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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.
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...
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.
If you have driven safely, they give you a discount.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
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.
Of course it should refer to defectives in the police farce.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
"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?
I'm sorry, $5 a month (the Progressive Snapshot thing) discount on what is typically a $100+ monthly payment is not worth them tracking my driving habits.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
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.
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.
It won't bring down insurance rates because the police unions will never allow it to be implemented. It's not like there was a technical hurdle to gathering this data before and Ford just 'solved' the problem, the issue is that the public employees that are supposed to enforce the law increasingly see themselves as above the law.
Enigma
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.
it would be awesome if it automatically deducted money from their pay every time they violated the laws.
"I'm sorry officer, you've exceeded the speed limit. I'm deducting $150 dollars from your next pay check and assigning two points to your license. Thank you for using Johnny Law, he he!"
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Today it's a discount. In 5 years no one will offer you insurance without it. (And the WAN connection to stay in touch...)
Good, just in time for my Kickstarter ODB-II/CAN datalink "test simulator for TESTING PURPOSES ONLY". Everyone will plug them together and toss them in the trunk.
I worked in IT for a police force for a time. These systems have already been in place for more than 10 years, Ford is just making them an option on the Interceptor rather than requiring an after-market solution. And yes, police do get in shit for going 50kph over the speed limit without their siren on. Not that that stopped some of them.
There is always an emergency somewhere.
Still remember when a local radio station [630CHED here in Edmonton] had a morning talk show that had a call-in segment for about a month, where callers would be asked if they thought there would be one or more police officers in some random donut shop. EVERYONE said yes [at least, every time I heard the segment]. And they were always right. Evidently, the police helpfully reminded the station manager that the segment put the police service in a negative light and may result in an increase in response times to the station and/or ticketing activities around the station...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I doubt that you've got the overhead of legal payouts we have. On two occasions, I've had insurance payouts from fender benders that included $5,000+ medical payoffs when nobody was actually injured. The insurance industry does this in order to get the individual to sign off and not take them to court where the costs would be much higher.
Just a side note on the fender benders. The first one was clearly a set up...the woman slammed on the brakes in front of me for no clear reason. She had a child in the back seat with stitches in his head from another recent "accident". The collision occurred under 5mph. Police and Fire came by, and no injuries were recorded. She filed a medical claim, and was bought off.
The other case was my daughter's, and she admitted guilt, but similarly there were under $1,000 in vehicle damages, and more than a $5k medical payout. This shit happens way too much in the U.S., and it seems nobody is making an effort to put an end to it.
Just another day in Paradise
Knowing where speed traps are would make them 100% effective. The point is to reduce speeding and no one will speed if they know there is a trap on the road, no one gets a ticket and the road becomes safer. The only way in which the trap is ineffective is that it doesn't generate any cash for the department.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all