# Policing — the pre-arrest half *The other half of the loop. Where the rest of Justice deals with people the colony has already caught, **policing** is what happens before the cell door: your own colonists commit crimes on the propensity spectrum, the colony investigates, and — sometimes — arrests.* It is a big behavioural change (your colonists become potential criminals), so it has **its own toggle** in the mod settings, on by default. Turn it off to run the rest of Justice — classification, deterrence, discipline, parole, regime — without colony crime. --- ## The loop **crime → witnessed / investigated → weighed arrest (resist?) → prison → … → parole → recidivism** Every stage draws on the same shared systems — each colonist's propensity, the one shared criminal record, the climate of order — so policing is not a bolt-on: the record it writes is the record classification grades on and discipline reforms. ## Crime — and why small colonies stay honest Every ~40 seconds, each free colonist gets a hidden roll to offend. The base chance is low (about 6% per roll) and it is multiplied hard by nature × nurture — almost nobody with an ordinary disposition ever does anything. But it is *also* multiplied by **crime cover**: | Free colonists | Crime cover | |---|---| | ≤ 3 | 0.15 | | ~8 | ~0.6 | | ≥ 13 | 1.0 | In a tight 2–3 pawn colony everyone knows everyone and retribution is certain even without a jail, so crime is **rare**; a larger, more anonymous colony offers cover. This is a deliberate inversion of the naive "no enforcement → more crime": a small colony is kept honest by its own closeness, not by a constable. A crime is one of **theft**, **vandalism**, or **assault** — leaning on who the culprit is (a kleptomaniac steals, a bloodlusty pawn assaults, a pyromaniac vandalizes). ## Consequences — the stakes A crime leaves a mark the colony can *see*: - **Theft** lifts a small stack of the colony's goods and the thief **pockets it**. RimWorld has no per-person property (stockpiles are communal), so theft is theft from the common store — but the culprit now physically carries what they took, a natural evidence trail a search can pick up. - **Vandalism** damages a nearby colony building. - **Assault** gives a nearby colonist a light, down-safe knock — and the culprit chooses their mark **wisely**: someone they resent (motive), who is weak (little retribution), and unwatched (few witnesses). - **Relationships fray.** An assault victim thinks much worse of their attacker immediately (they saw who did it); and when investigation *names* a culprit, the whole colony's opinion of them drops. - The colony is **notified** a crime happened — culprit unknown. ## Witnesses and investigation A crime is not equally solvable. Colonists who were near enough to **see** it are witnesses, and each is a partial lead — a witnessed crime starts up to 80% of the way to solved before anyone lifts a finger; an unseen one is a **cold case** worked from nothing. Investigation then builds evidence toward a full, named solve two ways: - **Ambient** progress, scaled by how many colonists the colony can spare — a background trickle from everyone keeping an eye out, faster when the colony has people to spare. - **The policing work type.** Assign a colonist to *policing* and they walk to open **crime scenes** and work them, adding a chunk of evidence scaled by their Intellectual + Social skill. A sharp constable cracks cases fast; a colony that spares no one lets them go cold. ## The weighed arrest A solved case does **not** mean an automatic arrest. Fellow-colonist cops will not gut the colony to jail someone over a petty crime — the arrest is a cost/benefit call, and it goes ahead only when both are true: the colony can **afford a prison**, and the crime is **serious enough** to clear a bar that rises with how valuable the culprit is. - **Severity** — the crime's kind (theft 1 · vandalism 1.5 · assault 2.5), escalated by the culprit's record (a rap sheet and prior escapes compound). - **Value** — 0..1 from the culprit's best skills. The bar sits at about 1.5 for an expendable pawn and climbs by three times the culprit's value — so a star colonist raises it to about 4.5. - **Capacity** — **below ~5 colonists, or with no prison bed, the colony arrests no one.** A prisoner plus a warden would cripple a small colony. Capacity ramps up as the colony grows. So a petty crime by your only doctor → they walk. A murder → arrested regardless. And a crime that paid, unanswered, erodes the climate of order a little more (crime emboldens). ## Resisting arrest The disposed do not go quietly (seeded by nature × nurture): - **Comply** → taken in cleanly (they become a prisoner of the colony — imprisonment is direct, and it survives guest-management mods like Hospitality). - **Resist** → the violent turn **berserk**, the rest **flee**. A botched arrest becomes a crisis the colony must handle the hard way, and openly defying arrest emboldens the lawless. - **Subdued** → a resister the colony beats down is then **imprisoned** — the resist path resolves to a cell once the colony wins the confrontation. One who flees the map gets away. ## Prison riots When the climate of order **collapses** (deterrence at the floor) in a colony holding prisoners, a neglected prison boils over into a **riot**: disposed prisoners turn violent together, and the unrest shatters order further. A well-run colony (high deterrence) never sees one — a riot is the thing a badly-run institution *earns*. ## Recidivism, made visible The loop closes on itself: a pawn hardened in prison (negative reform) runs a higher propensity and reoffends. When investigation names a culprit the colony had **paroled**, it says so out loud — the recidivism loop turning in the open, the payoff for everything classification, discipline, and parole did upstream. --- Part of **Institution: Policing**, in the Institution suite.