[UPDATE: Everything below this update comes from a satirical article, one of many Dan’s Papers has published in its over five decades of publishing.
Thanks to prompting by the B&B, I asked the East Hampton Town Police Department via Facebook about the article. This was what they said, for those who can’t see the new photo above:
Hoax. 2% Tax cap on municipalities, we have a very tight budget. Any time you see “hamptons” police, it’s a hoax…. All the police agencies are East Hampton Town, East Hampton Village, Southampton Town, etc….there is no Hamptons police. Dan’s is famous for their farce pieces. Sorry.
I hate that I was fooled by this, and apologize for reporting it as news in the first place.
P.S. To the staff at Dan’s Papers: I did a better job of fooling people than you, and I did it without trying – CA].
Though not planned to be as flashy and in-your-face as the oil states do it, the Hamptons Police Department now has its own fleet of luxury police cars.
HPD’s first 10 vehicles — all slated for undercover duty — were delivered Wednesday, Dan’s Papers says, totalling $1.3 million for the trouble. Spokesman Larry Hirsch explains the need for the luxury fleet:
When 75 percent of all of the vehicles on local roads are Range Rovers, Maseratis and Porsches, our unmarked Crown Vics stuck out like sore thumbs. In recent years our undercover officers’ activities have been severely compromised — everyone can tell they’re cops from the cars they drive!
To better blend in, Hirsch says the fleet includes “a pair of very high-powered Porsches, an Aston-Martin, a nice variety of BMWs, a Maybach and a couple of luxury SUVs.”
At least 20 more luxury vehicles are expected join in the coming months, with plans in the offing for a sub-fleet of vintage Rolls-Royce and Austin-Healey models to help patrol the mean streets of the Hamptons in secret.
Police stick out everywhere, even the undercover cars are quite obvious, the lights “hidden” in the grill are all too evident. I remember when the sheriffs department got 2-3 red Camaro SS’s just a few weeks after they were introduced, still pretty obvious seeing the “hidden” light bars.
I was going to post buying SS sedans would be more appropriate, but reading the article makes me think restored Wagoneers with LS power may be more appropriate, just have the Chargers/Taurus/Caprice waiting hidden away in case a pursuit is needed, double so if they think they can evade an old undercover Wagoneer.
Since I can’t edit my comment…
Anyone else expecting a reality TV show to become of this?
The Undercover Cars of Long Island?
They’re delayed trying to figure out how they could get the Kardashians worked into the show.
On a side note, I’ve never seen more than 15 seconds of whatever show it is they have.
Hummer – in my town the police have an interesting assortment of “ghost cars”. I’ve seen a F150 and Ram 1500. They also have a few unmarked Tahoe’s. one is grey with blacked out windows and black steel wheels. They have a white Tahoe with a stick family in the back window. I always laugh at that one. They aren’t truly “undercover” vehicles but traffic cops trying to blend in.
The K9 units are always easy to spot and I easily spotted 3 ERT (SWAT units) during our National Winter Games competitions.
Haha, I would love to be the cop on the Tahoe with the stick family. I’ve seen marked F150s in Ohio, but the best I’ve seen near me were the unmarked Camaro SS’s. The Tahoes on the other hand are very popular, some undercover usually with LS/LT trim.
Hummer – they should have stick people cuffing stick people
Haha that’s awesome, have you seen the ones online with one parent and kid(s), and then a stick figure of the other parent behind bars?
@Hummer – no. I’ll google it. I did see a young dude drive by once in a pickup and the stick figure was of a stick guy having sex with a bent over stick girl. The caption underneath , ” I’m working on it”.
That was really funny.
I saw a lifted Jeep with “Run you Stick bastards” . A Jeep was chasing them down. That one’s funny too.
The only giveaway for the fleet of Mustangs the Maine State Police run is the darker than legal tint jobs. And given the number of knobs with illegal tint running around, that doesn’t really make them stand out that much.
Are Mustangs common in Maine? With RWD and all.
The lights in the grill are always the give away for me, can’t really hide them with tint.
In the summer, very common. In the winter, not so much – the winter beater is a very common thing up here. The Staties don’t run theirs in the winter either. IIRC, they have a dozen or two total. Back when Maine ran Caprices for cop cars, they had a summer fleet of Camaros.
The lights are not in the grill, they are on the dash. You can’t see them with the tint. From behind, at night, you can see the computer if the cop has it on though.
Their favorite thing seems to be doing the speed limit in the right lane and waiting for idiots to blow by them. Like shooting fish in a barrel. I’ve seen them pull over whole lines of cars that way.
And some communities have 10 yr old cruisers that are falling apart, like everything else these days, the gap haves and have-nots continues to increase.
Not really a problem, those cruisers in the hamptons have a very high tax rate keeping them on the street. The communities with the 10 year old Vics, (in most cases) are more than happy with the almost non-existent local taxes.
