TEPD — Law Enforcement

How to join Estate PD, gear up at the armoury, and use your day-to-day powers — stop and search, roadside tests, fixed penalty notices, and the records system that logs everything.

Joining TEPD

Police work runs through the same Job Centre flow as any other career — pick up the “police” job, then toggle yourself on duty. Duty is the master switch: almost nothing below — armoury access, cuffing, roadside powers, the records system — works while you’re off duty.

Your grade decides what you’re trusted with. Fresh recruits carry the rank of PCSO and can detain a suspect pending a warranted officer, but can’t cuff, carry firearms, or issue penalty notices themselves. Clearing probation into a warranted grade opens the full toolkit: arrests, firearms eligibility, fixed penalty notices, and warrant execution. Command ranks (Inspector and above) additionally get authority to hand out specialist tickets to other officers. The path from recruit to command rank, along with the specialist units you can join, is covered in full in Training & Ranks.

Off duty, you’re just a civilian with a job title. Toggle on before you touch the armoury or approach anyone.

Kitting Up At The Armoury

Every station has a physical armoury you interact with while on duty. Draw Kit hands you a warranted officer’s standard loadout — protective vest, baton, incapacitant spray, cuffs, taser, a body camera, and a set of forensic tools (fingerprint kit, swabs, evidence bags) — or a lighter radio-and-camera kit if you’re a PCSO. Drawing again only tops up whatever you’re missing, so there’s no harm re-checking your loadout mid-shift.

Warranted officers holding the AFO (Authorised Firearms Officer) ticket get a separate Firearms option: a sidearm and a carbine, one of each checked out at a time. Every issue and return is logged against your name, so an unaccounted-for weapon comes back to you specifically. Return Kit hands everything back at once, including firearms — if something’s gone missing in the field it still gets marked returned and flagged rather than silently vanishing.

All of this only works standing at an actual armoury — you can’t draw kit from across the map.

Everyday Powers

Targeting a member of the public while on duty opens a set of enforcement options, all logged against that person’s record the moment you use them:

• Stop & Search — pick a stated ground (drugs, weapons, stolen property, going equipped, public order). Whatever ground you choose is written into the record verbatim, so a weak or fabricated reason is just as visible to a later review as a solid one.
• Breathalyse — a roadside sobriety check that reads the subject’s actual intoxication state against a set limit. A roadside drug wipe is also carried in the kit, though it currently comes back negative on every subject pending a wider rollout of drug-impairment detection. You’ll need the relevant kit item drawn from the armoury.
• Issue FPN — a warranted-only power. You pick from a fixed list of minor, on-the-spot offences (things like speeding, careless driving, driving without a licence, possession, shop theft, common assault) and the system charges the configured fine automatically. Point-bearing offences also endorse the subject’s driving licence.

FPN money doesn’t always come out of thin air the same way: a driving offence charged against a vehicle the subject actually owns is billed through their vehicle insurance where possible, reducing what lands on them directly; everything else goes onto their standing bills for later settlement. For the deeper detail on stops, stingers and mobile ANPR, see Pursuit & Traffic.

Batoning, tasering, or spraying someone auto-writes a use-of-force entry to the record — there’s no manual step to remember, and no way to keep it off the books.

Making An Arrest

Targeting a suspect and choosing Cuff starts a contested restraint: you need cuffs on you, need to be close, and the suspect gets a genuine chance to slip free before it locks in. Once cuffed, a suspect can’t fight, sprint, drive, or touch their inventory — though they can still try to struggle loose if left unwatched for too long.

From there you can escort a cuffed suspect on foot, load them into a vehicle, and finally book them in at a custody suite, which hands them into the charging and court pipeline. That whole downstream process — charges, bail, court, licence points, jail time — belongs to Arrest, Court & Prison; this page only covers getting a suspect there.

The PNC and the Dispatch Board

Every officer works off the same shared records system, reachable two ways: a desk terminal at police locations (press to interact), or the Police app on your tablet for mobile use. Both give you the same core tools:

• The CAD/dispatch board — a live list of open incidents, unit statuses, and calls waiting to be picked up. You can self-assign to a call, update its status, and raise a panic alert if things go wrong.
• The PNC (records search) — look someone up by name, vehicle, or description. Every search asks you to state a policing purpose first, and that reason is permanently logged — there’s no anonymous browsing of the public’s records.
• A person’s record shows their known markers, warrants, vehicles, and incident history, all built from the actions you and other officers take on shift.

Calls coming in from the public via 999 & 111 land straight on this board. The records system itself — searching, markers, warrants, and what a detective can dig up on a case — gets its own full treatment in Investigations & CCTV.

Talkgroups and the Radio

Your duty kit includes a police radio — a dedicated item distinct from the ordinary civilian handheld covered in Phones, Tablets & Radios. Using it from your inventory opens a channel menu populated with force-only talkgroups plus a shared multi-agency channel you hold in common with TEMS control. Access checks your job, not just whether you’re holding the item, so losing the job — or losing the radio — drops you off the channel within about a minute.

Push-to-talk is the same key you’d use on any voice channel; while transmitting, a handset visibly attaches to your hand so people around you can see you’re on the radio.

Tickets — Specialist Qualifications

Beyond rank, five separate tickets unlock specialist capability, granted or revoked by command officers:

Any officer can check their own tickets; command ranks can check and manage anyone’s. Full detail on earning these and how they sit alongside the rank ladder lives in Training & Ranks.

Accountability

Your body-worn camera isn’t optional in practice — using cuffs, force, or any enforcement power auto-starts it if it isn’t already rolling, and logs that specific moment as a discrete recorded event. Going off duty stops the recording. Between the camera, the mandatory search-purpose statement, and the fact that every stop, search, force use, and FPN is written straight to a permanent record, TEPD work is built to be auditable after the fact — by your supervisors as much as anyone you’ve dealt with.