If Police Chief Jack Boyd is going to be forced into retirement, he's determined to go out on top.
That's the premise of This Is the Police, a game coming this summer on PC from Weappy Studio, a small indie joint based out of Minsk, Belarus. Boyd always tried to be a good cop, even if he was never a good man—but after a corruption scandal rocks his department and exposes his corrupt deputy, he's given up on being the hero. Boyd has six months left before retirement, and he's going to spend it putting together a nice little nest egg by any means necessary.
"I had this kind of story in mind for several years," Ilya Yanovich, director at Weappy, says. "My grandfather was the police chief of my hometown."
He pauses. "Well, not a corrupt police chief."
Last month, I got to spend some time with an early build of This Is the Police, a portion covering the first 30 days of its 180-day span. The game is a mixture of character-driven narrative and strategic simulation, and tells Jack's story in a minimal, graphic-novel-like format. The noir-styled voiceovers from John St. John (aka the voice of tough-guy extraordinaire Duke Nukem) evoke a strained bitterness; Jack Boyd is an old asshole on his last leg, and he's determined to break bad any way he can.
He still has to keep up his day job, though, so the meat of the game traffics in the day-to-day duties of police administration. You respond to calls, manage your on-duty officers, and oversee criminal investigations. It's not exactly a realistic take—I imagine real police chiefs don't handpick and dispatch officers from the station for every crime—but it aims to be a harrowing one.
"We didn't care too much about how authentic it's going to be from a police routine point of view," said Yanovich. "We cared more about characters and story."
Jack Boyd is not exactly good people, but it's up to the player whether or not his story is one of redemption or destruction. If you want, you can keep the corruption to a minimum, trying to earn Jack's goal—a cool half-million dollars—the old-fashioned way.
Even if you do, though, you'll likely be wading into morally murky territory. Early on in the demo, a white supremacist group begins threatening black police officers, and the mayor—himself more than a little corrupt—offers a disturbing solution to the problem: fire all black employees of the city. ("For their own safety," of course.) "If someone's boss asks them to make some of these choices, a normal man would say, no, of course not," Yanovich says. "But in this context? You start thinking, 'maybe I just fire some guys.' It's obviously bad, but not as bad as getting them killed."
It's an uneasy situation to be placed in, and while I can't help but find it contrived, it still strikes a nerve. The game never lets you forget the complex set of pressures and political structures governing police work: the town of Freeburg is a stratified and nasty place, with mobsters, religious officials, fringe political groups, and corrupt officials all vying for power and influence. Later in the demo, I'm asked by the mayor to forcefully suppress a feminist demonstration downtown. I refuse. I don't know what the consequences for that will be in the final game, but Yanovich promises that choices like that won't be forgotten.
In Belarus, as in the United States, police work, and the abuse of police authority, is a highly contested political issue. Yanovich knows that his team is wading into a fraught political situation, though he says he doesn't intend his game to respond to specific political issues as such. Instead, it's more broadly about the weight of power. Less documentary, more prestige drama.
"It's about how people use the power of the police, about what kind of man we're giving that power to," Yanovich said. "If Jack Boyd is a good police chief, we have a good police force. If he's a bad person, we end up with a very dangerous, militarized force. When any kind of force or institute has that much power, we should be really careful about what kind of people we are putting in charge of it."
