Device in development fires electromagnetic pulse that tricks ebikes and scooters into shutting off
Its all fun and games until they shut off some poor bystander’s pacemaker. Not that the police give a flying fuck about collateral damage at this point.
They act as ebikes don’t have pedals.
Definitely not a conspiracy theory, but this comes coincidentally at the same time the UK considers breaking from EU requirement for pedals on ebikes lol.
E-scooters and ebikes are potentially an environmentally friendly way to travel, but they have been used in thousands of crimes.
Wait until you hear about shoes! They’ve been used in millions of crimes! /s
Cars have ebikes handily beat. Same for motorcycles.
UK ebikes seem like kind of a sub-par transport for a criminal who needs to get away quickly now that I think about it… Aren’t they limited to like 250 watts too?
IMO, this seems like something that would show up as military surplus equipment in the USA and thus end up with municipal police forces without a care about the civil liberty implications, whether or not actually deployed. I’m surprised the UK is beating us at our own game.
That said, even on this side of the pond, police departments have – or should have – policies to intercept motorbikes, which are likely the most applicable to stopping ebikes. It’s hard for me to believe that only a technological solution is truly the most sensible option here than, say, designing roads so getaway vehicles simply can’t develop sufficient speed in urban areas to be dangerous or effective at evading authorities.
My go-to example of such passive safety features are those outside of major sports stadiums in the USA here: decorative concrete planters, giant letters that spell the city’s name, and plazas to congregate pre-game are all subtle, modern forms of bollards and defensible space. I cannot simultaneously believe we can build stadiums with passive safety to protect thousands of patrons, yet cannot build roads to stymie reckless, high speed getaways.
As an aside, this sounds somewhat like the TV license vans in the UK, the purported mobile detector for TVs in homes that haven’t paid the UK’s TV license fee. Although they sound plausible, no such vans have ever been truly demonstrated publicly, simply being a myth to convince people to pay the fee.
Road design to impede traffic so the police can better apprehend people is the most dystopian thing I’ve heard of.
Tell me it’s not real.
Oh, its far worse than that. None of that needs to happen. Mass surveillance will just track people anywhere they go and police will apprehend them when they have to sleep. The UK already has one of the largest surveillance networks of any country.
And if the e-bike is in front of a coffee shop, what happens to all the innocent bystander electronics in this case?
What happens to phones and laptops hit with this pulse?
How about people with pacemakers? This seems like it could maybe kind of kill them a bit.
Don’t cross the streams!
That’s horrible
Finally a device outside of cybertrucks that can snipe cybertrucks :3
