I read the requirements and concerns as yet another sign we need to split up traffic enforcement and ordinary policing. The cars writing traffic tickets and responding to breakdowns and minor accidents don’t need half this crap. We could get by with a ton fewer cops that way.
(“What about car chases?” statistically they’re a terrible idea and we should stop doing them in almost all circumstances, so there’s little harm in losing the “tactical” capacity of your traffic enforcement cars)
I was just listening to the head of a municipal bus line on NPR talking about how there’s 70% non-payment of fares. Less than a third of his riders are doing what they’re supposed to. The interviewer then asked whether it was true that there was a policy not to even have a bus driver mention that the fare hadn’t been paid, let alone confront the person or kick them off, the guy responded, saying that that was indeed the policy, because the safety of his staff was paramount. This was just after he finished complaining about how people should follow social rules, but he’s apparently unwilling to enforce them. I personally think that public transportation should be fully subsidized as a public good, but if you’re going to have a rule, you need to enforce it if you want people to maintain general respect for the law.
So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. At least find another way to implement the consequence. The alternatives that spring to mind require extensive surveillance, though, so I’m not sure there is a preferable alternative.
Around 500 people in the US are killed in police chases per year, and around 1/4 of them are bystanders. Most of those chases are over traffic violations or non-violent crimes like shoplifting.
To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of bystanders killed just by police chases, per year, as all officers killed by all causes while on duty in 2022, according to the FBI’s database of deaths and assaults of police officers.
There are a lot fewer police officers than there are total people in the US, so it’s normally not useful to compare figures like this, however, in this case, it kind of is, because these are all deaths that involve police action, just like all the officer deaths (necessarily) are.
If we (reasonably, I think) default to assuming all police killed in the line of duty by any cause basically did not “have it coming” (contrary to the other 75% of chase deaths that I’m ignoring for this analysis to focus on the least-defensible harm) and should be regarded as innocents, then bystander deaths in police chases are doubling the figure of total annual wholly-unwarranted deaths due to police action, just for this one narrow category of activity.
If we regard police chase deaths as nearly always preventable and fundamentally “the fault” of police, and then only consider felonious killing of police officers (as opposed to purely accidental ones) for our comparison, then we’re looking at ~60 police deaths in 2022 vs ~125 bystander deaths from police chases, so the relative proportion of preventable harm during police activities due to this policy looks even worse.
And this is while totally disregarding the people being chased as worth ethical consideration in the do-or-don’t chase calculus. Plus I don’t know if that figure counts passengers as bystanders.
> So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution.
It's absolutely imperative for LEO's to consider safety of other residents when enforcing laws. There are much better ways to identify and detain suspects.
> maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution.
License plates exist and cop cars already scan those. Turning a possible arrest into a chase puts the suspect, anyone else in the car with them, the cops, and various uninvolved bystanders at risk of serious injury or death. It is an extreme escalation and should be reserved for extreme situations.
Potentially worthwhile isn’t enough to Mad Max after a suspect and maybe force them to lose control and crash, on public roads. These policies can and do kill and maim lots of people every year.
> I thought a majority of arrests are made during traffic stops
Maybe, but what proportion of stops end in an arrest?
A largish proportion of cop traffic enforcement & safety activity ends in a tow, but we don’t expect traffic enforcement cops to drive tow trucks. The traffic safety people can call out the regular cops if they need them.
> if you run and they can't chase, how do you expect arrests to happen?
Recording devices, reports, follow up. Chases are a public menace, especially when they do them over minor offenses, as is the case for the overwhelming majority of chases. Given the danger, I’d much rather anyone who’s not an active danger to life get away than a car chase occur. The evidence is pretty far on the side of “these are net-harmful”. Cops just like them a lot, so we keep doing them (many places do, anyway—some have all but eliminated them)
Risk of added charges, potentially more serious than the original offense, means the majority of folks facing arrest won’t flee, anyway.
>A largish proportion of cop traffic enforcement & safety activity ends in a tow, but we don’t expect traffic enforcement cops to drive tow trucks.
These are clearly disanalogous. You can leave a car waiting for a tow truck; it's not going to drive off on its own. But you can't just leave a suspect waiting to be arrested unless they're restrained (in which case, you've already done the hard part of arresting them).
Ambulances, fire trucks. We already expect them to call for help in a significant minority of stops and traffic safety actions, including for many where they remain while waiting for the help.
There are three major sets of modification that I can think of which are done to a cruiser:
- Light bars/electronics/sirens
- Armoring
- Ability to detain suspects
The first is going to be required for every police or sheriff cruiser.
The second will reduce casualties (arguably for both sides) in an armed engagement. Ideally required for any action which could create an armed engagement. Because a minimum of one side is always armed, every encounter can become an armed engagement. Huzzah USA etc. etc.
