"I can pull out a bag of weed and make it look like it came out of someone’s pocket."
Let’s Be Cops
Turns out cops in the metaverse can be just as corrupt — and not to mention creepy — as real world ones. At least that’s the case with a group of users on the metaverse platform VRChat who have created a police force to question, arrest, and occasionally frame other users for crimes.
Oh, and they do it while using avatars of underaged female anime characters. Yikes, right?
The Loli Police Department (LPD), disturbingly named for the slang internet term for underaged and often sexualized female anime characters, boasts nearly 11,000 members on its Discord server, Input reports. Founded in 2018 as a joke, the group has grown to be the most popular police roleplay community on VRChat.
"We have two-hour patrols where we break up into squads, go out into the world of VRChat, and interact with people to start roleplays," a Scottish computer science student who participates in the weird roleplay told Input. Jura is a sergeant in the LPD and even runs a training program for new recruits.
Virtual Corruption
"Officers" in the LPD spend their time harassing various people on the platform, investigating crimes, and occasionally arresting people. Some members have even admitted to planting evidence to fabricate reasons for arrests — just like actual cops.
"I can pull out a bag of weed and make it look like it came out of someone’s pocket," Karet, an LPD captain from Texas, told the site. "They always say it’s not theirs."
VR ACAB
Though the loli imagery is troubling, no one is actually getting arrested or hurt by a users larping as cops on the metaverse. However, the LPD do occasionally encounter pushback from users who harbor anti-police sentiments.
"We absolutely get abuse," another LPD member told Input. "Especially when there’s police violence going on in the US. We get a lot more people responding and saying curse words to us, like ‘Fuck the police.’"
On the one hand, the phenomenon is a quirky example of the ways the metaverse can allow us to truly transform who we are. On the other, the whole thing seems to be soaked in some sort of ironic-or-maybe-not joke about pedophilia.
One thing's for sure: there's already stuff unfolding on the metaverse that's so weird, dark, and unexpected that nothing would surprise us going forward.
READ MORE: Inside the volunteer 'police department' arresting people in VR [Input]
More on metaverse madness: Turns Out It’s Really Easy for Kids to Visit Sex Clubs in the Metaverse
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