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!

Re:They only missed one obvious thing.

[cayenne8]

This would not be about speeders

This would absolutely be about catching speeders.

You know the police motto now..."To Collect and Server..."

I'd MUCH rather the police be working *real* crimes like a bunch of gang members driving 10mph looking to commit a drive by shooting, rather than worrying that much if Mr. Jones is going 10mph over the limit to get to work to earn a living and pay taxes....

I'd bet, if you took the money out of the equation, you'd find just exactly how little catching speeders is considered a public safety thing.

Example..how about we take all the revenue gathered from speeding tickets paid, and rather than give that to the police department, we distribute those funds back and EOY to all citizens with a drivers license who have NOT had a speeding violation that year?

I'll be dollars to doughnuts that if you did this, you'd see the number of cops out monitoring speed traps plummet.

Re:In other news...

[Walter White]

They would have gotten more mileage by patenting blockchain in the infotainment system.

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.

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

[swb]

If officers must be visible to enforce traffic law, then you find bad drivers will only comply with traffic law when they can't see a cop.

If officers prefer hiding to catch speeders, selection bias says they will prioritize roads where it's easier to hide and drivers tend to drive faster for enforcement. They will not use crash data or safety enhancement criteria.

Cops shouldn't run speed traps based on the idea that people are driving faster and it's easier for them to hide. They should bias enforcement to areas that have bonafide data suggesting those roads have more accidents or safety problems.

Cops end up enforcing speed laws on roads which naturally encourage drivers to drive faster -- new stretches, with lower traffic levels and generally good road conditions -- and which enable easy hiding spots. This is just lazy policing with only marginal value in promoting safety.

Re:Autonomous cars

[Kierthos]

50 years ago, we hadn't landed on the moon yet.
30 years ago, the first smartphone hadn't been invented yet.
Hell, 10 years ago, home use 3D printing wasn't really a thing

Are there a lot of technological hurdles to overcome before we have good self-driving cars? Ones that even your grandma feels safe using? Sure.

But to say, flat out, that we're never going to reach it is asinine.

Re:Autonomous cars

[nitehawk214]

You are really, and truly, an idiot.

Why do you keep banging on about Moore's Law? Do you even know what it is? It says nothing about computing performance or technological progress. All it says is how many transistors can be crammed on a die. There is a lower lower limit to how big a transistor can be since you can't make it smaller than the electrons that flow through it.

This just means that future advances will be in different avenues. 3D chips, multi-core systems, optical interconnects, efficient thermal usage. All of these things are being developed today. Some of them won't pan out. Some of them will.

You are not even a Luddite. At least they admit that technology will progress as much as they dislike it. You are like the living embodiment of the argument from ignorance. "Progress won't happen because I can't figure out how it could!" Maybe you can't figure it out because you are an idiot. Did that ever occur to you?