It's recently been brought up to me that people have been IMing HPD officers directly, telling them OOCly about scenes in progress and expecting them to show up. I'd like to clarify one very important point about the HPD officers:

We are not now, nor have we ever been, REQUIRED to answer your calls.

People that choose to play HPD officers have as much right to choose what to RP as you do. If we are involved in a scene elsewhere, we do NOT have to react to your IM or your 911 calls. As part of our character concept, if we are NOT involved in a scene elsewhere; then yes it is expected we respond to 911 calls but we are never expected to respond to personal IMs.

Metagaming:
When you IM us and say, "Hey, suchandsuch is happening at Thisplace." Then expect us to show up and deal with it? That's metagaming. We have no in character knowledge that suchandsuch is happening at Thatplace, so we have absolutely no reason to go over to Thatplace and deal with suchandsuch. All HPD staff WILL ignore metagamed requests for police involvement.

Big Plots:
If you come into the station, or call in a 911 about a large plot case and want the police to be involved in it, please respect the fact that we put actual hours into investigating these crimes. When we have 5-10 hours real time put into investigating a case, and then some white-knight rushes in to save the day; that's 5-10 hours of our time wasted trying to help YOUR character's story at YOUR request that could have been better spent dealing with someone else that will let us see the RP through to the end.

Work Load:
When there is an officer on duty, it is COMMON for us to have to deal with 3-5 calls PER DAY each. This is a LOT of work, and when we do this sort of work for YOUR stories, and then hear nothing but complaining about what we did, it's hard for us to continue to want to do work for YOUR characters. Bear in mind that most of the officers very rarely ever have RP outside of the HPD because we simply haven't the time to have personal RP. If we do go off duty, then we hear complaints about how the HPD never do any work.

Swarming/Attention Hogs:
When we have a scene on the street it's common for people to gather around to watch the scene and involve themselves in it. This is fine, but the problems start when one or more of the people walking into the scene tries to inject themselves into it as a major role. That's interrupting a scene. ie: If we're arresting someone and you come walking up and suddenly attack us to white-knight some random stranger just because they're faced off with the HPD, you make yourself the center of attention and ruin the scene the HPD had going on with the suspect.

Ninjas/Billy Badasses:
HPD officers are trained in the Police Academy how to fight hand to hand, and with the various weaponry they're issued. When we're faced against average citizens, we aren't expected to always 'win', but we also don't expect every person we come up against to be an elite forces ninja that used to work for the CIA, trained in MMA and assassination with immunities to OC spray and the ability to pull taser prongs out of their body while screaming 'by the power of grayskull'. This is Hathian... the ass end of nowhere. People with that sort of training don't live in the slums of the United States.

All of the above listed things are causing our officers to burn out and go elsewhere for a 'break' away from the hassle of people forgetting that the HPD members get to chose their RP as much as you do.

This statement has been posted with the endorsement of Captain Hendrich Andel.