QUOTE (Midas @ Aug 11 2012, 04:37 AM)
Yeah, I must admit I don't see how any policing duties "generate profit" beyond the (fairly lucrative) price of the policing contract anyway.
See, that's because you're used to living in a place with honest, professional police. The ways for the cops to make money are myriad, especially if they're actually volunteers nominally beholden to the jurisdiction which pays their salaries, but to the almighty papa corp.
Off the top of my head:
1: Speed trap. Find a guy whom Grid Guide reports is operating manually, pull him over at the end of any stretch where he got himself up to the speed limit or exceeded it, and tell him he exceeded it by ten miles an hour. Have your hacker - the guy who has security access to GridGuide and most likely has hacked himself an Admin account - change the GG numbers to reflect it, and write him a ticket. Most of them won't dare to fight it, especially if they're an out-of-towner, they'll just pay (on the spot.) If they actually work up the testes to dispute the ticket in traffic court, you can just pass it off as a gridguide malfunction and dismiss the ticket as an erroneous error made in good faith.
2: Protection shake-down. Yes, just like the other side does. This is more profitable at the level of a few guys to a squad, though it can work for the whole company, but the best part is that it's really simple and, depending on the terms of your contract, may not even be illegal. Explain to the local shop owners that, while their contract with the municipality
does cover protecting them, private enterprises are on a much lower response rating that, say, things which happen in the streets, or to government buildings.
However, for the low, low repeating price of a sum which is roughly the same as that a criminal syndicate would charge; enough to make your eyes pop out and your blood pressure spike, but not so much that it would ruin you and drive you out of business, you can purchase an enhanced protection package, adding your, yes,
your business, to the same response list that government buildings and vehicles enjoy! So that when you press that PanicButton, you can rest assured that Lone Star/Knight Errant are going to come racing to your aid, lights and sirens, rather than ignoring it in favor of higher-priority calls and getting to you four hours later at three in the morning when you've had everything stolen, lock, stock, and barrel.
If they don't pay? Well, that's fine, that's their prerogative, of course. Then you just 'happen' to mention, whilst in earshot of some gangers who are due to be released from lockdown in the immediate future, that XYZ business/block of businesses chose not to pay for the enhanced protection package, and it's a real shame that their response time is four hours unless literally nothing else is going on. If any individual businesses did pay for the protection, be sure to name them by name and state that 'Yeah, but ABC paid, so if they call, we're going to have to run right over there."
Wham bam, within the two days after those gangers being sprung, every business on the block that didn't pay you will have been cleaned out to bare shelves, and you can make a big scene of arriving right on time three hours and fifty minutes too late to do a goddamn thing except make a big show of taking pictures and statements and dusting for fingerprints, all of which will be shoved in a box and forgotten about, because even if they later pay, those incidents happened before the enhanced protection plan was paid in full.
3: Random shake-downs for fun and profit. Admittedly, this one is risky, so it's best done with two or three big, armored trolls in uniform backing you up. Pick a guy who looks like a runner, or some other kind of well-financed crook, and shake him down. Rigorously check everything on him for ID and licenses. If anything comes back suspect - and at least one thing probably will, because who hasn't had occasion to need one of their pieces of gear on them that their license for is licensed to another fake SIN, drag them to lock-up and go over everything else on them with the Rating 6 scanner back at the lock-up. When they bribe you to let them go, you take the bribe money, and then smack them around for being an idiot, before thanking them for their contributions to your financial welfare. Report the bribe, that you took it, and that you then failed utterly to comply with what you being bribed to do - the old German Army system. Your hackers can then backtrace the bribe's payment and hopefully get that account drained, too.
This works best if you catch a negligent and well-off runner whose life you can disassemble (literally,) for profit (from draining the one basket he was stupid enough to keep all his eggs in, selling all those tasty illegal things back on the black market, up to and including pawning off his augs secondhand,) but the far more common case is that you'll catch some well-off idiot who bought a big handgun from a shady guy to look like a badass and get laid, and you can then shake him down for a large bribe and sell off his gun/keep it for yourself.
QUOTE
I guess a file could be shelved due to lack of progress in the investigation or lack of new leads though.
For me, the police looking after their own is an important lynchpin in my gameworld, and I would imagine this to be important for morale as well as engendering respect. If criminals know that killing a cop is going to lead to a massive costs-be-damned manhunt, they're likely to think twice about doing it in the first place.
Morale and respect are intangible qualities which don't have a tangible effect on the bottom line. Therefor, in the dystopian future that is Shadowrun, the corporate overlords who may haven't carried a badge (at least in any actual enforcement capacity) for twenty years - and the shareholders who are certain never to have done so - aren't going to be happy if you're spending a lot of money persecuting some unprofitable case that hasn't made the news and which is financially best ignored.