The third is required if the police officer will ever respond to anything that isn't giving out a parking ticket. Traffic stops can include anything from an armed engagement down to a drunk driver or peaceful execution of an outstanding warrant. Then there's simple responding to calls, which can also include all of the above.
The lack of ability to detain someone means you need (as stated in the article) more officers responding to an engagement.
Light bars, cameras, comms equipment. The traffic enforcement cars need those. Not so much the armor and detainment capabilities.
If it’s known they don’t pursue and aren’t likely to attack you to secure an arrest, the risk for them from the person they’re stopping (traffic on the e.g. highway they’re standing next to is another matter) in an encounter is a ton lower. Why fight them when you can just leave? And rack up another charge, sure, but one a hell of a lot less serious than attacking someone and then still fleeing.
It does mean calling in a regular cop for arrests, but what proportion of stops result in arrests in a day? They also have to call in tow trucks and ambulances and fire trucks.
> If it’s known they don’t pursue and aren’t likely to attack you to secure an arrest, the risk for them from the person they’re stopping
If this is true and not just an assumption (FWIW, I think you're wrong - human nature is not that logical when in fight or flight brain) it should be possible to come up with numbers to back this up. There are many locations in the US where the default is not to chase.
As a side note, they have to detain someone while waiting. That someone's care is also legally in their hands at that point; it doesn't make a lot of sense from a civilian safety perspective to just set them on the side of the highway.
I don’t think you’ll find that most chases are over issues that warrant turning it into a situation involving significant risk of serious injury or death for both those involved (which may include passengers in the fleeing car) and bystanders.
I completely understand, however, if they don't chase and it's not enough to try to catch the person in their house/work/whatever, it's practically the same as the law not being enforced, right?
I struggle to think it's fair to people that don't run if they're held responsible but people that run aren't.
How many deaths is this effort at fairness worth? I think enough would be caught by passive/invisible surveillance (drone tracking and other methods—these are already used) and simply following up at home or work that we’re not talking about some kind of get-away-free card, here. This also assumes a very-high rate of apprehension from chases, which does not seem to be the case (possibly under 50% when relatively-loose chase policies are in place—rates of apprehension, though not total apprehensions, appear to trend much higher with more-restrictive chase policies, as one might expect)
There have been some places that have either restricted or loosened restrictions on police chases over the last couple decades, which should give us an excellent data set to see the effects of these policies… unfortunately, police data gathering and sharing is notoriously awful, with the result that most attempts at analyzing the statistics of policing in the US are necessarily full of guesswork.
Just to be clear, I'm completely for restricted, even levels that could be considered highly restricted, chases. I'm just not sure that I'm okay with completely eliminating chases entirely.
I also worry that expanding "passive/invisible surveillance (drone tracking and other methods—these are already used)" is a net loss for citizens, however, I struggle on how to quantify that loss compared to the cost of accidents.
> if you run and they can't chase, how do you expect arrests to happen?
Lots of police departments have adopted a stance that they won't chase you except for certain circumstances (such as if you're presenting an immediate threat to the public).
Instead, they'll track the running suspect, position cars in the path of the vehicle and do ambushes involving spike strips, pit maneuvers, etc. Or, depending on the situation, they may do nothing in the moment and arrest the driver later at their home.
Even spike traps and “pit maneuvers” (AKA forcing another car to lose control at speed—take away the cool term and they’re just causing someone to lose control of a ton or three of steel on public streets, which is obviously nuts even if the only people at risk are in the fleeing car, unless the situation is already extreme) are crazy-dangerous and aren’t good to employ outside exceptional circumstances.
These tactics (outside extraordinary cases) are a solution to a problem the cops created themselves by chasing the fleeing suspect, and turning it into a life-and-death matter. It’s one of those cases where a knee-jerk and kinda authoritarian sense of justice (“they’re running, you can’t run from the cops, they have to go after them!”) is at sharply at odds with public benefit.
At least in my country, there are several tiers of police driver training/expertise.
A large amount of police work involves things like "go to the scene of the burglary from yesterday, take witness statements and fingerprints" and "go to the place the noise complaint came from, tell them to turn it down" and things like that.
Tasks that need a police car and timely response, but they don't need to be speeding and running red lights. This work is done by officers in kinda basic police cars.
Other officers, with advanced driver training, are called on for tasks that might need high speed pursuit. They get faster cars, like Mitsubishi Evos and Impreza WRXes.
That’s like saying let’s not equip planes that won’t crash with black boxes. Only the ones that crash need it. Let’s split up crashing and non crashing planes.
What would traffic enforcement folks be doing that would require all kinds of tactical upgrades to their cars, once we take car chases (again: already usually a bad idea and danger to the public well in excess of their benefits, no matter how the cop cars are equipped) out of the picture?
