I was looking around on the net and i saw this particular Dick Figures kind of wisdom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3n_IkqcPV0

Who's going to stop a cop car?

So i ask. How easy is it to impersonate Lone Star/Knight Errant?

Licenses are easy to come by, and a good fake sin goes a long way. What is needed to stabilish a working Law Enforcement SIN?

What kind of gear exist in cop cars by standard that stop them from being "requisitioned" by runners? What can they expect when they enter a cop car? What kind of Security?

Impersonate LS/KE? No idea. I do know that it would most likely be a bad idea to snatch a unit off the streets, so many RFID tags and biometric ident checks it would be crazy. Now, getting KE/LS to do your dirty work for you? Thats a lot more fun :>

So far in my current game we have used KE to obtain a package from a distributor warehouse and used LS to lock up a Terra First fool who was getting in the way of our run.

Well it would raise some suspicion when you're not in their comm system and your vehicle doesn't show up on their grid.
"Respond 3-14... Operator what do you mean there's no 3-14 in our system?"

That's kinda my point. The idea is not to make the car disappear. The idea is to make the COPS disappear and keep the card "working normally."

In that case, If you just nick the car off the street.. Assuming you get it running despite anti-theft protection and a pilot reporting anomalities back to HQ.
Once the cops discovers the theft they just dial it in and HQ drives the car back to HQ (Nicely locked with the thieves inside) If you override that well then you're back to the whole "not part of the system" dilemma.
Now if you were to remove the cops, their biomonitors/stealth tags would kick in after they don't report in for a certain amount of time. At that point you just need to pray you can outgun/run the Firewatch team on your ass.
Gut feeling? More trouble then it's worth.

I would start with the standard Security levels for Security gear, which is rating 4.

That seems a little low, but what makes is a difference will be all the procedures and the consequences. Security firms/Corps will have active security measures and active monitoring available. Opponents will be typically professional, dedicated, motivated and trained.

After you've breached security and done your business you'll need to get away with it long term. The security corps will go out of their way to respond to any breach of their security, in tracking it down, and in dealing with the consequences. They are extremely motivated to do so. Even if there is a net loss in nuyen. Rep really matters to them. Consumer confidence in Security forces is vital.

In several ways I would look at this is something that a runner team could get away initially with easily enough, but the consequences are something to give some real pause. Do you really want to be high on the hit list of a corp which specializes in tracking down people?

Having a corrupt cop on your side might be really worth it instead.

Well, at the minimum, you're going to need to be able to talk the lingo, and be very familiar with their procedures. So you're going to want a language skill specialization in police jargon and a Knowledge skill of Police Procedures with, I'd say, a minimum dice pool of 6. (Counting, of course, any specializations.)

Then you're going to have to beat the biometrics on the car. The simplest way to do this is to hack the car itself and add your own actual biometrics to its list of authorized users. Obviously, you'll also need any relevant RFIDs the car may scan for on your person, but you should be able to acquire those from the schmucks you just shanghai'd. You're probably gonna want the "Face" in the vehicle to be able to vocally impersonate the officers you just hijacked, so they're going to want voice modulator cyber, hopefully with the secondary pattern buffer, just in case they're running voice recognition software on the communications node back at the precinct.

The car is going to have a lot of goodies, of course. You can expect it to have GloMoss device to notify the occupants if they're being subjected to any astral phenomena. It's going to have a rather good computer inside it, which will be worth a lot if you 'nick it. The back seat will have the triggerable passenger-restraint version of the anti-theft system, so if you need to move someone who's not cooperative, in a hurry, and you can pull it off, hijacking a cop car isn't the worst idea you could come up with, even though it has a list of cons a mile long.

The trunk, of course, is going to be full of all sorts of goodies; expect, at the least, a box of spare restraints sized for all kinds of metahumans and a nice, beefy long-arm with APDS ammo for it, and of course some poppers of Jazz, spare tire, automotive tool-kit, etcetera.

