecked citymasters, medical bills up the wazoo, life insurance policies to pay, workman's comp, HR overhead to hire and train new employees, fines from the government for wrecking city property, lawsuits for "collateral damage", etc. Nasty stuff for a for-profit entity. In my book, LS would happily let the sleeping dogs lie as long as they don't cause trouble.

Anyway, sorry for the long-winded ramble. I hope it makes sense.

Taking down runners is fairly easy, it's the same way they take down terrorists, robbery gangs, gang leaders etc. They survial the hell out the site, then hit the guys pad when he's dead asleep, then heavily armed teams that outnumber the guys by about 4:1 roll in with flash-bangs and and clear the apartment in about 15 seconds. Ever seen a film of a properly trained tactical team doing a dynamic entry? It's really fast and the people inside don't really have a chance to do much other then cower or get shot. And that's without filling the place with neuro-stun - which as a contact and inhaled toxin is really horrifically effective for taking down people who don't sleep wearing a sealed suit with an internal air supply.

The trick is finding them. Creating a high profile provides the resources to do this.

Mostly from the 2nd edition Lone Star source book and the assorted Corporations books.




Correct. Saying Lone Star provides housing would obviously change the calculation, but there's nothing to suggest they do that and a fair bit of color background to suggest they don't.



I think we agree more on the nature of Lone Star corruption than we originally understood.

Yes, I agree that's how it would probably go down (and if the thugs didn't have anything worth taking, they'd beat the thugs up, haul them into jail, get them caught on some trumped up charges, send them to braindance in prison where LS gets paid more than it pays to keep those thugs alive).




Actually, there is. Lone Star maintains the prisons and makes a profit for every prisoner held in there. It is in their best interest to keep the prisons as full as possible without making it look suspiciously like they're just putting people in there to make money.

However, I suspect the bulk of their profit isn't from maintaining a prison (which any Joe can do), but from catching those crooks in the first place, so your general argument does stand (and is generally how I play them).

Hmm. Interesting. I hadn't really considered that there might be a profit in running a prison. Extrapolating from places like California (and most other states, I suspect), prisons tend to be horrendous money-sinks supported by shrinking tax payer dollars. I can't imagine how LS might turn a profit on a prison...at least anything more than the barely-break-even type. Of course, LS may not have to deal with all the civil rights and legal knotwork that our modern governments do and may be able to cut more corners to save money.

That being said, I think I agree with 95+% of what you've written. Good stuff that I'm sure I'm going to incorporate into my campaign.

I would agree with you on this. But I might still argue that these kinds of things are expensive endeavors that are bound to go south from time to time when you're dealing with talented, well armed people. How often do we see stories on the news today of well trained, well equipped SWAT teams winding up being in a stand-off situation with an average Joe armed with a hunting rifle? Make that average Joe a shadowrunning team armed as well if not better than LS, toss in a little luck (or bad luck from LS's point of view) and you've got yourself a recipe for disaster.

Still, I think your point is valid. Not every anti-shadowrunning operation is going to end up in a running street battle with guns a-blazin'. Of course, LS might decide that it would be more economical to just work the back corridors to try to neutralize the runners. A few phone calls to the corp(s) that are paying the runners, some thumb-screws applied to the team's fixer, or maybe even a face-to-face meet with an undercover officer warning them to back away might work much better than a SWAT team and a truckload of stun grenades!

Actually been watching alot of that program on a&e 48 hours. More realistic view of murder investigations then say csi. Can imagine with matrix and astral addition to those investigators crimes could be solved even faster with more accuracy. Now I assume and MAKE my players think when they commit there "crimes". Someone is watching and someone will scour the site for evidence...take precautions. PC's should have an edge over say your random street killer unless there randomly killing out on the street in front of there home.

CSI is kind of the best case scenario with all the toys necessary to process the evidence. Yes, 48 hrs is a great show for real life crime solving techniques, most of which involve tracking down leads from witnesses and informants...HORRAY FOR SOCIAL ADEPT COPS!!!!