Taking Over Psycho Squad

"Night City Public Security Management Regulations," Chapter 17, Section 3, clearly stipulated that NCPD personnel were to manage Psycho Squad. Though this had long since become mere formalism, it was still an ironclad rule written into Night City law.

Under rules established many years ago, in order to prevent the heavily augmented madmen of Psycho Squad from losing control, elite police officers who had passed political background checks and genetic screening had to be assigned to serve within it, maintaining supervision through twenty-four-hour rotating shifts.

After all, Psycho Squad's original members had been selected from NCPD's elite officers.

Yet times had changed. In today's Night City, the NCPD's management of Psycho Squad had long existed in name only. On the quarterly report documents piled up in City Hall's archives, the NCPD commissioner's electronic signature was nothing more than a routine formality.

The ones truly controlling Psycho Squad were commissioners who nominally belonged to the NCPD personnel roster but were secretly appointed by the City Council. They answered only to the City Council and held the remote forced-shutdown authority for every cyberpsychotic's implants, ensuring that this most uncontrollable and terrifying public security force in Night City remained firmly wrapped in the City Council's grasp.

This time, the NCPD's resumption of substantive control over Psycho Squad appeared to be a routine adjustment within the police system, but in truth, it was the inevitable result of an internal power struggle within the City Council.

To trace the origins of the decision to send City Council personnel into the NCPD to manage Psycho Squad, one had to mention Mayor Lucius Rhyne—the bloated yet wildly ambitious political genius.

Amid the blood-red smoke of the Unification War, while Night City's other politicians still feared New America's iron heel and trembled at the prospect of New America