Police are tagging fleeing cars with GPS darts to avoid dangerous pursuits | Hacker News Reader

Police are tagging fleeing cars with GPS darts to avoid dangerous pursuits

thedrive.com

60 pointsamichail58 comments

They do speed tracking by camera and send fines in the mail already in the UK. Reports are that nationwide camera network already tracks cars from driveway to destination. Worse cameras are now looking at activity inside the vehicle for fines - like not having a seatbelt in place or having a cellphone in hand. There was even a fine issued for “flipping off” a traffic camera https://nypost.com/2021/02/15/uk-driver-avoids-speeding-tick...

Seems western governments keep taking inspiration from China on monitoring of the population.

> Reports are ...

Weasel words.

https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...

The cops backing off doesn't make these people stop. Most of the time, people running from the cops keep right on speeding and running red lights, crashing within minutes of the chase being terminated. This does nothing to solve the problem of joyriders injuring and killing innocent people. They often attract attention of police because they're already driving in such a way that they are a lethal threat, and it is absurd to say "just let them be, chasing them might hurt someone or them." What's next, letting people trying to shoot others, keep firing because they or the public might get hurt?

Vehicles are lethal weapons. Full stop.

There is no legal right to evade police, or resist arrest. Full stop.

If you run from the cops, drive into oncoming traffic, hit speeds of 100+ MPH, or run lights, you are an imminent lethal threat to the general public and cops should treat you as such, with the power to do whatever it takes to end that threat as soon as possible, and if it risks or means killing you, tough shit. Don't run from the cops.

There is no difference between someone waving a gun around / shooting it and someone driving into oncoming traffic, flying through red lights, and doing 30+ MPH over the speed limit trying to get away from the cops.

Don't GPS tag the car. Don't follow them for hours. End the threat to the public just as you would any other imminent lethal threat to the public.

Develop spike strips that actually work. Blockade the roads so they're forced to stop by traffic. Use the "box" technique UK police do where they box the car in with 4-9 vehicles. Ram them off the road. Have a sniper put a fucking bullet through their head if you have to.

End the threat.

Watch how fast chases stop.

> Don't run from the cops.

Ahh you're white, right?

[dupe]

Actual article and more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857535

Its a good idea. I'm surprised there aren't trackers on all cars already, like a 21st century license plate. I thought toll passes would do this, but looking at the size of the sensors over interstates it isn't so easy.

I work in the public safety domain. You don’t even need a tracker on vehicles. There are several camera startups in this space, such as Flock Safety, which can scan for plates and particular vehicle descriptions and alert law enforcement. These devices are more common than you’d think. Agencies can also enter data sharing agreements. I work on the consuming end of data from systems like this.

[1]https://www.flocksafety.com/

[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/02/27/flock...

I was just talking to a coworker about this.

Imo it should be illegal, but what ever I guess haha

Basically, no need for a warrant any more. As long as it’s “in view of the public” they can track you entirely.

Champaign IL set these up on almost every intersection.

Massively gathered warrantless spying on the genpop should be illegal ...when it comes to tracking car license plates? I mean, compared to facial recognition and cell phone tracking, it seems quaint.

Is there an option for the public/non-law enforcement to access or pay to get this data? I know we're not getting the toothpaste back in the tube so we (the general public) might as well get some benefit from it.

There are a lot of government officials driving around doing non-sensitive/non-law enforcement work so they should have no expectation of privacy and no qualified immunity or some other exception related to active investigations.

This seems like a great way to ensure accountability of our representatives - if they'll let us.

A la Elon Jet but for the vehicles of publicly elected officials? I think we should have the right to keep tabs on them given how prone they are to misbehaving.

The NY Civil Liberties Union did find that toll passes are scanned far from actual toll roads. It appears to be used explicitly for surveillance purposes. Stick to cash or bill-by-mail, or connect your reader’s battery with a thumb when you need to use it.

https://www.nyclu.org/en/e-zpass-readers

I just leave mine off entirely.

When it fails to scan, they do ALPR to figure out who to send the ticket to, but, before they send a ticket they lookup against the EZPass database to see if your car is in it, and if so, they just debit your account like the tag did scan.

If that happens often enough, they send you a new tag and ask for the broken one back.

Oddly I keep getting defective tags.

I like you.

Thank you. I like you too.

> I'm surprised there aren't trackers on all cars already, like a 21st century license plate.

