Even dumber than smart guns
In response to a police officer shooting another plain-clothes police officer in NY (of course, in NY if you have a gun you’re a criminal or cop),Robb notes a solution in search of a problem:
One idea involves the use of radio frequency tags that would allow officers to pinpoint where other cops are in the city, Browne said. Another involves tags that would work gun-to-gun and use an infrared sensor: When a weapon is pulled from an officer’s holster it would trigger a signal that would be sent to the gun of a nearby officer. The signal may be seen or heard.
Using technology to solve problems that are better solved through other means tends to create more problems. There is no magic switch or button for every thing.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Hmm.. just what every undercover officer wants – an electronic means of marking his gun as police-department issue. Might be fun for a few days, though – set up your bar/restaurant/store with a little gizmo at the door that honks and flashes a light every time an armed cop walks in.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:34 am
“A spokesman for the federal lab said some of the ideas floated by the department, like the use of radio frequency tags, may not work.”
Uh-oh. If it doesn’t work, gun control groups will lobby to make it mandatory for all civilian guns!
June 8th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I will make a fortune selling black market cop detectors.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Let’s see, identify plain clothes, off duty and undercover officers without them knowing. Or clone the system so that a responding officer gets a don’t shoot signal while he is gunned down. Any more bright ideas.
Most shootings of non-uniformed police officers by other officers is due to non-uniformed officer acting in a non-compliant manner, i.e, turning, reaching for their badge, hands at waist or obscured, etc. The problem is the confronted non-uniformed police officer doesn’t realize he’s not known as a police officer and is being treated like a “citizen”. So he feels the orders don’t apply to him and also tries not to surrender. The confronting officer shoots the non-uniformed officer just like he was normal folk.
June 9th, 2009 at 5:24 am
I’m not sure, but I don’t think technology has advanced to the point where it can fix “stupid”.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:36 am
This would be exploited by criminals in so many ways it would be impossible to list them all.
One that comes to mind (the ‘cop detector’ idea is a brilliant one, by the by) would be that criminals would simply carry “false alarms” that would tag them as “Plain-clothed Police Officers” whenever the cops pointed their guns at them. This would give the criminal a “heads-up” when ever a cop pointed his gun in that general direction, and make the police officer hesitant to engage a hostile who was reaching for his gat and not his badge. This will get cops killed faster than poor judgment ever could.
Technology is no substitute for training.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
What I WOULD support, in any case, is a tiny little package that attaches to the shoulder or hat of any officer, gun or no gun. Enclosed is memory, a “dome” style hemispherical lens, a microphone, and a little bit of control circuitry.
The camera records video, a 360 degee span around the unit, as well as sound, to the onboard memory… when it’s first powered on, it records up to the 5 minute mark of 15-20 minutes total. Once 5 minutes is hit, a parallel circuit engineered into the simply steps the values in the memory locations down by the size of the write packet per clock cycle, essentially pushing old video off the front of the memory.
Here’s the catch… engineer the mic to overload somewhere around the pressure level that a 130dB source would get you at ~25-50′. When it clips, i.e. a sound loud enough to max the signal out, like a gunshot, car accident, bomb, etc., the memory push circuit deactivates while the recording continues.
When everything’s over, you get back to the station and a tech downloads the video, which will have to be “translated” from the lens view out to panoramic flat… and you now have video of all the officer’s visible surroundings from 5 minutes before, to 10-15 minutes after an incident. Could even attach a beacon to it that activates if the mic signal starts clipping and there’s not a radio signal spike within 30 seconds, the scenario being if an officer is shot and immediately disabled, 30 seconds afterwards an emergency signal is sent… but if the officer is ambushed and keys up, it detects the spike and continues recording but doesn’t signal out.
All these newfangled devices should be angled around what could be the two most important things a police officer does; observe and communicate. Forget the tactical and situational aids until you’ve got that down, unless you’re solving an immediate, serious problem.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Ah!
Build the AOS (angel on shoulder) into the radio mic as a replacement unit. The beacon would just be an autokey, mic’s already there, power provided, mic’s usually on the shoulder or high on the chest anyways… it’d look just like a standard remote mic unit with a clear glass “wart” on top.
The autokey beacon could play back a little reserved section of memory after 3-4 short keyed tones with backplay through the speaker… that’d alert the officer that his/her AOS went active without a disabling signal from the radio. After a couple seconds it continues and plays a pre-recorded name ID, and possibly after that a specially configured pulsed tone designed to allow a triangulation system to hone in on the radio source…. with pauses of course to allow normal traffic on that channel.
Someone get to it, I’ve got no interest in patenting this, I just want to see it happen 🙂