CZEdwards: The most successful scammers are the ones who figure out how to sell their junk to cops. No civilian oversight of their budgets or auditing their spending. It’s lifetime income, lifetime support upsells, ever-expanding market because there’s always money for cops to buy more crap.

The most successful scammers are the ones who figure out how to sell their junk to cops. No civilian oversight of their budgets or auditing their spending. It’s lifetime income, lifetime support upsells, ever-expanding market because there’s always money for cops to buy more crap.

“The company behind the new drone, Seattle-based Brinc — a tech startup with a 24-year-old chief executive — has boasted it will ‘revolutionize the public safety landscape.’” 🫠

Will these drones 'revolutionize' 911 response? L.A. suburb will be first to testwww.latimes.com Several Southern California law enforcement agencies use drones in a variety of scenarios including hostage situations, missing persons and 911 response.

And seriously, cops are the most compulsive shoppers of crap in the non-DoD world you will find. You can sell them dowsing rods. Any pseudo-science they can use to coerce confessions? Lifetime contract, be it voice stress analysis or polygraph or just a colander and a copier. Gullible motherfuckers.

Personally, if I was going for getting a civilian oversight board set up for the cops in my town, I wouldn’t start with their behavior. I’d do a good, old fashioned “follow the money.” I’d sell it publicly as taxpayer oversight to get what few economic conservatives still exist on board.

should point that that's almost entirely what the police unions seem to be built to fight.

The John Oliver thing a couple of weeks ago about how much of the opioid settlement money is being used to buy gadgets for cops was enraging.

Yeah.

*shotspotter has entered the chat*

Oh, jeez, that piece of junk. /head, meet desk. A lot.

Here to check for this. (Shotspotter.)

I remember that magic box that was supposed to detect improvised explosives-- they sold it to the Iraq army too. www.bbc.com/news/uk-2945... Stuff like this makes me wish I didn't have all these damned ethics preventing me from getting rich...

The story of the fake bomb detectorswww.bbc.com The sentencing of a British couple for making fake bomb detectors marks the end of a series of trials after a global scam which saw the devices end up in conflict zones and used by governments around ...

I misread that as "the non-D&D world", and it made perfect sense in the context of the crap every rpg character hauls around.

Well.. yeah, this, too. 😁

Colander and copier?

Some police forces are considering the idea of armed drones.I hope they won't get them because they won't have the training to use them responsible. Shooting people will become even more disconnected, and they will treat it like a video game.

Oh, lord! No!!

At present arming drones is a fantasy. The weight limits are marginal for getting a weapon into the air BEFORE you attach systems to control it. And then you have to add recoil damping. So it's not gonna happen anytime soon.

The fact that any cop shop anywhere even entertains the notion for more than the 8 seconds it takes to think it through? Says there’s a problem with the cop shop, and it’s mostly between the ears.

"I was scared for the life of my drone! I had to shoot!"

Any guesses on if this 24 year old is exactly what we think he is?

oh, my bet is yeah, he’s exactly what you think.

oh dear

Yup, that’s the lineage of a scamming douchebro.

He had 3 less than a year internships, then was a Thiel fellow, and then 30 under 30?! That's. Uh. How rich are his parents, do we think?

Yup. And 30 under 30 is pay for play, so it’s always a marker of someone trying to buy clout and recognition.

His parents are rich enough to have bought him hovercraft training when he was 12. Also, given that he’s 24 now, those internships were probably summer programs when he was in high school.

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No, he started his undergrad at 14.

Absolute cliche of what you imagine. Wow.

You hire cops for your sales people, they sell to their friends. I shared a floor with a sales office for one of those. Absolute worst neighbors ever.

Oh, like all of the fentanyl-resistant equipment I'm seeing marketed? BITCH MY SKIN IS FENTANYL RESISTANT* *fine: unless it's a patch but even then it takes quite a while for it to work.

Yes, this would be one of the examples. (Also, all of their drug field tests. If your field test will ping sugar as amphetamine, you field test exists only to make some scammer’s mortgage payments and abuse citizens.)

I hate those tests with such passion you'd think I'd been jailed for eating donuts.

They offend me as someone who barely passed organic chem. If I can point out the myriad flaws in your reagent test, you have no business being within 1000 yards of any reagent.

💯

Again, Douglas Adams nailed it, with his fictional depiction of a company producing software that automatically generated bullshit justifications, then acquired lock stock and barrel by the Pentagon.

Yup.

you can sell cops a plastic box with an antenna and dead ants inside, they are the biggest marks on earth

Yes.

This actually happened (except no dead ants) www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06... though there has been some actual success with Bees in bomb detection www.bbc.com/news/busines...

The $80 Million Fake Bomb-Detector Scam—and the People Behind Itwww.vanityfair.com When Baghdad bought tens of millions of dollars’ worth of British-made A.D.E. 651s, advertised as a foolproof bomb detector, the Iraqi government thought it would be saving countless lives. But the de...

This is one of my favorite examples, not least of all because the guy is named Wade L. Quattlebaum. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro_...

Quadro Tracker - Wikipediaen.m.wikipedia.org

YES! I love that one!

There’s a good podcast about it, Omnibus Episode 520

Is that the one where they glued bugs to the mainboard? I'm always fascinated by scammers that go the extra mile to make it clear that something is very very wrong. As if they might be protected by the "no serious person" defense or something.

For years cops have been buying $300 rifle racks with locks that can be defeated in half a second with a magnet so none of this is really surprising

[1106] INEXCUSABLE: Police Car Gun Lock Bypassed in ONE SECOND (Big Sky Racks' ELS 300)youtu.be https://www.covertinstruments.com

like that stupid spotshotter. expensive and doesn’t do squat.

Yup.

That’s not true. It magically conjures up probable cause out of thin sir.

they do that for free every day 🤣

Also you can literally sell them empty boxes with buttons on the outside and they’ll come back for more.

Cc: @lisamarietea.bsky.social

Me regularly trying to convince my dad we should go into police consulting for p much the same reason...

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