The pointy-headed geeks at the LAPD's top-secret R&D lab (motto: "To Research and Nerd") have emerged from their super-secure underground redoubt to unveil the latest weapon in the war on crime in the City of Angels:
the GPS dart.
Well, not so much a "dart" as a "gumball", but "gumball" doesn't necessarily bespeak the kind of hard-charging, macho style of policing that the LAPD is famous for. "Dart", on the other hand, is both monosyllabic
and phallic, which is much more in keeping with big-city, two-fisted crime fighting.
Which is all well and good, you might say, but how does the damn thing work?
Technical specifications of the "dart" are shrouded in mystery, but my sources in the Linux coding/crime fighting community have provided the following overview:
The GPS dart is an adhesive coated spheroid which contains a miniscule GPS transmitter. In the event of a high speed police pursuit, specially equipped LAPD officers will fire (via a compressed-air projectile launcher) a dart at the fleeing vehicle. Once the dart is securely attached to the vehicle's chassis, it will begin to transmit the wrong-doer's location to the LAPD command center deep in the bowels of the Parker Center. From there, police officials will monitor the would-be getaway car until it runs out of gas, or crosses safely into another jurisdiction.
Fascinating, no? Yes! But will it end the Southland's plague of high-speed chases? And if it does, what will KCAL9 air in primetime?