Scenario: I’m driving with a suspended license and may have an outstanding warrant for a missed court date. I elect not to run. Normal cop car called, takes me in. I won’t attack the traffic enforcement officer, because this is all being recorded and that gains me nothing except lost time and more charges, since if…
Scenario: The above is the situation but I elect to flee. No chase occurs, so this doesn’t turn into a prolonged risk to the public. Since I know the traffic enforcers don’t pursue and it’s well-publicized that their car and body cam footage is uploaded constantly, there’s zero reason to engage with or attempt to harm them.
The remaining risks are things that aren’t really mitigated by car upgrades (someone driving off mid-stop, which is risky for the traffic enforcer already standing next to the stopped-person’s car) or the kind of risks also present at, I dunno, the grocery store (someone armed and crazy attacks you for absolutely no conceivable benefit to themselves)
A bonus is that this would make non-traffic-enforcement cops a ton safer, since most of their deaths are from traffic accidents (not intentional attacks with a vehicle, to distinguish the two) and they’d spend way less time driving, or standing on the side of highways. [edit] I got that wrong, vehicle strikes and car crashes are more like ~40% of deaths on the job, not over half. Still, it’s way up the list of risks. Unclear how major injury causes break down.
No it's not. If something was stolen from your car or the neighbors music is too loud, you don't need a fully armed paramilitary with a 500 horsepower souped up car. A dude with a baton in a Prius is perfectly fine. If they need bigger guns, they can call them in if necessary.
I expected much more of a hit piece, but the findings of the police departments seem very well thought-out and explored. Police vehicles require extensive after-market work to meet the unique requirements of police forces, and there's not a long track history of how to do this with Teslas. The initial forays into this space are going to be pretty dicey and expensive until there is sufficient know-how to make the changes. Or Tesla itself could engage with this and work on a police model Tesla, but that is not likely to happen for a while.
I do wonder if the choice to use the Model 3 sedan was the right one; it feels like one of the SUVs would be a better choice because many of the complaints revolve around having sufficient interior room.
>> I do wonder if the choice to use the Model 3 sedan was the right one
I don't think you need to wonder. I have one and I love it, but if I were a cop, it wouldn't be my choice. I don't even think the Model Y would cut it. They should be using the Model X.
OTOH, I see cops driving a lot of Dodge Chargers around here (New England). Having rented one at one point, I can tell you that they don't have a whole lot of back seat room either, so I'm not sure about that point that one of the chiefs made.
But, yeah, I think it should be obvious to the most casual of observers that when you're trying to outfit a newish car that wasn't built for it to achieve a special purpose there's going to be growing pains. I couldn't find any solid quotes for police cars, but I seem to remember seeing that the average one was pushing $100,000 so the numbers they mentioned for the Teslas didn't sound that outrageous.
Well they make their own requirements so it's like me telling my job I need dual GPUs, 64GB RAM and 10TB to send my emails and make charts in Excel. Yeah, we do need a server/workhorse but not everyone needs one. Chromebook will due for most.
Another vehicle I've been paying some attention is the push to upgrade the US Post Office vehicles from the old boxy Grummans to the new duck nosed vehicle https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a62187981/usps-new-mail-tr.... I was really looking forward to those, but the other day I saw the mail lady driving one of the rebadged Mercede Metris minivans like that https://jalopnik.com/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-post-o.... We stopped to talk to the lady and oh boy did she give us a piece of mind! The pros were short - "softer seats and air conditioning are nice". The rest! Access to mail in back seat requires getting out of the car! If it rains there is no splash guard and you get wet. Being able to reach out of the window is difficult so one has to get out, again, getting wet and adding effort! The door is not a slider - it just opens out - so getting out while close to mailbox is harder. And so on. She stated that whoever chose THAT stopgap vehicle has never actually delivered mail.
So it's good a police department tried these vehicles and was willing to talk about the results!
I feel like this is less a "Teslas don't work for police" as much as it's a "a small luxury mid-range sedan doesn't work for police". Like, of course it doesn't?
Later in the article, it praises the F-150 Lightning (electric F-150 pickup truck) as a working solution for a police department, but seems to forget all the complaints about needing to charge and all that, which the F-150 Lightning also would have...
Not the hardest hit piece, but it's definitely written in a way that sounds like "Tesla is shit, but Ford knows what they're doing so it's good", even though most of the complaints were more about electric cars than about Tesla specifically.
Fords history of working with the cops and saying "Here's what we have, what fits best as a base to modify, how can we meet your needs?" that is older than Tesla's founding
The F-150 Lightning may not be dramatically better, but an OEM willing to work with you can make all the differnece in the world
At no point are they saying tesla's are bad. Just that they are not good for what police need them to do.
I have no connection to police but I do own a 2015 ford Police Interceptor Utility (Essentially an explorer.)
There are several features that are useful to police.
Manual headlights. (Keep debating spending the ~$50-70 to upgrade to auto headlights.) The lights and horn do not trigger when you lock the car with the remote. Nor do lights come on when you open the door. (All of these are features to prevent drawing attention when you are idling on the side of the road.)
