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.

Comments

Typo Alert

[pubwvj]

Police 'offers' should probably be 'officers' instead.

Terrible summary, unwarranted inferences

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

Big PDs have been doing this for years.

[hey!]

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.