Car buyers are slowly but surely becoming willing to hand over driver assistance, but it’s already starting to come to the people who spend the most time behind the wheel: professional drivers, whether in trucks or taxis. But there’s another type of profession, one that spends much of its time driving, that is being sidestepped as a target of the autonomous revolution: police officers, who often spend hours driving around or idling, waiting for a crime to occur. But now the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office is combining policing and autonomy with a pilot program to get rid of an autonomous police car on the jurisdiction’s streets. There’s just one problem: it’s built to be an autonomous car, not an autonomous agent.
Miami-Dade police are calling the new project PUG, according to CBS Newsunmanned ground for police. It looks like Miami’s famous sky cops are safe from autonomy for now. The vehicle itself is a Ford Explorer equipped with an autonomy suite, thermal imaging cameras, a 360-degree camera and a drone. It will reportedly be upgraded with license plate scanners at some point, which would theoretically allow it to automatically issue parking tickets, but until then the actual police capabilities (copabilities) are more or less… nothing.
Not really a police officer
So this whole autonomy project does the same job as a parked police car. Or a broken down police car. Except that people nearby can rest assured that there’s no real agent inside – the PUG’s thick layer of autonomy sensors isn’t exactly difficult to pick out of a range. While the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department has not paid for this pilot model, other counties looking to obtain a PUG will have to spend six figures for the privilege. Is this really the best way for agents to spend $200,000? I have to imagine that there is something, anything, better to spend that money on than an empty car.
#Miamis #selfdriving #police #car #conduct #police #stop #Jalopnik