Fairly tall sidewalls. I can go over a curb and not have any issue. The suspension is the best of any car / truck I have owned.
It is rated for a 75MPH impact from the rear. (Fun fact. The full size spare tire is required to be in place to keep the rating.
I have 4 switches on the steering wheel for accessories. (I assume stuff like lights and sirens.)
There are some others like being able to disconnect the door locks from the back doors although mine were set to normal car when I got it.
Emergency vehicles are the kind of vehicles I don't really want electric yet. Power goes out when there are emergencies, and then what? They break out a bunch of beater crown vics?
Also inevitably lithium packs are the last thing I want to bring more of to an emergency.. imagine bringing more lithium to a California wildfire when most fire depts struggle to extinguish packs in the most favourable conditions.
> Furthermore, officers reported “autopilot interference,” which caused “a delay when officers shift into drive” and also triggered an automatic stop when officers tried to pull over to the side of the road, possibly because the car assumed the vehicle was wrongfully veering off course.
It sounds like the police, just like Tesla and the Cybertruck, are testing these things out in the public?! Wouldn't these issues be discovered before these cars were actually deployed, like in a simulated road stop or something? Seems a bit bananas that they discovered these issues once officers use these cars in public.
As far as I know South Pasadena is the only one that has converted their entire fleet to Teslas. It’s a small city in the middle of suburban LA with zero off roading and they borrow lots of resources from the Pasadena PD so the limitations probably aren’t that big a deal. There’s not a lot going on in the town so if someone is getting arrested half the officers on duty show up anyway.
Other departments are running smaller trials or converting to more suitable cars like the F-150 Lightning mentioned in the article.
Long gone are the days that they could afford to arrange proper pre-live-environment testing for anything like this. Even if much testing is done away from the live environment some testing period is still going to be needed before full roll-out (though this seems to be earlier stage testing than that).
I can't help thinking that if/when the oil really starts to run out, the only vehicles that will be allowed to use it will be Emergency Services vehicles. I can't currently imagine (say) an electric fire truck, nor ambulance.
I can't currently imagine (say) an electric fire truck, nor ambulance.
Why? The biggest problem I can think of is that they have a shorter range, but for a fire truck or ambulance the extra weight for longer range wouldn't really be an issue. The lower maintenance requirements might also mean ambulances won't be the shitshow that private ambulance companies make them right now.
In the worst case scenario, I imagine there would be more priority for a vehicle which can provide power to on-scene electric vehicles, which is something frequently done for lighting up scenes even today.
That said, I don't see these coming today or tomorrow. In a couple of years, though, we'll start seeing them more.
they had over 100K BUDGET to make the car ready for police work but somehow they did not find a way to reproduce the "hide behind the engine". sounds like they hired the wrong engineers to do the job. I think even GPT 2 can come up with a solution to this for less than a few thousands
This does not sound unreasonable at all. The crown Vic and explorer have had kits for decades and ford designers know the requirements
This department bought retail consumer teslas and had to get custom fittings to bring them up to spec
Of course it’s going to be expensive. Getting out of ICE vehicles is going to have a sticker shock and it’s our own fault for waiting this long to get started
The $150k budget included the price of 2 cars. They probably didn't get base models. $35k was for modifying both.
They have to bootstrap the r&d for armoring Teslas. They could only find a performance shop that mostly does fiber aero kits. That's the actual issue - no existing armorers. For the "engine block hide", though, would keeping some extra vests in the frunk do the job?
> However, "the Tesla presented challenges due to the small interior space, 'smart car' features, and low vehicle profile limiting maneuverability (e.g., jumping curbs, off-road use)."
Not really. I have no incentive to defend Tesla. I do not own one, and I do not want one. I own a Ford Expedition. I was merely saying that Cybertruck would have been a better choice (or even a larger Tesla!), and them plugging a Ford EV at the end seemed like a paid hit piece brought to you by Ford.
I read the requirements and concerns as yet another sign we need to split up traffic enforcement and ordinary policing. The cars writing traffic tickets and responding to breakdowns and minor accidents don’t need half this crap. We could get by with a ton fewer cops that way.
(“What about car chases?” statistically they’re a terrible idea and we should stop doing them in almost all circumstances, so there’s little harm in losing the “tactical” capacity of your traffic enforcement cars)
I was just listening to the head of a municipal bus line on NPR talking about how there’s 70% non-payment of fares. Less than a third of his riders are doing what they’re supposed to. The interviewer then asked whether it was true that there was a policy not to even have a bus driver mention that the fare hadn’t been paid, let alone confront the person or kick them off, the guy responded, saying that that was indeed the policy, because the safety of his staff was paramount. This was just after he finished complaining about how people should follow social rules, but he’s apparently unwilling to enforce them. I personally think that public transportation should be fully subsidized as a public good, but if you’re going to have a rule, you need to enforce it if you want people to maintain general respect for the law.