Are you referring to a state or government tracker on every vehicle? If so, it seems like you're implying that's a good idea. If that's the case, I hope there's some joke in here I'm missing.

License plate readers (LPR) are common in cities and on motorways in UK; there are “Average Speed” zones where the LPR is accomplished by cameras mounted on overhead gantries spanning miles. Speeding tickets can be issued automatically if you break the speed limit between gantries. It’s always been weird to me the US doesn’t do this and often requires a trooper to pull you over and give you a written ticket. Note that not all motorways have this in UK, but those which do, you don’t see anywhere near as much excessive speed.

LPR is also used in UK by the Driver and Vehicle License Agency (DVLA) to oversee taxation of vehicles. No more “tabs” or license discs to display in your front window, it’s all LPR these days.

LPR databases are queryable by the security services and law enforcement — there are enough cameras in cities your location can be pinned down to “within a few streets”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...

This isn’t a tracker on every vehicle but it’s pretty equivalent for drivers who don’t live in the middle of nowhere where LPR may only be deployed in major towns.

It sounds frankly dystopian, and I hope that this never comes to my country.

The government has no business tracking the movements of its citizens outside of an active criminal investigation and only then within well defined paramaters.

It does feel like a very stereotypically American view to be absolutely aghast at the idea of the government tracking the location of cars while being entirely permissive of private companies doing the same and reselling that data to anyone and everyone that wants it (including the government, ironically)

Disabling government technology is a crime. Interfering with third party data collection efforts is my absolute right. These are not the same things.

That doesn't really sound like a right and if it is you probably signed it away when you bought the car.

And that company is free to fight that battle in civil court whereas the government will haul you into criminal court. Pretty big difference.

In most (if not all?) parts of the US you are legally required to display a license plate and to not obscure it — those tinted covers you see people use are both a “Pull me over if you’re not otherwise busy!” to a lot of State Troopers (at least according to those that I occasionally shoot with on a pistol range), and ineffective outside nighttime (they reflect the IR emitter, but those often aren’t on in daylight).

So, how are you “interfering with third party data collection efforts”, while also meeting your legal requirements (government) obligations to display an unobscured and valid license plate on the vehicle, given the conversation is about ALPR/ANPR and where the tracking is a camera which reads the license plate?

I'm not cool with private companies tracking my location either, outside of specific scenarios where I've given express permission.

This country absolutely needs stronger consumer protections.

> It’s always been weird to me the US doesn’t do this and often requires a trooper to pull you over and give you a written ticket.

Very different cultures. The US is still a culture of personal accountability and freedom. If you aren't hurting anyone you can do as you please. The UK skews toward rules for the sake of rules. Sadly the US is also moving in that direction, but mercifully still trails the UK.

It's the long tail of free speech. You can't stop someone from publishing information about how to defeat such a device. It would become common knowledge very quickly and would be used easily by criminals with specialized toolsets available on several different levels of marketplace.

In the UK, you can much more easily wrap all that up, and deny existence to those markets and even to import of that equipment.

And it's beyond culture. The UK holds an active monarchy and a hereditary house of parliament. The citizen simply does not have the same status and is unavoidably a "subject."

Hereditary peerage was ended with the House of Lords Act 1999.

I don't know anything about UK law, but apparently the act still allows for 92 hereditary peers[1], and indeed:

"The most recent grant of a hereditary peerage was in 2019 for the youngest child of Elizabeth II, Prince Edward"[2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords_Act_1999

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_peer

I was specifically referring to hereditary peerage in the House of Lords, which was almost completely done away with. At around 13% of members, the chamber is largely no longer a chamber of hereditary peers. Hereditary peerage and hereditary peerage participation in the house of lords are separate. There are around 800 hereditary peers, but since 1999, only 92 of these hereditary titles have a spot in the house of lords. The hereditary peerage granted to Prince Edward is not one of the 92 hereditary peerages in the House of Lords, so it doesn't allow him participation.

You are right, it's very much a culture thing.

On the US side its very "individual good" focus, whereas in the UK (and Europe in general) its more "community good" focused.

This may be partly a function of density- with higher density comes more human interaction in a smaller space.

The US also had a long period of no, or minimal govt, over very wide areas. This lead to a culture of personal security etc (think Westerns with people carrying guns).

Most Americans see govt at best as a necessary evil, who is actively working "against my interest." Whereas most Europeans see govt as an effective way to "promote community interest". (I'm referencing govt as a concept here, not as a political or party construct. In other words you might be against the people currently in govt, but still appreciate that there should be a govt.)

