Although Irvine police said they won’t use the Cybertruck as a patrol car, the police department didn’t rule out other uses should the need arise.
A police department in Southern California says it has the country’s first Tesla Cybertruck for police use, but the unusual vehicle won’t see much action.
The Irvine Police Department unveiled the purchase Tuesday in a splashy video on social media, including Facebook and X. The price tag: $153,175.03, including the installation of emergency equipment.
The police department said its Cybertruck would have a limited role: jazzing up anti-drug events at schools through the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program.
Of course it would fucking be Irvine and of course it would be the provenly-inedfective D.A.R.E. folks.
For you non Californians, Irvine is a corporation that bought up land and made a “utopian” suburban city. I went to grad school there. It’s the kind of place you get pulled over for having long hair (as I can attest to).
Edit with a joke: People from Irvine be all like “Who is John Galt”.
D.A.R.E. taught me that random people will force me to take drugs. Still waiting on that one. We did learn you can get high from sniffing glue though.
It’s a real shame; Irvine has lots of great food, and it’s another large east-Asian population center within the LA-OC metro area, but it’s also so staunchly Republican that I can’t stand to watch local news down there.
That’s nothing against the university, though. I have family who got their degrees there, and I even took summer classes on campus once. I dig the school and it was my fallback when I applied for colleges (back when it was possible to have a fallback).
For everyone’s reference, D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was not only ineffective, they were anti-effective. Their presence and total demonization of weed not only didn’t reduce drug usage rates, they frequently increased the rates.
They’ve been known to be ineffective since at least 2004: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448384/
DARE is a wild program. They finally admitted defeat to drugs and have switched to suicide prevention. The kids that do petitions for them, at least around me, are militant. I had one follow me into a restaurant to keep pestering me. Didn’t stop until I told the children to kindly fuck off already
The kids that did petitions in my experience seemed to have a chip on their shoulder to impress authority or they were related to a cop. Also, there would be prizes like a PSP or an iPod touch. Higher value stuff than any other fundraiser in the school.
Yeah, that was my experience. All those stories made me more curious about drugs than anything else even back in elementary school. Also, having people that used to have addiction problems come in to talk about them showed that you could get through them.
Also didn’t really help that the one guy’s description of things going wrong for him was basically a bus ride with a hangover where he needed to puke out the window. And that he still did it after that, implying that there was something good about it.
It wasn’t DARE exactly but some Canadian equivalent. I hadn’t really thought about drugs that much before that and didn’t shy away when I had an opportunity to try weed a few years later (thought it was interesting but not worth the money at the time).
Also it only took taking psychedelics a few times to figure out the real problem authority has with them: they can help you break down your preconceived notions and see through the leaps of “logic” that the current system depends on.
Like the first time I did mushrooms, I realized that authority figures (like doctors, police, etc) were just people like you or me and included people having bad days, people not focused on the current task, people who cheated their way through school or got to where they were via corruption, people who think they understand something better than they really do or base their knowledge on outdated information, trolls and bullies, as well as people trying their best in good faith.
It was so obvious in hindsight, but I realized that up until then I had this implicit trust that even if there were times I didn’t fully agree with them, they were generally “different” in a “better” kind of way instead of a spectrum of the same kind of people you went to high school with, just with a selection process that is supposed to filter some out (with varying degrees of success).
Same experience here.
While in elementary school, the DARE guy told us that drugs just make you dizzy, like when you spin in circles. He told us to just go run around and we’d feel the same. I thought that sounded awesome! All the good feelings of exercise without the exercise. Fuck yeah!
DARE turned little me into a proto druggie.
Screw Elon. Stop spending tax money to support his endeavors.
Oh good, now you can get away with crime if it’s raining
Wankers. ACAB.
All
Cybertrucks
Are
BadThe uninsurable cybertruck being bought by police stations is the surest sign that police are ignorant money sinks.
uninsurable
That story was fake news based on one tweet
Thanks for the update. Corrections tend to be buried. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/geico-tesla-cybertruck-coverage/
I love that the Snopes article has this whole sidebar about how unreliable the cybertruck is to explain why the tweet was so believable
Other uses like what…?