The biggest problem with hijacking a cop car is that the cops are going to want it back sooner or later, and unless you're some very convincing Faces who just happened to match the cops you hijacked in metatype and build and have all the goodies necessary to mimic their biometrics, and have done a massive amount of background checking on them, you're not going to be able to hijack a couple of cops, finish out their shift, drive back to the precinct and clock out in their uniforms. And stealing a cop car is a very, very bad idea, because you're going to have to put an absolutely ridiculous amount of work into cleaning it of all of its RFID tags, thoroughly destroying the existing software to replace it with your own that won't call back and say "Hey, I'm thirty days overdue for maintenance, come check on me," and of course, then repaint it, and dismount the light bar (assuming it had one.)

It's really not a very safe idea. Very cost-effective if you already have everything you need to do it, because you'll get a very pimped-out ride, but the cops will be looking for it, so you're probably going to want to move it to another city.

Hacker to fake identities, get a decommissioned car and set it up to look legit. A little background search beforehand on KE/LS tactics. A spoof chip in the car could go a long way as well.

Can't you just spoof a ' accept new user' command from HQ? Also, wouldn't a "I'm a cop" license work? Specially with a good SIN?



That was what i was asking for. Thanks.

The biggest problem with hijacking a cop car is that the cops are going to want it back sooner or later, and unless you're some very convincing Faces who just happened to match the cops you hijacked in metatype and build and have all the goodies necessary to mimic their biometrics, and have done a massive amount of background checking on them, you're not going to be able to hijack a couple of cops, finish out their shift, drive back to the precinct and clock out in their uniforms. And stealing a cop car is a very, very bad idea, because you're going to have to put an absolutely ridiculous amount of work into cleaning it of all of its RFID tags, thoroughly destroying the existing software to replace it with your own that won't call back and say "Hey, I'm thirty days overdue for maintenance, come check on me," and of course, then repaint it, and dismount the light bar (assuming it had one.)


I never thought about using the car and dismantle it. It would certainly be too hot. but i thought it would be a plan to an infiltration job on a mid-high level run.



I just thought using it to do a job and escape. Who's going to mess with a cop car?

A smart cop can easily trip you up, however...

John McClane: "Hey, Metro, how's your day goin' over there? Yeah, you gotta be pretty, uh, crazy over there, what with all those 5-87's, huh?"
Mai Lihn: "Yes, sir, we've had to dispatch all units."
John McClane: "Yeah, you had to dispatch all units for all the naked people walkin' around?" - Die Hard 4.0

A police vehicle should also have a fairly decent medical kit inside - R3 or R4. If for no other reason than that cops get shot at a lot, and ambulances don't teleport around.

Point of interest: in modern use, the number codes have gone the way of the dodo, because different number codes would be meaningless across even similar agencies - such as different police departments - to say nothing of police departments interacting with emergency medical and fire responders, let alone local agencies trying to interact with federal agencies. At best, they were meaningless - at worst, agencies used the same numbers to mean very different things.

10-4 remains in common parlance because it's become such an accepted use of "I acknowledge" that everyone uses it, and rapes and such are still referred to by their number codes out of respect for dignity.


That said, that's why you want a working knowledge of police lingo.

Like I said.. its most likely easier to dupe LS/KE into doing your dirty work for you with a little social engineering by the face and some set up by the runners.

Fake it to a cop? Or fake it to the general public? Faking it to the general public is almost trivial. There was a case last year of a guy in a sedan pulling people over with flashing yellow flashing lights.

In SR, faking being LS to KE is probably pretty easy. Faking being LS to LS .... is only middling easy. (It's happened.)

Conveniently you left out KE to KE.

Also, with encryption being able to be afforded by most police, they don't have to have this mystical code system to confuse everyone with a simple radio scanner that listens to police frequencies. (Of course, getting a police descrambler...).

And John is a Timex Watch in a Digital World, anyhow, so him using a number code just makes sense from a character point of view. A smart (or someone with knowledge of police procedures) person would have just gone, "Sorry, I don't understand the code, I was hired in the Twenty-First Century." as they've probably had to explain that to quite a few old cops time and again not to use number codes.

Ten-Codes have somewhat been standardized by Amateur Radio Operators and the few Truckers that still have Civilian-Band Radios (They're more reliable than cell phones in Canada, which has too many dead zones.), and 10-4 is the standard "Acknowledge" from that. So is 10-20 for a request of location. There are a bunch of others, but it's been years since I've had Dad talk to me about it.

