How to add cops on the street- cheap
Trying to get the Dayton Police Department to write traffic tickets like Oakwood or Kettering is like trying to get a candidate to run against the machine here- ain’t going to happen.
So- instead of having real cops stand outside with laser detectors- why not use:
Idea City: Marketing – Advertising – Culture
The New York Times reports the town of Smyrna, Tennessee has posted life-size, corrugated plastic cutouts of cops holding speed guns at busy intersections in town… (click the link above to see the rest of the article- the link to the Times is gone)
The trick comes, when you actually put the real cop out with his cutout- so you can never tell if it’s real, or Officer Rex.
The perception of Oakwood as a quiet, safe city- comes in part from their crackdown on speeders. Dayton suffers as a perceived wild-west of boom-thunk cars and smoking rubber. A few cut-out cops and a little enforcement might start to change things.
Opinions anyone?
Those things would be the number one favorite object to steal of drunk UD students.
Just add a lojack device (or a simple cell phone) to it- and voila- another brand of criminal is caught.
And then the cost of the project escalates and it dies before it ever gets off the drawing board.
Lojack and other tracking tech is actually very cheap these days-
and if Dayton is going to be a hotbed of RFID tech- we could probably get the stuff donated.
Is everyone here under the influence of Dr. Negativo?
Maybe it’s because you want to solve all of Dayton’s problems through government initiatives, and we have all seen how lazy, corrupt, and incompetent the City of Dayton is, and that colors our perspective.
I say why not. It probably wouldn’t cost but $100–150 per “cop”. It’d let people know that the DPD is trying new things and has an eye on the city.
Sure, why not. It’s not a bad idea. I don’t think the negative comments are bad either. In fact, they are necessary. Look at it this way: Imagine that this and other blogs are different departments in an organization or government. The blog post is a proposal and the comments are the feasibility study where everybody in the public gets to bring up the problems with the idea and discuss possible solutions.
Might as well do them here, it’s a lot cheaper than funding some firm in Florida to do a ‘study’ about how effective the proposal would be.
Imagine if the government process in Dayton and Montgomery county worked like our blogs do!
just imagine if it worked at all? That would be a big improvement.
;-)
i sort of have to agree with David,
if the shock factor of peaking the hill and a life size plastic cop with a radar gun makes you hit your brakes… enough said…
i’d have to part ways though with the need to attach gps devices to the plastic cops or provide camera surveillance to insure they were not cop-napped
this starts approaching whether the offender thought he was stealing a plastic cop or if it could be assault of a police officer… or government property…
or if he just lost control of his car and crashed into the plastic cop… what are the next implications?
I hate to say but the “boom thunk” drivers likely don’t care much for police intervention anyways, so the likelihood of a cardboard cutout or a real cop deterring their speeding is moot.
But if you want to scare old man river or various soccer mom’s these should do the trick.
Why don’t we just gate every community and have armed guarded checkpoints? That will keep us safe!
DPD did something similar many years ago on and around Brown Street. Two police officers drove two cruisers to Brown Street. One parked his cruiser in an area of concern, with its overhead lights on. He exited the cruiser and got into the cruiser with the other cop. They patrolled other places and in the meantime, the “area of concern” was as quiet as a church parking lot. But yea, the armed guarded checkpoints sound cool, too.
I love the idea! But the City would probably have to hire a couple more ‘Employee Care’ firms to deal with all the feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem brought about by the much thinner, healthier looking ‘cut-out’ cops.