So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. At least find another way to implement the consequence. The alternatives that spring to mind require extensive surveillance, though, so I’m not sure there is a preferable alternative.
Around 500 people in the US are killed in police chases per year, and around 1/4 of them are bystanders. Most of those chases are over traffic violations or non-violent crimes like shoplifting.
To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of bystanders killed just by police chases, per year, as all officers killed by all causes while on duty in 2022, according to the FBI’s database of deaths and assaults of police officers.
There are a lot fewer police officers than there are total people in the US, so it’s normally not useful to compare figures like this, however, in this case, it kind of is, because these are all deaths that involve police action, just like all the officer deaths (necessarily) are.
If we (reasonably, I think) default to assuming all police killed in the line of duty by any cause basically did not “have it coming” (contrary to the other 75% of chase deaths that I’m ignoring for this analysis to focus on the least-defensible harm) and should be regarded as innocents, then bystander deaths in police chases are doubling the figure of total annual wholly-unwarranted deaths due to police action, just for this one narrow category of activity.
If we regard police chase deaths as nearly always preventable and fundamentally “the fault” of police, and then only consider felonious killing of police officers (as opposed to purely accidental ones) for our comparison, then we’re looking at ~60 police deaths in 2022 vs ~125 bystander deaths from police chases, so the relative proportion of preventable harm during police activities due to this policy looks even worse.
And this is while totally disregarding the people being chased as worth ethical consideration in the do-or-don’t chase calculus. Plus I don’t know if that figure counts passengers as bystanders.
> So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution.
It's absolutely imperative for LEO's to consider safety of other residents when enforcing laws. There are much better ways to identify and detain suspects.
> maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution.
License plates exist and cop cars already scan those. Turning a possible arrest into a chase puts the suspect, anyone else in the car with them, the cops, and various uninvolved bystanders at risk of serious injury or death. It is an extreme escalation and should be reserved for extreme situations.
Sure, assuming it's not a stolen car. But I don't think that's a safe assumption in the cases where a chase is potentially worthwhile.
Potentially worthwhile isn’t enough to Mad Max after a suspect and maybe force them to lose control and crash, on public roads. These policies can and do kill and maim lots of people every year.
Yep, the current solution doesn’t seem great. Are there known-good alternatives that are probably equally effective as deterrents?
I thought a majority of arrests are made during traffic stops, if you run and they can't chase, how do you expect arrests to happen?
I'm not a fan of the current system, but I struggle to personally come up with a better one.
> I thought a majority of arrests are made during traffic stops
Maybe, but what proportion of stops end in an arrest?
A largish proportion of cop traffic enforcement & safety activity ends in a tow, but we don’t expect traffic enforcement cops to drive tow trucks. The traffic safety people can call out the regular cops if they need them.
> if you run and they can't chase, how do you expect arrests to happen?
Recording devices, reports, follow up. Chases are a public menace, especially when they do them over minor offenses, as is the case for the overwhelming majority of chases. Given the danger, I’d much rather anyone who’s not an active danger to life get away than a car chase occur. The evidence is pretty far on the side of “these are net-harmful”. Cops just like them a lot, so we keep doing them (many places do, anyway—some have all but eliminated them)
Risk of added charges, potentially more serious than the original offense, means the majority of folks facing arrest won’t flee, anyway.
>A largish proportion of cop traffic enforcement & safety activity ends in a tow, but we don’t expect traffic enforcement cops to drive tow trucks.
These are clearly disanalogous. You can leave a car waiting for a tow truck; it's not going to drive off on its own. But you can't just leave a suspect waiting to be arrested unless they're restrained (in which case, you've already done the hard part of arresting them).
Ambulances, fire trucks. We already expect them to call for help in a significant minority of stops and traffic safety actions, including for many where they remain while waiting for the help.
There are three major sets of modification that I can think of which are done to a cruiser:
- Light bars/electronics/sirens
- Armoring
- Ability to detain suspects
The first is going to be required for every police or sheriff cruiser.
The second will reduce casualties (arguably for both sides) in an armed engagement. Ideally required for any action which could create an armed engagement. Because a minimum of one side is always armed, every encounter can become an armed engagement. Huzzah USA etc. etc.
The third is required if the police officer will ever respond to anything that isn't giving out a parking ticket. Traffic stops can include anything from an armed engagement down to a drunk driver or peaceful execution of an outstanding warrant. Then there's simple responding to calls, which can also include all of the above.
The lack of ability to detain someone means you need (as stated in the article) more officers responding to an engagement.
Light bars, cameras, comms equipment. The traffic enforcement cars need those. Not so much the armor and detainment capabilities.
