One of the bigger issues that I had and continue to have while serving in the DEPD, that I consider a department wide issue, because of its potential to affect any/all officers of our department, is that, even though I am ICly assumed and expected to have been trained and know what I am doing, OOCly I know little to nothing about policing-besides what I see on Cops and Speeders (in a town where there is no traffic for traffic tickets) and other cop shows. What really intrigued me was How could a character be (ICly) expected to know something when the roleplayer behind the character knows nothing on that subject (OOCly)?

After several have noticed that several others were in desperate need for some training, we hosted a training class today; however, what I suggest that we do is to actually create an online Police Academy for the Dead End PD. This way, instead of assuming that Officers are ICly trained when in fact they know nothing, we can send actually ICly send them to Police Academy before they are officially hired as rookies. What we can do is to have experienced Officers create Powerpoints, Lessons, and the such and post them on the Academy Website, along with tests following each lesson that applicants must pass in order to be considered for employment in our department. Every officer in the department should be able to access these lessons at any time and should be able to use said lessons as a reference while they roleplay out their duties. We can also use this for ongoing training and on the job training which in Real life Officers will have to go through and which can be used as a criteria for promotion.

I know that I have already discussed this during our lesson today with Shade and that Shade, who at the time seemed to like this idea is already working towards implementing this; however, I decided to post this anyways so that we can further discuss this as a team.

I have never actually worked with creating something like this before; however, I do know of a program or such called Moodle which I have seen used for such a purpose. Of course, we can always just upload the PowerPoints to the site and then test through Google Doc Forms although this Moodle thing can give each Officer an account to access the courses with, can allow for both lesson to be uploaded and test to be administered, can track progress, amongst other things.

As Shade mentioned to me earlier, as good of an idea this is, there is also going to be a good amount of work that’s going to be needed to be put into this-designing the site, writing up and creating lessons, etc. Since each of us know more or less about different topics, I suggest that as a department we should get together and each contribute whatever they can to create this, given that we do go ahead and create this Police Academy (another reason I brought it to forums anyways). I hope that someone who is an actual police officer or who has the expertise of a IRL Police Officer can join in with this (not too sure but I’m hoping we have an actual IRL cop in our department), again, given that we do go ahead with this idea.

So what do y’all think? Think we should give this a try? Anyone who can and is willing to help with this?