Starchase - GPS Enabled Dart for Police
You've seen them on TV - those high speed police chases. Well a new company has a solution to the dangerous high speed chases; a gps enabled dart that can latch onto a car and transmit its position back to the police dispatcher. What's Star Chase? It is an air-propelled miniature dart equipped with a global positioning device. Once fired from a patrol car, it sticks to a fleeing motorist's vehicle and emits a radio signal to police. This sounds a lot cooler than a dog tracking collar.
Los Angeles Police Chief Bratton hailed the dart as "the big new idea" and said that if the pilot program was successful, Los Angeles' seemingly daily TV fix of police chases could be a thing of the past.
"Instead of us pushing them doing 70 or 80 miles an hour … this device allows us not to have to pursue after the car," Bratton said. "It allows us to start vectoring where the car is. Even if they bail out of the car, we'll have pretty much instantaneously information where they are."
U.S. Department of Justice officials, Bratton said, suggested that the StarChase system, the brainchild of a Virginia company, be tested in Los Angeles. A small number of patrol cars will be equipped with the compressed air launchers, which fire the miniature GPS receiver in a sticky compound resembling a golf ball, for four to six months as a trial.
There were more than 600 pursuits in Los Angeles and more than 100,000 nationwide last year. Critics have long questioned the wisdom of police pursuits because they can endanger bystanders and officers.
Los Angeles' love-hate relationship with police chases goes back at least to O.J. Simpson's slow-speed pursuit across Southern California freeways in 1994.
LAPD chases — as well as pursuits by other agencies — often end violently. Last year, an LAPD officer fatally shot a 13-year-old boy, who was driving a stolen car, at the end of a pursuit. This week, a pursuit in Chino ended with a San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy firing at the passenger of the car in a controversial incident caught on videotape.
ReadMore at LA Times
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Posted by Scott Martin at February 4, 2006 11:22 AM
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