Being as I'm a Staff Member and also a member of Professional Standards in the PD, I'll give my personal thoughts regarding the suggestion and then move on to present both sides of the argument regarding this issue of guns being confiscated.
Firstly, I personally don't believe this needs to be added under Rule 3.18 as like
@A1L stated, Law 4.6 already covers that, and if an officer does confiscate mid-shootout when their life is potentially in danger/area not clear, then they can be reported for Rule 4.1 and punished by staff members. And while many users are under the impression that all staff members say "make an IA complaint", this is not entirely true as me and a few others have dealt with sits regarding this. Even that once incident at Bank where an officer confiscated
@Husky 's gun while being sniped at from the Office roof was dealt with by me and the gun was refunded as an example.
Now, onto the beefy part of the issue: the "make an IA complaint".
As
@Lelios has pointed out, due to how this specific law violation by an officer can be considered, in my opinion and from experience, a
minor rule violation where nine times out of ten, the issue is resolved via a verbal warning (for incidents where it's dead obvious the officer has unlawfully confiscated a firearm). But when it can't be proven in the admin sit/report, then that's when the "make an IA complaint" typically comes into play.
Just for clarification before proceeding, like @Hendricks said: staff have been informed to try and resolve any incidents relating to Rule 4.1 in the admin sit instead of simply saying "make an IA complaint". If a staff member does inform you to make an IA complaint without doing any form of investigation, then it would be best to make a staff complaint on the staff member failing to perform their duties.
As
@Ayjay has stated on a number of occasions, Internal Affairs was created in order to deal with police misconduct and to have a separate punishment system for officers that can impact their progress in the PD, such as reprimands and written warnings that prevent them from applying for new roles for a specific number of days/weeks/months as well as more severe punishments such as demotion or being dishonorable discharged if proven guilty of misconduct - which some may argue losing progression in the PD could be a more severe punishment rather than receiving a server warning/ban that doesn't impact their progress.
(Unless you want to take the Community Bans and Warnings policy into consideration.)
Also as well, I'd like to direct your attention towards Section 4d of the PLPD Handbook which gives information regarding the confiscation of illegal items:
As we can see from this subsection, confiscation should generally only take place when a supervisor has given permission to, although this can be easily ignored if the supervisor "isn't available" but the more important aspect of 4d would be the final point that states how confiscation should occur within an area that can take place without disturbance and of course, with this whole issue of guns being confiscated, this is also against PLPD policies.
So which then brings the issue into more clear light: the issue with confiscating weapons is both a law and a policy violation which then, when taking everything else that I've stated into consideration, should these types of issues be resolved via Internal Affairs or should this issue be resolved exclusively with server warnings/bans? The way I'll personally proceed about this is to try and resolve the situation in the report for convenience sake but if you want greater punishments to be issued towards the officer, then Internal Affairs might be the best way for the officer to receive disciplinary action.
