New York City’s Police Department has been driving what appears like an early prototype of a futuristic vehicle through the streets of the metropolis. It has transpired that the prototype is the precursor to equipping NYPD with such vehicles in bulk.
The prototype comes equipped with a whole lot of new and advanced surveillance technologies. It can, for instance, verify license plates of the cars near it in real-time by reading them through an infrared sensor and then cross-matching them against a database.
Moreover, the vehicle also contains a radiation detector, although we don’t have any details on exactly what kind of radiations will the detector alert NYPD about. The tech-savvy car further packs a dashboard-mounted video surveillance camera which, thanks to an in-car modem, can livestream the video feed directly to the headquarters.
So far, only one prototype of the type has been spotted on the streets of New York. However, WSJ reports that it is part of a plan to ramp up the tech available in NYPD cars by 2020. The vehicle was included in NY Police Commissioner Ray Kelly‘s report titled ‘NYPD2020’ which envisions various technologies and developments which must be added to the city’s police force by the conclusion of this decade.
This means that we may soon see more futuristic NYPD vehicle pop up on the city’s streets, armed with better surveillance capabilities. However, this also raises the valid objection of how such surveillance will be regulated and citizens be allowed to guard their everyday privacy without being watched and recorded.
Source: WSJ
Courtesy: Engadget
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