You should see the fire trucks and emergency vehicles in East Hampton. They are always the newest and shiniest available. The fire stations are spotless and powered by solar panels. Generally all donated by wealthy families and businesses.
Routine traffic patrol should never drive unmarked vehicles. Of course, if traffic patrol is treated as revenue enhancement rather than public service, less conspicuous cruisers will definitely increase the take (tax) rate.
A small handful I can understand for occasional surveillance duty or protective details. But more than 20?? BS, the Hamptons are just not that big. This smells like traffic revenue collection to me. The hypocrisy is glaring. If this was really about public safety, the fact that normal patrol vehicles stand out so much and encourage people to obey the law would be an asset, not a liability.
The first ten are to be used for undercover duty. Now what the local police force of a small wealthy borough is doing for undercover to require ten cars might be another question.
Didn’t you ever watch Revenge? Plenty of intrigue and dastardly doings going on with the rich and famous in the Hamptons!
I am going to guess it involves a lot of very rich, very bored kids buying various recreational drugs from enterprising drug dealers who come in to supply them.
It wreaks of entitlement, and yes I thought an obvious Police presence was the deterrent. Do they supply Hublot watches for the officers so they truly feel part of the community?
Never heard of hublot, so I looked it up (mobile version) first image was pretty cool, then you scroll down and you see multiple points trying to sell the watches as “Fashion statements”… Really? What kind of loser would buy that crap after you just tried to tell them that the watch is a fashion statement?
Did you scroll down farther to see the prices?
I can’t find the prices, again I’m using my phone…
Still looking for them…
Edit: shop on Google shows then ranging from $8,500- $132,000. My guess is they’re catering to the uneducated lottery winners that can somehow manage to spend $250,000,000 in a year.
Let’s just say, at my previous job, my manager’s boss paid more for a Hublot than I did for my CPO Lincoln.
That’s just stupid ridiculous, what’s going through someone’s mind to spend that much to impress people you don’t know? Because the people you already know have an idea of what kind of person you are, no matter how much money you have.
Or maybe they just like the watch? Not everyone buys extravagant things to impress other people.
Maybe so, I just can’t imagine a high level of quality on a product that sells on pop culture, despite the price.
But who knows, maybe the discriminating connoisseur sees it differently.
If he liked the watch, fine. I didn’t really like him. He’s the kind of guy that would tell us to cut expenses (people) by having a meeting, that he flew in for on a private jet, at a Ritz or a boutique hotel. He also would take us off agenda by talking about himself for lengthy periods of time and make me late for meetings with customers or things I scheduled after work.
So in other words he was a typical senior exec?
I guess so. Where I work now, Senior Management is much better. There is less waste and more collaboration. Being up higher on the totem pole helps too. Maybe one day I can grow up and be a senior exec without being an a$$.
@bball
You have to think like Homer if you’re going to get ahead.
BART: No offense, Homer, but your half-assed underparenting was a lot more fun than your half-assed overparenting.
HOMER: But I’m using my whole ass.
“a sub-fleet of vintage Rolls-Royce and Austin-Healey models to help patrol the mean streets of the Hamptons in secret.”
This is nuts to me. I get the idea of blending in but are you telling me *vintage* Rolls Royces and Austin-Healys (of all things) are so common they blend in? So there are a bunch of British Leyland products floating around there used as beaters?
A British Leyland product chasing another British Leyland product is the saddest police car chase ever. It’s really just a delayed foot chase.
+1
Whose electronics will short out first?
It probably would be comparable to this famous Canadian police car chase:
“Dispatch, Rolls 1 is Code 7. Rolls 2 y’all got any Grey Poupon?”
Haha
Nice.
Awesome post sproc.
@all of you
The Vintage Rolls/Austin Healy thing should have been a dead giveaway because it doesn’t even make sense. There can’t be more than a few thousand of these things left in North America, and even the ones that are left are generally going to be ill suited for DD work.
Remember Miami Vice?
They could re-skin a Corvette ;)
What about “proceeds of crime” seizures?
Read the article, it reads like an April Fools day joke. They have another article there about the Hamptons Police getting a submarine. Must be Dans Papers’ little in-joke. You got duped but there is still time to claim you knew it was fake. All in a days work of cutting and pasting Internet news I guess.
Has this turned into the Friday Funnies?
Saw the sub…Cameron owes me a beer.
What do you drink?
No harm no foul as they say Cameron – my wife works for a Craft Brewer so lets say I’m covered for beer..:)
:)
You’re right, Power6, it does read like an April Fools’ Day joke. Also, the affluent usually are smart enough to deny ludicrous requests from local law enforcement: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/09/us/suburb-wants-an-uzi-for-every-officer.html
I could claim I knew it was fake all along, but that would mean I lacked integrity in the first place.
