From GPS-Enforced Speed Limits to GPS-Ended Police Chases

On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 21:29:03 -0800, Scott en Aztlán
> wrote:

>http://ktla.trb.com/news/ktla-lapdgp...ll=ktla-news-1
>
>With that street-cop psychology, Chief William J. Bratton unveiled
>Thursday a new and decidedly strange weapon in the LAPD's effort to
>halt high-speed pursuits.
>
>It is an air-propelled miniature dart equipped with a global
>positioning device. Once fired from a patrol car, it sticks to a
>fleeing motorist's vehicle and emits a radio signal to police.
>
>Bratton hailed the dart as "the big new idea" and said that if the
>pilot program was successful, Los Angeles' seemingly daily TV fix of
>police chases could be a thing of the past.

This is incredibly boneheaded!

They get the location of the car with a GPS. So what? They already have the
location of the car now, via helicopters. Anything that they could do with
this device they can already do via observation from the helicopter.

The only improvement here might be for bad weather and night use where the
chopper is less effective.

Their main problem is that the cops are so boneheaded that they fail to
overtake and box in the fleeing suspect. They simply chase... and chase... and
chase... and even when they have the suspect vehicle stopped, they fail to
manuever into his path such that he cannot take off again, as we probably all
saw last week when that nut-job drove the wrong way up an on-ramp and hit a car
head-on. Just before that, they had him stopped, but the cops didn't box him
in. Are they afraid of denting their cruisers?

Its not the the technology, its the cops!

Dave Head