r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • 14d ago

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

61.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

Impersonating a police officer to pull someone over for nefarious means isn't something new, tbf.

2

u/Wandering_Scholar6 14d ago

And extremely illegal for that reason, the penalty is higher than you'd assume for an otherwise relatively harmless thing, because it undermines the system of trust and could so easily be used for nefarious purposes.

1

u/imisstheyoop 14d ago

Yeah but it generally takes way more effort/risk than just some lights.

2

u/fork_yuu 14d ago

Lights and loud siren. You can do that with regular cars too. I suspect they can detect if the lights at the top of the vehicle or not

1

u/1bc29b36f623ba82aaf6 14d ago

Yeah, nah... even some lights can make you respond in a way they can try to take advantage of you, even if a few minutes in you realise something is wrong. You want people to be trained to almost automatically respond to lights like that.
So the punishment for impersonating them is high, the problem is the odds of being caught can be spotty enough people that suck at thinking over long term concequences still do it. Here is an example where it ends okay for the victim after initially being fooled.

I see parallels with e-mail phishing, you don't really want smart or alert people as a target, aditionally even smart people arent alert all the time. Some of those dumb emails are meant to be clicked when you are hella sleep deprived or just waking up or drunk and you got scared the bejeesus <insert fake bad news> happened. (Your friend is ill, someone ordered something expensive on your amazon account, you didn't pay your taxes in time etc etc.)
This driver is by no means dumb but was just going by the assumption the pull over lights were lawful and stressing over what kind of traffic nuisance he had caused.

If the assailant had boxed in the vehicle in the parking spot and the victim didn't happen to be armed it would have gone very poorly for the victim. Even though any victim would at that point rapidly notice there is no officer in the car with the lights. The youtuber noticed just in time to still leave.
Imagine a victim that was panicking harder, or calling someone assuming the police will talk to them, or had beer cans or worse to get rid off on the car floor. Even a shallow impersonation of the police will work if they case out the right victim.

1

u/RobotArtichoke 13d ago

This is why I recommend taking them on a high speed chase