Ideas of Questionable Quality: Security Edition

[The Grim Sleeper]

quality post about why Security should be immune to subversion.Spoiler!

I'm going to go with an pretty out there suggestion and say that the problem isn't security as a role, but rather changelings and mindslaves. Yes, really. Hear me out here: What's the one big difference between a redshirt and some random vigilante?

It's not equipment; there's all sorts of ways for a vigilante to get their hands on a taser or a stun baton. It's not skill, because anyone can be a regular security officer. It's not access, because the HoP gives all access away like candy these days.

The big difference, the reason why Security exists in the first place, is that the redshirts are 100% guaranteed not to be antagonists at roundstart. As an ordinary spaceman, seeing a redshirt is supposed to mean that you can relax and let your guard down - the reshirt isn't going to randomly ambush you and neither will anyone else with them in the room. Or, at least if they do, they'll think long and hard about how to take you both down without eating a face full of taser. Take two spacemen and put them in the same room and you'll see both of them back slowly away on the off chance the other guy is an antag. Add in a security officer and they can suddenly 'trust' each other to at least not try anything right that second. It's like having these little red islands of tranquility and civility roaming the station eating donuts.

Changelings and mindslaves ruin this by making it possible for you to run into antagonist security. There's no trust, no sense of safety, just more of the same suspicion and dread that comes with staring down any other heavily armed stranger in a dark maintenance tunnel. There's no safety in numbers anymore, so people try for safety in obscurity - they fuck off to whatever deserted corner of the map is least likely to get them murdered and hide there, not interacting with anyone or anything. Since everyone is alone and silent, we get silent rampages where people get picked off one by one. No witnesses, no reactions, mass apathy.

If you want to revitalize Security, the first step has got to be to do something to keep Security trustworthy all round long. If there's a officer hanging out at the bar and you can actually sit down next to them and be appropriately confident that they're not a ling and they're not going to devour your drunk ass, you can start nucleating public gatherings in public places again. Suddenly a bunch of giant brick walls get thrown up in front of rampagers - it's pretty easy to murder a geneticist 1v1 in the monkey pen, but it's hard to kill the bartender, a security officer and two greyshirts all at once without anyone ratting you out. But in order for that to happen, there needs to be at least a couple people on the station with a bright red sign painted on their back that credibly claims they're 100% guaranteed not to be the person trying to kill you and that it's okay to be in the same room with them without constantly being on your guard.

I agree with making Security resistant to changelings and mindslaving.

 I feel maybe we should go one step further: make it so that a person in a red shirt CANNOT be anything other then a Security officer; make the Red Uniform simply fall off anybody who isn't an officer.