Can you spot the reason for that “No Standing” sign?
This is a photograph taken recently at the Cadillac Place building, on West Grand Blvd just west of Woodward in Detroit. It used to be called the General Motors Building before GM decamped to the RenCen. To make sure that much office space (when it was built, the GM Bldg was the second largest in the world) wouldn’t go vacant in Detroit’s economically viable midtown area, the State of Michigan moved many of its Detroit area office workers into the renamed building. Some of those state employees work for the Michigan State Police, which has offices for their Detroit detachment on the Milwaukee Ave. side of the building. It’s not a full scale police post, there’s no public lobby, but it’s where state police hang out in Detroit when they aren’t busy protecting and serving the public, not to mention rescuing injured peregrine falcons. (Read More…)
The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway… At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.
This Beijing policeman has a hard look at this BMW X1. Not because it’s extremely dusty. A few days parked outside in Beijing, and any car looks like that. No, this car has no license plates. The plateless car has been gathering dust for a while on Beijing’s streets. (Read More…)
A while ago, we showed you a video of an angry Shanghainese woman, towing a tow-truck away. Alas, the video was staged. This time, it’s serious. Or so they swear over at Carnewschina, and at the TV station in Liaoning Province that showed on the evening news what happened when the police wanted to tow a Buick Excelle. The Buick’s driver, a resolute woman, had different ideas. (Read More…)
The woman in this video ended up in handcuffs and jail in the District of Columbia. Her crime? Her tags had expired. This was last year. And it was no isolated occurrence. To this day, people are routinely thrown into the nation’s capital’s slammer if they forgot to renew their license plate. (Read More…)
Last fall, the first tests of the new Chevy Caprice PPV, Dodge Charger Pursuit and Ford Taurus Interceptor generated quite a bit of interest here at TTAC and beyond, as three all-new contestants battled to replace the outgoing Crown Victoria as America’s cop car. At the time, the Caprice seemed like the clear performance favorite, but as Sajeev Mehta has pointed out, there’s more to the cop-car equation than pure speed. Although good luck trying to tell the Detroit Three that, as all three are cherry-picking performance stats in the wake of the latest round of Michigan State Police testing.
In Albuquerque, a police officer is caught with his pants not quite down, but nonetheless having sex on the hood of a car. From the pictures released, it looked consensual. This is not what can be said of the conduct of a Philadelphia police officer. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Keith Corley II, a 4 year member of the Philadelphia police department, was charged with raping a woman in the back of his squad car while on duty in the 18th District in West Philadelphia. (Read More…)
A federal appellate court ruled Friday that the pepper spraying and beating of a black motorist who did not wear his seat belt constituted excessive force. Mark Anthony Young, 46, was driving to the gym in February 2007 when Los Angeles County, California Sheriff’s Deputy Richard Wells stopped him so he could issue a ticket for failing to buckle up. Wells’ problems began when he was unable to produce his vehicle registration.
While Wells was writing up the ticket, Young got out of his truck and walked over to hand the deputy the vehicle’s paperwork. Wells ordered Young back into his truck, but Young did not feel like doing so. He sat on the curb, eating broccoli. In his legal filing, Wells claimed the broccoli was dangerous and that he “believed that [Young] was about to throw the broccoli at [him] in order to cause a distraction before assaulting him.” (Read More…)
In 1998, South Carolina lawmakers mandated that police use dashboard mounted cameras to document the arrest of anyone arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI). The state supreme court on Monday ruled that the town of Mount Pleasant was not in compliance with this statute, which states a suspect “must have his conduct at the incident site and the breath test site video recorded.”
There is a Police Equipment Show in Beijing, and it’s a meeting of the minds: Chinese cops want to get out of their Santana wagons (read gen 2 Passat Variant), and Chinese carmakers want a slice of the lucrative government pie. Our friend Tycho of ChinaCarNews (formerly known as TheTycho.com) went to the show and took his camera along. Above a uniformed Shanghai-Volkswagen Passat Lingyu, the logical successor of the ubiquitous Shanghai-Volkswagen Santana. More Chinese police after the jump … (Read More…)
It’s not out yet, and it won’t be before the end of the year, but Opel is already flogging the Euro-version of the Volt, the Ampera, as the perfect cop car. Main selling point: It’s a veritable multi mission vehicle. “Whether emission free on patrol, or silent during undercover surveillance, or fast and persistent when in hot pursuit – the Opel Ampera is the ideal police cruiser,” brags Opel, which appears to humor AutoBild.(Read More…)
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