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Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed

New submitter Lew Lorton notes a NY Times story about a thief in New York City who was tracked and located using a GPS device inside a decoy pill bottle he had stolen (along with other pill bottles) from a pharmacy. When police confronted the thief, he raised a gun to shoot at an officer, and was killed "The decoy bottles were introduced last year by the police commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, who announced that the department would begin to stock pharmacy shelves with decoy bottles of painkillers containing GPS devices. The initiative was in response to a sharp increase of armed and often deadly pharmacy robberies across the state, frequently by people addicted to painkillers. ... The bottles are designed to be weighted and to rattle when shaken, so a thief does not initially realize they do not contain pills. Each of the decoy bottles sits atop a special base, and when the bottle is lifted from the base, it begins to emit a tracking signal."

2 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting concept by scottbomb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The usual story burglary victims hear is that they'll likely never get their stuff back. I can install a GPS transmitter inside one of my computers or my guitar. As a ham radio operator, I can use APRS which is trackable almost anywhere. Very interesting.

  2. Re:PC leftist crowd, ignore not; by Improv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not all of us on the left have a problem with this.

    --
    For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.