I didn’t know the story reported was satire, nor did I know anything about Dan’s Papers. Not until you and Veee8 said something.
You both are the reason I decided to check into this myself; thus, the updated piece you (hopefully) are reading now.
Cameron thanks for checking up on it, hope i didnt come off too douchy ha, just the lack of original reporting and verified sources is a little annoying but i know this is just a news blog not claiming to be original reporting.
Power6 – Cameron does five articles a day. That’s a pretty heavy load for anyone. When it comes to the web, you are either first or you’re last. There is no middle. If we don’t get something up quickly, there is mutiny (look at comments on posts prior to our posting of the Camaro reveal, a day after it happened).
If you want to blame anyone, blame me. I was the one who sent her the story.
“nor did I know anything about Dan’s Papers”
Moral of the story: Always fact check a source that isn’t widely regarded for its credibility. You can probably trust Reuters or Automotive News, but who in the f**k is Dan?
Dan’s a liar, apparently.
Funny you should ask: http://www.danspapers.com/about-us/
“Unmarked” and “undercover” are two different things.
For undercover, the best thing is to get a forfeiture car or two from the next state over.
I always liked the idea of PDs decaling the words “Unmarked Police Car” down the side of an incognito Crown Vic or Charger.
Because a big sedan with black steel wheels, blackout trim and dual exhaust pipes is, like, totally unnoticable by the general public.
There was a really old computer game for ye olde DOS. It was either Street Rod or Street Rod 2, I can’t remember which. You could put decals on your car. One that you could put on was a big sheriff style star with a banner underneath that said “I am not a cop”.
That would be kinda cool to actually do, if you own a retired police car.
Just because there’s higher incomes within the ZIP codes they serve does not suddenly make it acceptable to buy expensive or exotic cars just to “fit in”. Even if the area is chock full of Range Rovers, Rolls-Royces, Maybachs and so on doesn’t mean the police department has to match.
If the usual suspects stick out (Crown Vic, Charger, Caprice/Impala, Taurus, et al), get something else. Fusion. Dart. Escape. Grand Caravan. Cruze. None of these are obvious police vehicles. If anything, they’ll be assumed to be rental cars of vacationers.
It doesn’t matter how much wealth the populace has–it’s completely unacceptable to spend money with wild abandon just because they can; just because the bill goes to the taxpayers. These cars will be nothing more than toys, they will have no benefit to the taxpaying public.
These cars were bought for a collective purpose: we couldn’t afford to buy them on our own, so we’ll just buy (and joyride) them on the taxpayer’s dime. Mark my words.
The whole thing was actually a hoax.
How did you miss the entire update before the original article?
Oh btw Cameron, Daria fanfiction? I mean I know what the show was and had seen it, but I’ve never heard of it’s fanfiction (or fanfiction for any cartoon as such).
Daria fan fiction was the first fan fiction I wrote; I’ve since moved on to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan fiction, all of it hosted at FiMFiction.net.
For you and the rest of the B&B, here’s what fan fiction is: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FanFic
Thanks for the link.
You’re welcome.
I offer you THIS critique of Dan Rattiner, publisher of Dan’s Papers:
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/dan_rattiner_the_hoaxer_of_the_hamptons
“In 1999 he reported that a 30-foot, man-killing Ecuadoran eel had been spotted in Peconic Bay. The article included an 800 number for “The Eel Hotline.” Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Rattiner, the number was actually that of a VW dealer in Riverhead, who was subsequently flooded with reports of eel sightings. By way of apology, Rattiner offered the dealer a free half-page ad”
This is probably the most phone traffic the VW dealer had seen in decades.
“Regular readers knew not to take his stories seriously, but frequently the mainstream media would get taken in by his tales and would circulate them as fact.”
And so the feeding frenzy for cop-bashing stories reaches its logical conclusion… outright fiction.
Journalism at its finest.
Dan’s papers has real news, but has fake news to tease the tourists, mostly the ones visiting from NYC. My mother was reading it last year and was like “Oh, the Kardashians were seen taking the subway from Bridgehampton to Montauk!”
There is no subway in the Hamptons. Obviously.
CA-Sorry if you were embarrassed. That, of course, wasn’t the point of the story. We just like to poke fun at people’s view of the Hamptons. We absolutely LOVE that you wrote Daria fan fiction, by the way. That is so great. And what a fun result!
Apology accepted. I suppose if the Hamptons were an oil state, the story would have been business as usual.
Perhaps I could write for your publication in the near future? I may not be able to win the lottery like I did with Alexandria’s Genesis, but it would be fun to mess with tourists!
Getting snagged on a Dan’s Pages satirical article was a mistake. And I’m sorry for that.
In my eyes however you lost credibility as a reporter. And made TTAC look bad.
I wish you well in your future endeavors. But I’ll get my auto news from somewhere else from this point forward.
Thanks for the ride, TTAC. It was fun while it lasted.