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Ford Develops a Way To Monitor Police Driving
cartechboy writes Sometimes you wonder, "Who's watching the police?" Well, now it appears everyone can as Ford has developed a way to track how the police drive. The automaker has announced a new telematics system for police cars that will keep tabs on the cops while they are driving, tracking their behavior in real time. The system will be able to tell what speed the police offers are traveling, whether they're wearing their seat belts, and where they're driving. The idea behind this system is to improve fleet management with a side benefit of creating a degree of transparency to improve public trust.
... insurance rates, as well.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Police 'offers' should probably be 'officers' instead.
Every cop are know is a great, honest person. Let's keep honest people honest and maybe snag some bad apples while we're at it.
Any bets on whether the public will ever see a single byte of this data?
I just got a message from the future!
It read: ...and the police have been using this system for several years without a problem. Why not apply it to the general public for the sake of safety...
So after that commercial trucking companies will have these systems installed to augment the ones they already are using. And then it will be offered to the general public, with insurance companies offering a discount to drivers that install these systems. The discounts will be significant enough that the vast majority of people will do so, and then anyone driving is even more traceable than they already were.
ha haaaa...populations.
if a) the system was implemented by various departments and agencies, b) the data was used to actually monitor and sufficiently discipline law and policy violators, and c) if said departments and agencies actually made that data public.
Will this information be publicly available? Seems unlikely.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
They will claim this will help criminals know where they normally are for planning crimes.
Or the systems will start mysteriously malfunctioning after being "accidentally" damaged. Cops consider being above the law to be a job perk.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This is solving the wrong problem. Focus on preventing the police from unjustly murdering, imprisoning, and harassing people first, then worry about how they drive. That will go a lot further toward building some trust in the police.
I just got a message from the present. This will never be allowed because I will definitely put a monitoring device in my vehicle showing where all of the cops are as soon as the data is publicly available.
Transparency is nice. Will ordinary people have any access to these records? For instance, if a cop runs into me, can I use those records as evidence or will they be conveniently erased? The head-mounted cams on California police officers had an incredible effect on police brutality (claims went down ~75% if I recall correctly). Maybe this could have a similarly behavior-improving effect.
GM shares go up as police forces dont want to be monitored.
"We apologize, but it seems that the system was malfunctioning between the times of 7pm and 11pm last night. This was a temporary outage, but sadly the history relevant to the event in question was lost. We greatly regret the losses incurred by the families attending the bat mitzvah, and we promise that our standard investigative procedures will determine whether there is any culpability by the officers. Pending the results of the investigation, our officers have been placed on paid leave, as they have suffered tremendous trauma due to the tragic situation."
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Over a decade ago, Siemens offered a system that offered all of this. It would automatically alert dispatch if a vehicle left a specified area, the shotgun was dismounted, lights were on, vehicle was exceeding a certain speed without lights on, etc... I worked with the public transit version which had similar features, but the local PD was there with us for quite a bit evaluating how we were using it to possibly start using it on their fleet. This was in 2004.
Here's the reality of trying to watch police officers:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
They're used to being above the law - not following rules.
Do you have ESP?
The worst (by far) driving I've seen in person has been police working on their in-car computers while buzzing down the road at 30km above the posted limit. No sirens, no lights. Just a whole lot of drifting/swerving and general inattention.
In unrelated news, the International Union of Police Associations has announced an exclusive partnership with General Motors for all future fleet purchase orders.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
It'll be an optional feature that most departments will opt out of, for "safety and security reasons".
I am not at all sure that the benefit of "creating a degree of transparency to improve public trust" will outweigh the benefit of maintaining a degree of secrecy to permit the improper activities. The loss of freedom for some police will be tangible; the gain in reputation will not be. The only hope would be to have this imposed on police departments from outside.
RCMP here in Yorkton are notorious for flipping on the lights to zip through intersections and speeding through school zones on the way to Tim Horton's for their coffee and doughnuts. Sadly, it's not a "meme" -- they really are that arrogant in this town. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There have been 3 times that I've been close to being involved in a major accident with another automobile, and in all 3 cases it was due to 'Police Driving.' Cop cutting across 2 lanes of oncoming 65+mph highway traffic to reach the shoulder, cop deciding not to wait at a light and swerving into the oncoming traffic lane without turning on his siren while I'm making a legal right turn into said lane...
