| ▲ | twelvedogs 14 hours ago |
| police will chase in the US for really any reason, kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine john oliver did a whole thing on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ygQ2wEwJw |
|
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine Except that the person trying to get away knows that too, so if all they're doing is buying themselves a bigger fine, why are they doing it? The answer to that could be because they stole the car, or because there's a body in the back, in which case mailing them a fine doesn't work. |
| |
| ▲ | idle_zealot an hour ago | parent [-] | | > The answer to that could be because they stole the car, or because there's a body in the back, in which case mailing them a fine doesn't work. Except it's almost never that. The answer is that people are stupid and impulsive. |
|
|
| ▲ | themafia 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "I wasn't driving at the time. Someone took my car." There is generally no crime for owning a vehicle used in a crime. The violation belongs to the _driver_ and to no one else. Burden of proof can be extreme in US courts. |
| |
| ▲ | dns_snek 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You don't need to be chasing them on the road. Attach a GPS tracker to the car and follow it with drone, collect surveillance footage and arrest them once they come to a stop. | | |
| ▲ | themafia 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They do have GPS dart launchers and other systems. They're fairly unreliable. It's difficult for the lead driver in a chase to deploy accurately and cars are typically dirty enough to make most adhesives ineffective particularly when deployed at highway speeds. A hoodie is enough to defeat the drone surveillance, and regardless of what facial recognition technology you use, a jury still has to buy the output of that system. For drones with less than a 6 foot wingspan that don't require a runway you've got maybe 30 minutes of flight time at a top speed of 30 miles per hour. So unless you know where they're going already you're not going to be able to effectively deploy it in the time necessary to capture them and you can't loiter long enough to track them with infrared. The helicopter is an insurance policy. When you have a bunch of marked units doing twice the speed limit on a long enough chase they're going to hit something. Those crashes are devastating and lead to eye watering settlement amounts. The helicopter can safely chase most vehicles at almost any speed and the risk of them crashing with any civilian or even civilian property is effectively zero. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | domoregood 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| True, but chases involving stolen vehicles (a non-trivial percentage of all chases) means that mailing a fine to the registered owner wouldn't be a universal solution. |
|
| ▲ | mschuster91 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine thing is, in Germany and many other European countries there's a mandate to register your place of residence with the authorities in a timely manner (i.e. 2 weeks after moving in). Americans and Brits don't have that, so "mail them a fine" is most likely going to result in the letter not arriving where it should. |
| |
| ▲ | inferiorhuman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can't speak to the UK but in California there are various rules around updating vehicle registration when you move. Enforcement is pretty lax unless you drive something with exceptionally high registration fees. There's strong wording about updating voter registration when you move, but I doubt there's much in the way of actual law. If there is it's basically never enforced as far as I can tell. |
|
