Ford Has An Idea For An Autonomous Police Car That Could Find A Hiding Spot (jalopnik.com)

Ford has submitted a patent application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for an autonomous police car that could function "in lieu of or in addition to human police officers." From a report: Now, companies always file patents for technology that may never get made, but an autonomous police cruiser seems like the logical conclusion to the development self-driving cars. But damn is it weird to read about. The patent, describes how the hypothetical car would rely on artificial intelligence and use "on-board speed detection equipment, cameras, and [it would] communicate with other devices in the area such as stationary speed cameras."

Comments

They only missed one obvious thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

In a world of self-driving cars, there will not be any speeders. OPPS!

If you've done nothing wrong, no reason to hide

[DickBreath]

Police say it all the time. If you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide.

So why do they need to hide? What are they hiding? What are they afraid of?

Isn't the whole point of policing to increase public safety? Isn't the point of enforcing the speed limits to increase public safety? If a visible police presence is seen on a roadway, that alone will deter most drivers from speeding. The stupidest drivers who speed anyway will then get ticketed for speeding.

Police might object that the number of tickets they write would diminish. But isn't that the whole point? If you think that ticketing is a source of revenue then you've already gone down the wrong side of a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of crooked behavior by police. Next police start to think that all sorts of crime should lead to revenue. Lesser and lesser infractions lead to assets seized until at least no crime is needed at all to justify just robbing people for no reason. And this already happens in some places. Police will stop and rob people who have done nothing wrong except for merely being out of state. Seize their money and send them on their way.

Writing tickets is not a goal in and of itself. The goal is to get people to stop speeding. Not to raise money. If a visible police presence stops most speeders, then the job is being done on a better and larger scale than not being able to ticket every single speeder. Hiding is a sign that police ARE doing something shameful and wrong.