Posted on 10/25/2013 8:47:53 PM PDT by Java4Jay
Police chases are dangerous. Sometimes people get hurt or even killed. But a new piece of technology in Iowa may soon make police pursuits a thing of the past.
The secret weapon is mounted in the grill of an Iowa State Patrol cruiser. When the trooper hits a button in the car or on a key fob, the suspect's car is tagged by the Star Chase system.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbs12.com ...
what could possibly go wrong? besides do we really believe this won’t be misused?
Beats the crap out of long range high speed chases. IMHO
Ought to work great on motorcycles.
A lid pops open in the grill and the tracking bullet shoots out, sticking to the bad guy’s trunk.
I thought it wasn’t to long ago that the tech talked about was something that would fry the cars computer shutting down the car and the chase.
A Predator SRAW would do the job.
Drones for every occasion!
Is there anything they can’t do/
This is pretty cool! “Q” would definitely approve.
I like this and wish I had invented it.
It may stop long distance pursuits, but only if they can get the vehicle “tagged” quickly. And departments with a no-pursuit policy won't be able to use these anyway.
However, it's another tool that can be used in limited situations. Another reason it's use would be limited is because it costs $500 a pop for the tracking devices.
It ran into the problem that there are a lot of cars made of metal; this means that they basically have to be touching bumpers before a cruiser-mounted HERF gun could scramble the car’s electronics. Hybrids have heavily shielded electronics due to the EM fields their electric motors produce and HERF guns are even less capable against them.
Does work against the plastic wonder, the Corvette C5, though. In one media test, it made the door locks fritz and the computer stalled the engine after the beam was held on the car for a few seconds. Unfortunately for the idea, all the operator had to do was turn the car off then back on to ‘reboot’ the car once the beam wasn’t directly playing on the car (i.e., make a sharp turn while coasting) and off it went again. Worse, the Honda Accord they tested completely ignored the weapon until it was basically at contact range - and even then it refused to shut down, only ran a little funny while the beam was on it. And they were using a larger and more powerful version than you would normally be able to mount on a cruiser. Think “large DirecTV or DishTV antenna” and you have the idea.
so the bad guy gets tagged, dumps the vehicle and car jacks someone - at gun point…..problem solved?
1) How do they prove who was driving the vehicle?
2) How do they keep someone from removing the tag?
3) Once understood by criminals, how is it any better than just recording the license plate number?
As soon as the bad guy sees the cops back off, he knows he’s been tagged. So he takes his time finding a place to ditch the car where he can also carjack another one. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought of this.
Just great. The dumbest of society will now have even more ballistics devices to shoot innocent Americans.
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