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.
DARE is still happening places?
That shit causes insane levels of damage…
We had it in elementary schools and they said everything would kill you and was equally bad. So when a few kids started smoking weed in middle school. We expected their lives to be over. A few years later they were fine so everyone started smoking, then kids quickly moved onto coke, opioids and pretty much everything else.
Because they lied about some stuff, most kids assumed they lied about everything.
The cybertruck is obviously fucked, but it’s insane anywhere in the country is still grasping to a program we know hasn’t worked for decades
It’s crazy how expensive it is too. At my HS, as an ASB rep got contacted by DARE reps once and they where oh its only $15k per classroom. It all made sense when I started to learn its always been a money grubbing grift. It never had a good reason to exist other then excuse to charge alot for busybwork.
Not just money.
Kids love cops, so cops love going to schools and having everyone treat them like super heroes
Until there’s a school shooter that is, then suddenly they’re stuck in the phonebooth trying to take their glasses off.
To make things worse, we’ve known they were ineffective for over 20 years
This is sadly the typical progression. People come to the conclusion that drugs aren’t really that big of a deal but then do too much of them. It’s sort of like people turning 21 and getting hammered. Better to help people do things safely and provide alternatives or treatment than to proclaim abstinence.
Our division does DARE with 4th graders still. Officers come in and spew that shit for a few weeks and kids get a bunch of swag and cupcakes for signing a pledge. I’m not a fan of any of it, but it’s above my pay grade.
@MicroWave “So remember, kids – drugs’ll make you do really weird stuff, like pay $153,000 for a Cybertruck.”
"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 don’t know the exact number, but I’m sure it’s less than zero.
…or $44 billion for Twitter…
didn’t rule out other uses
- Paper weight
- Accidental jail cell
- Battery ram (see what I did there? Hold for applause)
- Means to explore young citizens’ limited value
Don’t forget - flint and steel for fire starting when you happen to be in an area of the wilds accessible by a shitty city car that dies if it sees a puddle!
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
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.
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 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.
I’m still trying to find a D.A.R.E. beer koozie.
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”.
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
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).
Cops handing out drugs from a cybertruck saying shit like “this stuff is the skibidi rizzlest!” sounds like the best way to keep kids off drugs. It’s like watching your dad get into that thing you like and suddenly that thing is super uncool.
… yea, that would probably work.
The cybertruck is 100% the result of misuse of drugs, and if presented in that fashion, might at least help in some way with making it clear how important it can be to use drugs responsibly.
For some reason this had me thinking of the scene in Waterboy where Bobby gives a talk to some kids, and immediately when he finishes the teacher or coach or whatever for the kids says “which brings me to my next point: Don’t. Smoke. Crack.” And all the kids just nod. Just replace Bobby with Elon presenting the cybertruck.
Wankers. ACAB.
All
Cybertrucks
Are
BadThe
uninsurablecybertruck 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
It is a pretty fantastic read.
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
“Hey kids, this is what cars look like when you’re on drugs. Do you really want THAT?”
Oh good, now you can get away with crime if it’s raining
I wonder how much education could have been done with $150 000. Like imagine if you use that money to actually teach people about responsible drug use.
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?
'member when all the “cool” DARE cop cars were seized drug dealer cars?
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.