If it’s known they don’t pursue and aren’t likely to attack you to secure an arrest, the risk for them from the person they’re stopping (traffic on the e.g. highway they’re standing next to is another matter) in an encounter is a ton lower. Why fight them when you can just leave? And rack up another charge, sure, but one a hell of a lot less serious than attacking someone and then still fleeing.
It does mean calling in a regular cop for arrests, but what proportion of stops result in arrests in a day? They also have to call in tow trucks and ambulances and fire trucks.
> If it’s known they don’t pursue and aren’t likely to attack you to secure an arrest, the risk for them from the person they’re stopping
If this is true and not just an assumption (FWIW, I think you're wrong - human nature is not that logical when in fight or flight brain) it should be possible to come up with numbers to back this up. There are many locations in the US where the default is not to chase.
As a side note, they have to detain someone while waiting. That someone's care is also legally in their hands at that point; it doesn't make a lot of sense from a civilian safety perspective to just set them on the side of the highway.
So the answer is less/no chases and more raids?
I totally agree that the majority of folks don't flee and wouldn't flee, but the folks that do, they're the main dangers we want to catch anyway.
I struggle to agree with the concept that raids ate better than chases.
I don’t think you’ll find that most chases are over issues that warrant turning it into a situation involving significant risk of serious injury or death for both those involved (which may include passengers in the fleeing car) and bystanders.
I completely understand, however, if they don't chase and it's not enough to try to catch the person in their house/work/whatever, it's practically the same as the law not being enforced, right?
I struggle to think it's fair to people that don't run if they're held responsible but people that run aren't.
How many deaths is this effort at fairness worth? I think enough would be caught by passive/invisible surveillance (drone tracking and other methods—these are already used) and simply following up at home or work that we’re not talking about some kind of get-away-free card, here. This also assumes a very-high rate of apprehension from chases, which does not seem to be the case (possibly under 50% when relatively-loose chase policies are in place—rates of apprehension, though not total apprehensions, appear to trend much higher with more-restrictive chase policies, as one might expect)
There have been some places that have either restricted or loosened restrictions on police chases over the last couple decades, which should give us an excellent data set to see the effects of these policies… unfortunately, police data gathering and sharing is notoriously awful, with the result that most attempts at analyzing the statistics of policing in the US are necessarily full of guesswork.
Just to be clear, I'm completely for restricted, even levels that could be considered highly restricted, chases. I'm just not sure that I'm okay with completely eliminating chases entirely.
I also worry that expanding "passive/invisible surveillance (drone tracking and other methods—these are already used)" is a net loss for citizens, however, I struggle on how to quantify that loss compared to the cost of accidents.
> if you run and they can't chase, how do you expect arrests to happen?
Lots of police departments have adopted a stance that they won't chase you except for certain circumstances (such as if you're presenting an immediate threat to the public).
Instead, they'll track the running suspect, position cars in the path of the vehicle and do ambushes involving spike strips, pit maneuvers, etc. Or, depending on the situation, they may do nothing in the moment and arrest the driver later at their home.
Even spike traps and “pit maneuvers” (AKA forcing another car to lose control at speed—take away the cool term and they’re just causing someone to lose control of a ton or three of steel on public streets, which is obviously nuts even if the only people at risk are in the fleeing car, unless the situation is already extreme) are crazy-dangerous and aren’t good to employ outside exceptional circumstances.
These tactics (outside extraordinary cases) are a solution to a problem the cops created themselves by chasing the fleeing suspect, and turning it into a life-and-death matter. It’s one of those cases where a knee-jerk and kinda authoritarian sense of justice (“they’re running, you can’t run from the cops, they have to go after them!”) is at sharply at odds with public benefit.
At least in my country, there are several tiers of police driver training/expertise.
A large amount of police work involves things like "go to the scene of the burglary from yesterday, take witness statements and fingerprints" and "go to the place the noise complaint came from, tell them to turn it down" and things like that.
Tasks that need a police car and timely response, but they don't need to be speeding and running red lights. This work is done by officers in kinda basic police cars.
Other officers, with advanced driver training, are called on for tasks that might need high speed pursuit. They get faster cars, like Mitsubishi Evos and Impreza WRXes.
That’s like saying let’s not equip planes that won’t crash with black boxes. Only the ones that crash need it. Let’s split up crashing and non crashing planes.
What would traffic enforcement folks be doing that would require all kinds of tactical upgrades to their cars, once we take car chases (again: already usually a bad idea and danger to the public well in excess of their benefits, no matter how the cop cars are equipped) out of the picture?
Scenario: ordinary traffic stop. Writes ticket or issues warning. Everything’s fine.
Scenario: I’m driving with a suspended license and may have an outstanding warrant for a missed court date. I elect not to run. Normal cop car called, takes me in. I won’t attack the traffic enforcement officer, because this is all being recorded and that gains me nothing except lost time and more charges, since if…
Scenario: The above is the situation but I elect to flee. No chase occurs, so this doesn’t turn into a prolonged risk to the public. Since I know the traffic enforcers don’t pursue and it’s well-publicized that their car and body cam footage is uploaded constantly, there’s zero reason to engage with or attempt to harm them.
