Big news from Peoria! The police department is hiring, and it seems they're desperate enough to go with a blatantly violent recruitment campaign. Call of Duty, that's a video game… the youth like video games… this should help entice the kids to join the police force, right? Well, if you kids like simulated violence, raiding bunkers, shooting people, screaming expletives and hitting every button on the controller and still losing from the comfort of home, maybe you'd like to do the same thing, with real (limited) consequences in real life? Presumably, if this campaign were to be effective, there'd be a wave of new recruits who think that the appropriate response to violent conflict is the Konami code, or this interpretation of it.
The campaign never had the time to be effective, as the immediate backlash caused the department to remove the post. The Peoria police department didn't overlook potential copyright infringement, though, and were careful not to use images directly from Activision. Good thinking!
"Instead of using any images from Call of Duty (I didn't want to cross any legal lines with Activision), I thought I would use one of the pics from our own SWAT guys," Jacob Moushon, a crime analyst from the Peoria Police Department, wrote to Police Chief Eric Echevarria, and officers Christopher Collins and Ryan Winkle on February 21, according to a copy of the email. "Please let me know what you think and any changes you want."
Joseph Cox, 404Media
Maybe the next Call of Duty game will feature Peoria as one of the battlefields you can choose from.