I think if I were like 10 years old and some cop showed up in a Cybertruck and told me not to use drugs, I’d probably wonder what’s so good about drugs instead.
Oh don’t worry, that’s dare’s normal effect
This seems like a wild misuse of government services. Aren’t the police in the law enforcement game and not the drug abuse game? Why aren’t the city bus drivers also teaching these programs and getting to drive around sweet ass cybertrucks?
Cops are a parody of themselves.
Didn’t they see the episode of Reno 911 where they bought a Hummvee for “community outreach “?
Really hard to park
I remember in the late 90s the cops in my large city caught flack for buying SUVs in a city with no offroading and zero hills. They gave the same reason. Now all the squad cars are SUVs.
Are car manufacturers actually making cars anymore? Seems they all shifted to SUVs.
Honestly, for a promotional event it’s not the worst thing ever. The kids will all come over and oogle it.
The army landed an Apache in the middle of our track in high school. A cybertruck’s practically a bargain comparatively
Odds are that single helicopter landing cost more than this.
Yeah but that is usually part of their training, at the very least it is for jet flyovers.
I must object to the comparison of a rare and interesting flying killing machine with a mass-produced pointy truck that works sometimes. Irvine PD is lame.
@MicroWave “So remember, kids – drugs’ll make you do really weird stuff, like pay $153,000 for a Cybertruck.”
Geico won’t insure it. If others follow, then it’ll be illegal to drive in California, since insurance is mandatory.
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"For over three decades, our DARE officers have driven attention-grabbing and one-of-a-kind vehicles that never fail to turn heads and excite students,” the department said on Facebook.
How many of those excited students were stopped from using drugs by these attention-grabbing one-of-a-kind vehicles? An exact number isn’t necessary, I’ll accept an educated approximation.
Also-
And she said the department needed a new D.A.R.E. vehicle anyway.
I may be showing my age here, but back when I was a kid, Officer Friendly used to come to my school and tell us how drugs did not make you cool in his regular old patrol car.
They were usually seized assets which is awful but seems less so than spending over $150k on a vehicle that major insurers refuse to cover.
I drive a school bus and it’s depressing how excited elementary and middle-school kids get when they see a cybertruck. Shit, they still get excited when they see a tesla and those things are everywhere.
I don’t doubt kids get excited over them since they’re marketed to people of that maturity level, but I doubt it would convince any of them to not use drugs if they were considering it.
I used to work on a school bus and I get excited when I see a CyberTruck, too. Then I can look in the mirror and say, “you’re not the dumbest person I’ve seen today!” It’s a real ego boost.
I don’t know the exact number, but I’m sure it’s less than zero.
…or $44 billion for Twitter…
'member when all the “cool” DARE cop cars were seized drug dealer cars?
Do they still give out D.A.R.E. shirts? Those things made you the king of the party when the bong was being passed around in high school.
I had a black DARE shirt growing up. It disappeared or got given away at some point and I didn’t care.
Now, the purple Jump Rope For Heart shirt I had was my absolute favorite. I wore that until it evaporated.
My son has an old school D.A.R.E shirt he got from Goodwill. He wears it sometimes to go play hardcore shows.
I’m still trying to find a D.A.R.E. beer koozie.
Maybe just… Defunding the police just a liiiiitle bit wouldn’t be so bad…
Im joking btw dont hurt me or argue at me ;-;
Because this viewpoint exists I died to crime.
Thanks a lot
Wait but thats illegal
They do need to defund them if they are paying for this shit.
Police also shouldn’t be out for 5150s but here we are. At least suicide by cop is easy
Huh. I came specifically to say “Defund. Them.”
You know you’re on Lemmy, right?
Hahah, people don’t see it right away. Here you’ll get trashed for not saying it with your chest. Honestly, I’m happier than a pig in a donut shop
We can recognize that lowering their funding won’t get rid of their unnecessary expenses
Just say no!
Ha ha!