The remaining risks are things that aren’t really mitigated by car upgrades (someone driving off mid-stop, which is risky for the traffic enforcer already standing next to the stopped-person’s car) or the kind of risks also present at, I dunno, the grocery store (someone armed and crazy attacks you for absolutely no conceivable benefit to themselves)
A bonus is that this would make non-traffic-enforcement cops a ton safer, since most of their deaths are from traffic accidents (not intentional attacks with a vehicle, to distinguish the two) and they’d spend way less time driving, or standing on the side of highways. [edit] I got that wrong, vehicle strikes and car crashes are more like ~40% of deaths on the job, not over half. Still, it’s way up the list of risks. Unclear how major injury causes break down.
No it's not. If something was stolen from your car or the neighbors music is too loud, you don't need a fully armed paramilitary with a 500 horsepower souped up car. A dude with a baton in a Prius is perfectly fine. If they need bigger guns, they can call them in if necessary.
I expected much more of a hit piece, but the findings of the police departments seem very well thought-out and explored. Police vehicles require extensive after-market work to meet the unique requirements of police forces, and there's not a long track history of how to do this with Teslas. The initial forays into this space are going to be pretty dicey and expensive until there is sufficient know-how to make the changes. Or Tesla itself could engage with this and work on a police model Tesla, but that is not likely to happen for a while.
I do wonder if the choice to use the Model 3 sedan was the right one; it feels like one of the SUVs would be a better choice because many of the complaints revolve around having sufficient interior room.
>> I do wonder if the choice to use the Model 3 sedan was the right one
I don't think you need to wonder. I have one and I love it, but if I were a cop, it wouldn't be my choice. I don't even think the Model Y would cut it. They should be using the Model X.
OTOH, I see cops driving a lot of Dodge Chargers around here (New England). Having rented one at one point, I can tell you that they don't have a whole lot of back seat room either, so I'm not sure about that point that one of the chiefs made.
But, yeah, I think it should be obvious to the most casual of observers that when you're trying to outfit a newish car that wasn't built for it to achieve a special purpose there's going to be growing pains. I couldn't find any solid quotes for police cars, but I seem to remember seeing that the average one was pushing $100,000 so the numbers they mentioned for the Teslas didn't sound that outrageous.
Well they make their own requirements so it's like me telling my job I need dual GPUs, 64GB RAM and 10TB to send my emails and make charts in Excel. Yeah, we do need a server/workhorse but not everyone needs one. Chromebook will due for most.
Another vehicle I've been paying some attention is the push to upgrade the US Post Office vehicles from the old boxy Grummans to the new duck nosed vehicle https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a62187981/usps-new-mail-tr.... I was really looking forward to those, but the other day I saw the mail lady driving one of the rebadged Mercede Metris minivans like that https://jalopnik.com/whats-the-real-reason-behind-the-post-o.... We stopped to talk to the lady and oh boy did she give us a piece of mind! The pros were short - "softer seats and air conditioning are nice". The rest! Access to mail in back seat requires getting out of the car! If it rains there is no splash guard and you get wet. Being able to reach out of the window is difficult so one has to get out, again, getting wet and adding effort! The door is not a slider - it just opens out - so getting out while close to mailbox is harder. And so on. She stated that whoever chose THAT stopgap vehicle has never actually delivered mail.
So it's good a police department tried these vehicles and was willing to talk about the results!
Just a note - the actual EVs are getting rave reviews and seem to be fully customized for postal delivery. https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1fflpg8/u...
I feel like this is less a "Teslas don't work for police" as much as it's a "a small luxury mid-range sedan doesn't work for police". Like, of course it doesn't?
Later in the article, it praises the F-150 Lightning (electric F-150 pickup truck) as a working solution for a police department, but seems to forget all the complaints about needing to charge and all that, which the F-150 Lightning also would have...
Not the hardest hit piece, but it's definitely written in a way that sounds like "Tesla is shit, but Ford knows what they're doing so it's good", even though most of the complaints were more about electric cars than about Tesla specifically.
Fords history of working with the cops and saying "Here's what we have, what fits best as a base to modify, how can we meet your needs?" that is older than Tesla's founding
The F-150 Lightning may not be dramatically better, but an OEM willing to work with you can make all the differnece in the world
At no point are they saying tesla's are bad. Just that they are not good for what police need them to do.
I have no connection to police but I do own a 2015 ford Police Interceptor Utility (Essentially an explorer.)
There are several features that are useful to police.
Manual headlights. (Keep debating spending the ~$50-70 to upgrade to auto headlights.) The lights and horn do not trigger when you lock the car with the remote. Nor do lights come on when you open the door. (All of these are features to prevent drawing attention when you are idling on the side of the road.)