I'd ask him about it now, but I doubt ashes in an urn would give much of a good answer. Google is your friend at least for that.

Also, the number codes really didn't fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled. Crooks knew the codes same as the cops.



Nobody ever said Die Hard crooks were clever. Fiendishly brilliant at getting money, perhaps, but not clever.

To be fair, it's better than most hacker movies I've seen.

At least they knew what a USB Stick was (First appearance in a movie!!!).

Sneakers is the only one I can see without my brain trying to strangle me and my soul burning with the hate-filled passion of ten-thousand supernovas.

*Smirk*
"You want me to hack the planet? he wants me to hack the planet... Okey, if I were to do this I would need an unlimited supply of Xena tapes and hot pockets"

*Watches Canray implode to a singularity* Sorry, I'm just a fan of supermassive black holes.

Did you just call CanRay fat?

I have to say that I thought of something similar to this myself, but I never had time or inclination to go into it in depth. It's good to see that someone on this rock is less lazy than me!

Also, the 51-50.

What about getting a SUV with Chameleon Coating, GridLink Override, GridLink, spoof Chip, Morphing License Plate, Special Machinery (retractable Emergency vehicle lighting), Special Machinery (Siren).
Then dress in black Business Suits with Sunglasses and have a License that says FBI.

Add a Rocket booster [retractable] which is activated by a big red button on the dash, then say you're with the MIB.

Hell, the MIB saw which way the wind was blowing around the time the first Megacorporation first had someone executed in cold blood for profit. They jumped ship, burned all their bases and jumped out-of-system.

That black SUV with the rocket booster and the finely-suited men inside is with the DIMR now.

So are the MIB now the Mages in Black?

Yup. I believe Horizon are releasing that movie later this year.

You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmet.....

Considering what shadowrunners get up to every day, anti-piracy warnings like that are just giving us ideas.

Not only would I steal a policeman's helmet (it's a great disguise part), I'd also download a car!

My current character would never do something like that... But putting some dumb street ganger up to you? Hell yes.

I'm tempted to show my group this to see what they do.

Do it! Do it do it do it!

Will show them Sunday, see what happens. But they're currently busy trying to figure out what happened after a bar crawl gone bad, with the last memories at "The Cathode Glow", where a group of hackers were role playing, got upset about the "Null Heads" in the bar, and dared them to drink a few "PPC"s (Guess what the hackers were RPGing!).

The group woke up in the basement of Ghoul Cab Headquarters ("I didn't know Ghoul Cab had a headquarters!"), completely stripped, and thrown to the ghouls in the basement because the driver was a bit on the slow side, and only heard the "Dead" part of "Dead Drunk".

And the Hacker's personal hacking device of choice? The one autographed by "Bull: The Best Ork Decker You Never Met", yeah, it's gone.

All I have to say is: "This is your brain. This is your brain on ShadowSEA Apps written by Neo-@s. Any questions?"

Battletech: A Time of War 17th Edition




Oh, he's going to be furious.



"Yes: Where's the nearest gun salesman who takes credit and can get me an Ares Predator on short notice? I have a lot of 10mm payback to dispense."

Close enough. The Conga-Line of Humiliation didn't stop there, as he's also the group's Rigger and one of the drivers. His Ares RoadMaster was stolen, used for a joy ride, and then parked across three handicapped spaces. 5000¥ fine and two months until his court date to see if his license is going to be suspended.

And that didn't even include the usage of the van as a troll's outhouse and squatter's den. Hacker/Rigger ejected them PHYSICALLY.Actually, the guy with the App Addiction is not the Hacker/Rigger, and he's happy he got to one of his safehouse stashes (guess who in my group read my book? ) and now has armor, good clothing that didn't come out of a vending machine or were a ghoul's castoffs, and some personal protection items.

But, yes, he is being blamed very, very badly.

Oh, and their front-of-a-front is shut down as the Yaks have a "Business Meeting"...

In CanRay's group, people who bought and read Safehouses get the treatment otherwise afforded to the GMs significant other.

I would've sworn that wasn't a real thing until recently.