Thank you. That was the joke, twisting the cliché “celebrating July 4 by exercising freedom to ___.” Always amazing to me how many people here have a hard time getting jokes.
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Humor pales in comparison to pedantry, the need to be correct, and having everyone else know it; didn’t ya know?
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That fool needed to get across the county line! didn’t he watch no dukes of hazard?
Please do not presume to tell me where my concern is or where it should be. While i agree that the people potentially using the tool in question are a much larger concern in this situation, the tool is important in itself as well. Just as “the medium is the method”* the tool available to the tool user can affect their mindset. Part of the difference between how English and an American police officers react to situations is down whether they have a gun. In simple terms, a gun being part of the equation (in the hands of a law enforcement officer) tends to lead to more violent outcomes and no greater safety for the officer in most situations.
And part of a continuing issue with human thought is this ever-present binary. You forgot the possibility that it could be both. Consider: is a fatal biological weapon ever a good tool?
Do you really see this particular technology getting into the hands of the general public? Anytime soon? Also, keep in mind that this technology can be used to keep track of dissidents. Sure this douce-bag was speeding dangerously, but what if he was just a guy that the sheriff had a beef with? “We got some down time, let’s check out what William’s doing.” “Ha! You’re so bad, Sheriff Roscoe.”
* In case it’s not obvious, i meant to type ‘message’ here, not ‘method’.
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It’s really nothing more than taking existing benign map data and overlaying on top of live video. No more than a glorified paper map in the sky.
A tool suite such a ESRI that is designed for managing and visualizing data AND tying it back to databases such as income, race, and or arrest history is a far more dangerous tool and is in the hands of the general public now.
Combining the two would be problematic for all the reasons that you have expressed.
The sign in question is in the Northern Territory (Aus), which has a very low population density, and basically one decent straight road going south to South Australia. The no speed limit status is a bit contentious, and IIRC has been removed and put back once or twice. That road is used a lot by road trains, which carry freight south.
In practice, its probably too expensive for the NT police to enforce, given the small population and the distances they cover.
I don’t know if Canada has similar lengths of straight road in their distant north. Mountains and ice may make conditions totally different.
Thank YOU.
Police capture a speeder. Not just a speeder but someone who is driving so fast he is a danger to himself and others. They do so without a “high speed chase” that puts others at risk. All I can say is, “Bravo!”
When someone flees at 147 mph from a routine traffic stop, some degree of alarm and suspicion is warranted. It didn’t help that he tried to hide at a house that wasn’t his. That’s pretty much the definition of not going quietly and endangering others.
Dude did everything he could short of setting his bike on fire to justify having a weapon drawn on him. I get that police and guns are a valid topic of discussion, especially lately. But if this were the threshold for weapons being drawn, far fewer people would get shot.
In most of the industrialised world, police weapons are drawn when there is a clear and immediate threat of lethal force. Not before, and not afterwards either.
The routine use by US police of firearms as compliance tools (“stop or I’ll shoot!”) is a very unusual thing. The obvious consequence of this practice is to convert “failure to obey police commands” into a death penalty offence.
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Perhaps, but isn’t the fact that so many citizens are armed in the US also an unusual thing?
Police here have to assume that everyone is armed and potentially dangerous.
They don’t have to; they choose to.
You can argue that this is a reasonable choice to make, but I wonder: what percentage of people stopped by police are actually armed in reality? What percentage of those people represent a real threat to the police?
Statistically, American policing is not a dangerous job. It’s much safer than just about any traditional blue-collar work; construction, forestry, mining, nursing, etc.
Would it really become unacceptably dangerous if police weren’t encouraged to routinely threaten to murder people?
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I think what you mean is that in most of the world, that’s the policy, at least to a first approximation. And so it is in the United States. What I’m saying is that a motorcycle fleeing a traffic stop at 150 mph in a residential area in broad daylight satisfies the spirit of the rule that says “guns holstered until there’s a threat.”
I’m aware that there are enormous systemic problems with police and guns, and that those problems are worse in the US than in any other country like it. This wasn’t a manifestation of those systemic problems.
Except the gun happened when he was home and off his bike.
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It’s a policy that is taken seriously; cops who ignore it don’t tend to stay cops for long.
This is what our use-of-force scandals tend to look like:
No shots fired, nobody killed, arrestee actually was committing an offence. But the cop is in deep shit regardless; at a minimum, he’s blown any chance of future promotion and should start looking for a new job ASAP.
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If “he was home” is relevant, then so is the fact that it wasn’t his home.
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My point was that the bike was not endangering people at that time.
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clearly the only thing that can stop these good guys with planes is bad guys with planes.
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You DO get shot for having endangered people, but you’re only SUPPOSED to get shot while you are doing so.
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