I don’t agree with your stereotype of Americans. We very much believe in our institutions.

Sure, some police somewhere have probably been sold a unit by one of the dozens of companies that have tried to commercialize this. They are a cute toy with very little practical use.

Most departments already have much better capabilities that allow them to do passive tracking (air units or other technologies) or mutual aid agreements with a larger department or a county/state asset that can.

Air units aren't cheap. Dedicating a dozen units to a chase isn't cheap. Insurance and damages aren't cheap. The police should have a plethora of capabilities so they can size their solution to the level of danger encountered and have additional options when a particular solution isn't available in a given situation.

The other day I was driving through a school zone and it had that 25 mph radar screen. Most people did slow down, but it got me thinking. With modern cars being "smart", could govt offer a tax tax break for folks opting into the car sotware capping speeds dynamically?

This might be in the works already: with hybrids + full electric vehicles being increasingly used, the revenue from a fuel tax is dropping. There are regions investigating use-based taxes that track when and where vehicles are used, and assess a tax based on that information.

This is, of course, a frightening proposal for anyone who wants to keep even one shred of privacy, but so it goes ....

There's a lot of interesting ways to do usage based vehicle tax that don't impact privacy or do so only minimally.

The simplistic is to just bin roads into N categories and every mile it increments your monthly usage category N road type. The categories could be anything like road type, time of day, current congestion level, etc. There's actually little reason to track the specific location or road name.

> There's actually little reason to track the specific location or road name.

Yet, so many reasons for several government agencies to do exactly that.

My exact thoughts, although I would’ve been more blunt…

"Do you have anything to hide" is one of the worst sentences in existence.

It wouldn't need to share any data with anyone, just have dynamic speed control depending on the road someone is driving. Storing data for all 6 million km of road locally and refreshing them regularly should be doable.

Governments are already considering or in the process of mandating that cars be equipped with automatic speed limiters. It's long overdue.

There's no way that's a good idea without a AZ-5 style wax+paper seal and flip cap on the steering wheel to turn it off. You want to be able to use your car in emergency situations.

But I pay taxes for energy already? Why should I pay to charge and then again to drive?

Or use the grappler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_mRRJHUZrc

It's effective but it's too big to be deployed on every vehicle all the time and requires some finesse to use.

It's synergistic with PIT/TVI. If the car doesn't swerve to avoid it, PIT. If the driver keeps his car directly in front of the police car, grapple.

So long as there are safeguards to ensure this doesn't end up with police just tagging whoever they want in any situation, this is great.

Example safeguards could be:

* Legal rules allowing evidence collected as a result of inappropriate use to be thrown out,

* Transparency reports on use of the devices,

* Requiring authorization from higher ups (with at least an audio paper trail), and/or

* The devices being highly visible.

You'd also need protections against parallel construction.

vehicle-mounted launchers that fire foam projectiles with a heat-activated sticky glue at fleeing vehicles in a car chase. The projectiles have wireless GPS tracking systems built into them, which allow police to track the car's whereabouts. The launchers and darts are made by StarChase, who also leases out handheld units to the NYPD, among other departments. The idea is to eliminate car chases, which are dangerous and often put the public at risk.

https://www.starchase.com/products/vehicle-mounted-gps-launc...

StarChase technology has been reviewed and approved by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

https://www.starchase.com/4th-amendment/

Why not deploy a reaper drone equipped with R9X? Literally shred the engine of that car.

The problem is that you need a large percentage of your vehicles equipped with this, because you never know which one will be taking part in a pursuit. And even if you're lucky enough to be taking part in the start of a pursuit with an equipped vehicle, surely the darts don't have a 100% hit rate.

So how much of Spiderman is now real life?

Not the part about a paid job as a wet film photographer for a print newspaper.

He’s a freelance photographer, not an employee. That was probably ahead of its time.

"vehicle-mounted launchers that fire foam projectiles with a heat-activated sticky glue at fleeing vehicles"

This has a ridiculously Snow Crash like sound to it.

"they're said to travel about 30 mph" ... I'm underwhelmed. Cop still has to chase, fast enough so the dart can catch up.

Couldn't they fire a dart any faster than 30 mph (= 44 fps) ?

Or, they can do like they do in Arkansas and PIT the car at 130 mph.

I mean, when you're dealing with a barbarian driving 130 mph you're probably saving someone's life

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