Allow me to preface this entire post by saying that I am not taking sides here. I am currently a member of Aegis, in addition to sAPD, and I hope that those who choose to read or respond to this can do so in a civil manner and facilitate a proper discussion instead of the majority of finger pointing posts that I have seen thus far. This whole situation has turned into a she said / he said battle of blame which is extremely sad especially when we have people in power who are equipped to deal with these situations (Chief Winters, Senior / Head Admins, and Lead Dev / Design Staff). Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't question their decisions, as can be seen from the Staff Gang Abuse post from Sovereign. We should instead focus on doing it in a constructive manner to better improve the community and make sure that this never happens going forward.
I do believe that both parties involved (Mighty / TapTap and Nicole) are at fault in this particular situation.
Firstly, I was directly involved in the situation as a civilian. I logged in after both civilian ghosthawks were already in the air (shortly before they engaged cops at a pharmaceutical). Throughout the engagement, I was on the ground titaning cop ghosthawks at Athira Rebel and was fully unaware that one of the ghosthawks had a medic skin. Once I saw the video that Super_Nova had posted as a status update, it became apparent that the skin was present.
I personally spent 10 million in titan rockets to combat the cop ghosthawks and protect i chop hatchbacks and McPooperson's ghosthawks. I am not very happy with spending this amount of money (and not receiving any sort of compensation for this lost money) to fight infinite admin money. I will admit, some of the cop ghosthawks belonged to TapTap, Super_Nova, and Clash, which were all fair game. I am unsure of the amount of my own money spent specifically fighting unauthorized admin ghosthawks, and there were also three other people titaning the cop ghosthawks that also spent time and legit money fighting these ghosthawks. I will admit that as a result of my work as a Designer, I do receive staff points that can be redeemed for ghosthawks, other gear, and warpoints / in-game money. This is merely a fallback if I spend too much and is by no means an infinite form of cash.
I do not endorse the use of RVMAT, MIRROR, PHANTOM, and other vehicle cosmetic changes to be used in combat. This has been mentioned by Jay in the #dev-and-design discord channel and he stated that "if you are found abusing this, you may be liable to have your status removed and texture/material abilities revoked." Nicole has publicly taken responsibility for this and instead of participating in this witch hunt, we should let those in-charge of the designers to handle this issue internally.
In that regard, the same can be said for the administrative staff team and the Senior APD. Those in charge of those respective factions are responsible for those below them. I believe in Winters ability as a Chief, and he has handled the issue with TapTap as he saw fit. The same goes for Mighty. Gary and the other Senior Administrators are responsible for dealing with those that they oversee. We might not necessarily see the end result, as we have with TapTap's APD whitelist, however, we must trust that the people we have put in charge of these factions will (and hopefully have) dealt with these situations correctly.
I really hope that going forward, we as a community, can find better ways to deal with abuse situations instead of witch hunting people on the forums. I understand that Arma isn't the most wholesome community, but we should at least try to focus on making our server more enjoyable for all those who don't hold senior / staff positions. We must trust in the institution and rules we have in place and facilitate constructive discussions if these rules are not serving their current purposes. Otherwise, what's the point of even playing this game anymore.
EDIT:
Since I was asked about the video of the ghosthawk, I will leave the gyazo here:
https://gyazo.com/4e85b87eb86e8277ef895cbf1fdf26dc
Credit to Super_Nova via status updates.