Protecting the citizens of San Andreas in GTA 5

Now that Grand Theft Auto V is available on PC, the modding community is coming up with some amazing stuff. There are some silly ones, like being able to play the game as a cow, and some that fundamentally change how the game plays. My favourite so far is Police Mod by a modder called Dehan. It reverses the traditional GTA roles and lets you play as a cop, fighting crime in Los Santos and Blaine County. It’s not quite as fully featured as IV ’s brilliant LCPD mod—yet—but it’s still pretty fun.

Hit F3 after installing the mod and a menu pops up, letting you go on duty. You can choose from every type of cop in the game, from highway patrol to FIB agents. Then you can spawn a police vehicle, including bikes, choppers, and even the snow-covered cars from the prologue. Cars magically appear in front of you, and you can spawn as many as you like. You can even spawn AI-controlled ‘partners’ who’ll follow you around, shooting at anyone who attacks you.

From the mod menu you can access ‘callouts’, which generates a crime somewhere nearby and sets an objective marker. It’s best to do this in the city, though, because whenever I tried it in the country, the suspects would spawn somewhere weird, like at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. Callouts range from stopping a speeder who’s tearing around in an Infernus, to intervening in a ‘massacre’—which basically spawns a load of gun-toting madmen who randomly attack civilians. You can’t arrest perps at this stage, so all you can really do is kill ’em. The ability to force them to drop their weapons, or even just zap them with a taser, would be welcome.

Another option in the mod menu is to spawn objects, such as barriers and traffic cones. I try and set up a roadblock with them, but cars just drive through them. I have so many cones cluttering the road at one point, that a bus drives through them and is immediately pinged into the air. I never see it again. There isn’t much point to this option at the moment, but hopefully Dehan will expand on it in future updates. I decide to just focus on the callouts. I am the rain that will wash away the scum of Los Santos, I tell myself. But then I crash my squad car into a gas station and die horribly.

It’s weird being on the other side of the law. As I curse the goons firing at me, I think about how many times I’ve been on the other side of this situation in GTA . The mod is hit and miss. Sometimes the Infernus spawns in the middle of the sea, making it impossible to catch, and there’s no notification when you’ve cleared an objective. I’d like to be able to report back to HQ on my car’s radio to ‘finish’ a mission. But, hey, this mod was made by one person in their spare time. It’s cool that it even exists at all. There were claims that using mods in singleplayer was resulting in people being banned from GTA Online , but Rockstar has since denied this. It has no problem with people using mods in story mode.

Los Santos and Blaine County are such amazing playgrounds, I want to see more of this kind of thing from GTA ’s army of modders. I want to experience the crime- ridden state of San Andreas from other perspectives. There’s already a trucking mod, but I’d love to see the city through the eyes of a firefighter or an airline pilot. Sadly I don’t have any modding talent whatsoever, so I’ll just have to keep my eyes on the community and see what else they come up with. As much fun as I had being a cop, I think, until there’s more to interesting things to do in the mod, I’ll stay on the wrong side of the law.