I definitely agree that there should be more role-play and that if there's instances where you have shootouts from left to right it should be interpreted ICly and not OOCly, this means that you shouldn't leave a scene just for the sake of responding to another shootout, you should be role-playing things and not rushing them.
As for cutting people loose it all depends on the scenario, there will always be laws that fall under Officer Discretion and there can be some agreements as far as role-playing a teenager and etc. I agree with you that you shouldn't just be throwing people into jails. In fact, I'm in favor of serving sentences offline, but that's a topic for another discussion.
People are free to go and role-play off duty, however, we do not enforce that and it would somewhat be hard, however, I do see where you're coming from and I think the key is really focusing on role-playing a character.
Like I said to KnownAlmighty, it will always depend on the crime that was committed, some fall under Officer Discretion and it will be up to the individual which means it will depend on your character's traits, etc. However, I agree that cops should be more lenient when it comes to role-playing around teenagers.
We're always open to taking any suggestions, but we do not have to agree with you, there will always be people that won't agree with you and that's pretty much it, sometimes we can make decisions that most of our factions members won't like (i.e when UPR was introduced a lot of people didn't like) but if we believe it's the right decision for the faction we'll do and we'll also be the first to admit our mistakes.
When we had the SA-MP server it was not possible to do that sort of role-play but I believe with the endless opportunities in RAGE we might see interesting role-play scenarios.
We would like to see that as well, but it will ultimately depend on the server development.
As for the off-duty aspect, you can read some of my replies, but the general rule is that we cannot enforce off-duty role-play, it's really up to the individual and I personally don't think enforcing off-duty role-play is the right direction.
I think it's important that when you feel that someone is breaking the server rules you should straight away report them, that's the first step, second step is submitting an OOC complaint. If you don't do any of these then there's nothing we can do if we don't know about such incidents.
I think that was well seen, especially with GND and some of the gangs that were on SA-MP there were a lot of interesting interactions, but there's always room for improvement and I think it would be beneficial for everyone to create more engagement with others and make things more dynamic.
There will be an economy system that will accommodate a budget for legal factions, which means it will bring new opportunities to the faction and new things to role-play, I think some of the ideas are feasible while others aren't.
For example, it wouldn't be viable to check ammo usage, the amount of shootouts that sometime happen are insane and not necessarily realistic, but that's really because at the end of the day this is still a game and not a real life replica.
I think that there'll always be a compromise, we're based from LAPD and we want to keep that way, but I like the idea of giving it a twist and making unique, but at the end of the day I can't say what we won't and will replicate, I think it will really be on a case by case, but I do like the idea of adapting to the city, perhaps it would make things more dynamic and not the same thing every month.