Fairly tall sidewalls. I can go over a curb and not have any issue. The suspension is the best of any car / truck I have owned.
It is rated for a 75MPH impact from the rear. (Fun fact. The full size spare tire is required to be in place to keep the rating.
I have 4 switches on the steering wheel for accessories. (I assume stuff like lights and sirens.)
There are some others like being able to disconnect the door locks from the back doors although mine were set to normal car when I got it.
Emergency vehicles are the kind of vehicles I don't really want electric yet. Power goes out when there are emergencies, and then what? They break out a bunch of beater crown vics?
Also inevitably lithium packs are the last thing I want to bring more of to an emergency.. imagine bringing more lithium to a California wildfire when most fire depts struggle to extinguish packs in the most favourable conditions.
Modern gas pumps don't work without electricity, but batteries and generators can still charge electric cars.
Most cities have their own pumps at the maintenance yard, and they can run on generators
Which can unironically also recharge electric vehicles.
Sure, both systems work equally well in an extended power failure
> Furthermore, officers reported “autopilot interference,” which caused “a delay when officers shift into drive” and also triggered an automatic stop when officers tried to pull over to the side of the road, possibly because the car assumed the vehicle was wrongfully veering off course.
It sounds like the police, just like Tesla and the Cybertruck, are testing these things out in the public?! Wouldn't these issues be discovered before these cars were actually deployed, like in a simulated road stop or something? Seems a bit bananas that they discovered these issues once officers use these cars in public.
As far as I know South Pasadena is the only one that has converted their entire fleet to Teslas. It’s a small city in the middle of suburban LA with zero off roading and they borrow lots of resources from the Pasadena PD so the limitations probably aren’t that big a deal. There’s not a lot going on in the town so if someone is getting arrested half the officers on duty show up anyway.
Other departments are running smaller trials or converting to more suitable cars like the F-150 Lightning mentioned in the article.
> are testing these things out in the public?!
Long gone are the days that they could afford to arrange proper pre-live-environment testing for anything like this. Even if much testing is done away from the live environment some testing period is still going to be needed before full roll-out (though this seems to be earlier stage testing than that).
I can't help thinking that if/when the oil really starts to run out, the only vehicles that will be allowed to use it will be Emergency Services vehicles. I can't currently imagine (say) an electric fire truck, nor ambulance.
I can't currently imagine (say) an electric fire truck, nor ambulance.
Why? The biggest problem I can think of is that they have a shorter range, but for a fire truck or ambulance the extra weight for longer range wouldn't really be an issue. The lower maintenance requirements might also mean ambulances won't be the shitshow that private ambulance companies make them right now.
In the worst case scenario, I imagine there would be more priority for a vehicle which can provide power to on-scene electric vehicles, which is something frequently done for lighting up scenes even today.
That said, I don't see these coming today or tomorrow. In a couple of years, though, we'll start seeing them more.
Those would absolutely be good options for EV conversion. What are you objections?
they had over 100K BUDGET to make the car ready for police work but somehow they did not find a way to reproduce the "hide behind the engine". sounds like they hired the wrong engineers to do the job. I think even GPT 2 can come up with a solution to this for less than a few thousands
This does not sound unreasonable at all. The crown Vic and explorer have had kits for decades and ford designers know the requirements
This department bought retail consumer teslas and had to get custom fittings to bring them up to spec
Of course it’s going to be expensive. Getting out of ICE vehicles is going to have a sticker shock and it’s our own fault for waiting this long to get started
The $150k budget included the price of 2 cars. They probably didn't get base models. $35k was for modifying both.
They have to bootstrap the r&d for armoring Teslas. They could only find a performance shop that mostly does fiber aero kits. That's the actual issue - no existing armorers. For the "engine block hide", though, would keeping some extra vests in the frunk do the job?
Perhaps they're better off with an EV Blazer?
Weight matters. They can add a bunch of armor but then the cars range is shot and it's too slow. It's already a heavy vehicle.
> However, "the Tesla presented challenges due to the small interior space, 'smart car' features, and low vehicle profile limiting maneuverability (e.g., jumping curbs, off-road use)."
Should've picked the Cybertruck.
Irvine did, looks like it's working for them: https://ngtnews.com/tesla-cybertruck-ready-to-help-enforce-t...
The F150 Lightning actually worked for the purpose, if you read the article.
I did read it. The purpose of the article seems to be a Tesla hit piece.
Is there evidence for that, or is that just ingrained now as something we say when an article hurts our feelings?
Not really. I have no incentive to defend Tesla. I do not own one, and I do not want one. I own a Ford Expedition. I was merely saying that Cybertruck would have been a better choice (or even a larger Tesla!), and them plugging a Ford EV at the end seemed like a paid hit piece brought to you by Ford.