If this system can somehow make cops accountable for their own bad driving (particularly in the event of an accident), it might actually make the roads safer. That is, providing that they upload data live and/or do not put in a hidden feature to irretrievably delete the last 10 minutes of data...
Wait... what the fuck good will it do?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Sometimes you wonder, "Who's watching the police?" Well, now it appears everyone can
Really? Can they? How have you managed to infer that from these two articles, neither of which says any such thing?
The idea behind this system is to improve fleet management with a side benefit of creating a degree of transparency to improve public trust.
I don't see anything in either article about increasing transparency.
What they are saying is that this will allow police departments (not the public) to monitor their drivers and better promote safety among them, and that this will then, hopefully, lead to more public confidence in driving cops - and less cops dying in fatal crashes, because
crashes are the number one cause of officer fatalities.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
. . . what's the problem, officer?
Of course cops will need an override button so that it can switch off these functions when patrolling poor neighborhoods of color. /sarcasm
Yah, they'll start using it right away, I am sure. Pretty much every cop I see on the freeway goes >20mph over the speed limit if the traffic allows. They do neat things like back up on the emergency lane to get back into the speedtrap. Never mind scared and swerving drivers around them. But hey, whatever helps to support the PD coffers ... I mean reduce crime.
It's called vehicle tracking, and the devices I was working with ten years ago had arrays of discrete (on/off), continuous (analog) and data inputs you could wire up to anything and the state would be relayed back every few seconds over a cellular data link. For example some police departments equip cruisers with shotguns mounted in the trunk. Put a switch on the shotgun mount and as soon as an officer takes the shotgun out of the rack an alarm goes of back at HQ and the crusier's position is marked on a map.
You can use the inputs on those units for anything. Put the same unit in a snow plow and connect the discrete input to a switch that is activated whenever the plow is lowered. Collect the GPS fixes where the plow is down, put them on a map and bingo, you have a map of the streets you've plowed.
What you do with the inputs is limited only by your imagination. You could put a switch in all the seats and you'd know if the crusier was transporting anyone, or when an officer exited the vehicle. Mount accelerometers in the vehicle and wire them to the analog inputs and you know when the vehicle is maneuvering aggresively. It's not engineering, it's Arduino style inventing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Seems like I have heard about this sort of thing for a while. I am not sure what is new about it. They have something like it for snowplows here. Caught someone plowing their neighbors driveways.
Go on to YouTube and watch any of the countless videos of cops being fascist assholes, all caught on their own dashcams. Then note how few if any of these criminals with badges actually recieved a punishment befitting their crime.
Then tell me again how having record of police driving habits will automatically lead to them earning back the public's trust, knowing all the while how cops rarely see consequences.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Hey workstations crash and data gets lost. It even happens to big government at the IRS.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Police departments nation-wide have placed on hold all orders for Ford Taurus police models and have now moved unfulfilled orders to Dodge Chargers and Chevy Malibus.
Lame synopsis.
I drive to the local mountains and the desert to camp or for a day trip. I like to see the CHP on the road. The posted maximum speed is 70 MPH and today's roads are designed to have curves which can be safely driven at 80 or 90 MPH. Sometimes the officers must drive faster than normal traffic to find problem drivers .
That's who polices policemen.
Public officials have no expectation of privacy in the performance of their official duties. All of the telematic data from these systems along with in-car audio and video of the driver should be streamed in realtime to the Internet for all to see. There should be no doubt to anyone about where these public servants are and what they are doing with taxpayer money at all times.
The system will be able to tell what speed the police offers are traveling
Yes but why would Ford care how quickly they pick up their hookers?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Ford, I guess . . . .
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-milton-charges-deputy-20140828-story.html
Link above is about an LA County Sheriff who was texting while driving, and hit and killed a bicyclist. Any prosecutor would go after you or me (helps their stats), but the DA declined to bring any criminal charges against the perp. Uh, officer.
http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/20140714/sheriffs-deputy-texting-before-patrol-car-struck-killed-cyclist-in-calabasas
...that information is part of an ongoind investigation and can not be released to the public.
BUILD public trust. You can't improve on zero.
Ford knows most police cars are now chargers...
US? If there's a way to monitor the cops you can bet your sweet bippy thatit's only going to be the cops that have access to it. Utter hubris to think otherwise.