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Comment by pdog | Hacker News Reader

> "The reality is that everyone runs from the police nowadays."

Since when? This should be a bigger story than the availability of GPS tracking darts.

Back in my younger years, I was stopped at a light when a guy pulled up next to me and revved his engine, an invitation to drag to the next light. I revved my engine back. Light turns green, we race to the next light. I see a cop put on their lights behind us.

Now we're both stopped at the light with the cop coming up behind us. I'm on the inside lane. The guy next to me decided he's going to try to run from the cop and makes a right turn.

Cop pulls up beside me, shouts at me "pull around the corner and wait for me" then goes off after the other guy.

So I pulled around the corner and waited for her. She did manage to catch the other guy down the street. About 15 minutes later she comes over to me and says: "I can't believe you did what I asked. I had your plate and would've tracked you down. Don't let me catch you drag racing again. I'm letting you go with a warning."

Yeah that would be pretty effective unless the person being pursued had removed the plates or something.

If she'd have tracked you down the prosecutor would have then had to prove it was you in the driver's seat for any sort of moving violation to stick. In an age before ubiquitous 4k surveillance this would have been a tall order.

Sounds like a lot of extra work instead of facing the consequence you brought upon yourself by drag racing.

In my experience, and I used to get pulled over a lot, being courteous and respectful to an officer is sufficient to avoid a speeding citation with 50% success rate.

And probably 50% off the times when you don’t get a citation, the ticket is reduced.

If you are white, maybe.

However, I noticed that after growing long hair more citations would stick too.

Also depends on the car you drive.

Anecdotally, my brother decided to splurge on his childhood dreamcar (a BMW Z3, second hand of course). He found that he started getting stopped for "random checks" once every couple of trips on the motorway. The probability would also be much higher if the car was freshly washed and shiny.

He then switched back to a normal, more "boring" car, and the "random checks" stopped.

Yep, I've noticed car choice mattering for myself and others as well.

Reflecting back to my original comment:

I guess my goal besides sharing my opinion was wanting to communicate to people who seemed to have the "just be polite and respectful view" is that factors like these make the predictability of politeness or respectability affecting the outcome at all way more variable.

Sometimes to the point of not mattering at all.

FWIW, I'm white and very aware that it may be different if you are not. I thought about it when writing my comment but decided I m just didn't want to drag it into this discussion.

In my experience, it never hurts to be polite and respectful, though even as a white person I've had run-ins with officers who were either in a bad mood or just jerks and no amount of good will on my part seemed to matter. So it didn't help, but giving them lip would've just antagonized them further.

So yeah, maybe it doesn't help. But I can't imagine it would ever hurt.

And finally: I can only reflect my experience as a middle-class middle-aged married straight white Jewish male who's lived a relatively privileged life. I acknowledge that in its entirety. And I'm certainly interested in hearing other folks' experiences and learning from them. If someone wants to chime in about that time they were polite and respectful and it made the situation somehow worse, I'm all ears.

And old. And not poor. And preferably a woman.

Poor, young, black and male are the high crime demographics that get drilled into officers' heads at the academy. People checking more than one of those boxes rarely catch a break.

> the prosecutor would have then had to prove it was you in the driver's seat for any sort of moving violation to stick.

Obviously in a fair system, this would have to be true, but in today's system, is it actually true? Don't a lot of speed cameras automatically mail out tickets by license plate, and it's just assumed that if you're the owner, you're also the driver, unless you can prove someone else actually was?

Amusingly, identical twins still get off the hook for this. And I read on HN recently that in places with particularly egregious automatic enforcement, it becomes popular to wear a ski mask while driving

In the USA it depends by state. Many East Coast counties have speed cameras and red light cameras.

California doesn't have speed cameras but certain jurisdictions have red light cameras. And it depends by jurisdiction whether you have to pay or send it to /dev/null.

In Arizona I know of Scottsdale having speed cameras. Not sure how they get around the legality.

In Germany they take a photo of the front of your car, so your face is on it... Unless you drive there with a left-hand drive car: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081607/Speeding-pu...

In Belgium it's way worse. Picture of the back of your car and you have to pay. No way around it. In fact, if you want to fight the ticket you need to pay to see the photo. How's that for discovery?

this article is full of claims in need of data such as this one.

> These darts have been used successfully, nationwide, 10,000 times – meaning 10,000 wanted or accused criminals have been taken off the streets.

every single use of the dart was for a criminal? a 100% conviction rate?

also

> The most important thing about StarChase is every tag saves a life”

every police chase involves a death?

Definitely marketing hyberbole but if they need to use the tag dart, presumably it is someone who is fleeing from the police, so they are _at least_ guilty of eluding, with probably a very high conviction rate for at least that offense, if they go to trial.

Never run from the police, because they never kill people who are cooperating?

Ok... What are the cases where running from the police is the preferable strategy?

When you get away.

You're driving home with your girlfriend and daughter and a police officer pulls you over. You are licensed to carry a gun, and you have your gun in your car. If you drive off you're evading police, and guilty of a crime, and if you don't you get this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile.

I am not saying "you should always run from the cops". What I'm saying is that "there's nothing to fear from cooperating with the police after not committing a crime" is also not true.

The police are responsible for creating an environment in which a sizable portion of the population have a very real fear that any interaction may result in harm or death whether or not you did anything wrong, and so the decision to run may seem "wrong" but it is not unreasonable.

It's against policy for police officers to chase 2 and 3 wheel vehicles because of the high risk of fatality.

All they had to do is say "could save a life" and it would have been a lot more effective because it would be hard to criticize

This reads like a sponsored story to advertise the tracking dart product. I looked through the page a couple times for a disclosure but didn't see one.

> every single use of the dart was for a criminal? a 100% conviction rate?

Maybe uses where that wasn't the case just don't count as "successful".

>The reality is that everyone runs from the police nowadays.

I think the reality is they have something to sell and are happy to deploy some over the top rhetoric to try. Unfortunately police are inundated with this kind of language building the image that police work is full of action and danger when in fact it's more dangerous to be a pizza delivery driver.

Since never. It's one of those classic "say something ridiculous about the public so you can justify mistreating them" cases.

I always run from the police.

60% of the time, it works every time.

(Edit: This is humour. I don’t always run from the police. I mostly run when they have no reason to chase, because you can always act really confused and be unsure why they were chasing you, arguing you were just late for a meeting.)

I've never really "run" from the police but I've definitely taken a sharp turn onto a side road when I think a cop is going to chase me after I was speeding. lol

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