Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
Oh you haven't seen the all-white decals on white cruisers with no top lights? Or the decals that are visible only when you're directly in line with the cruiser? There was an undercover Mitsubishi Lancer back in my home town. They aren't always so up front.
What's interesting is that I've seen a noticeable uptick in ordinary cars being camouflaged, in quasi-legal ways. Dark tinted windows all over, plenty of license-plate cloaking techniques, and a new one which is probably specifically anti-AI/anti-Flock: people are cloaking or concealing their hood ornaments: that is, the unique logo of the maker of their vehicle. An idle pastime of mine has always been car ID, so it's interesting to be a little more challenged when I see a hood ornament that's encased in a tinted shield, and I still need to correctly guess the make/model of the vehicle.
Gemini tells me it's 100% legal everywhere in the USA, to swap, modify, or conceal vehicle branding on privately-owned vehicles.
This is paired with a rather alarming but "more harmless than it appears" fad where people modify their "exhaust tune" to sound like backfire/gunshots. And they drive past all night long. I hear them everywhere. I had an LLM chat about it, and it's really something people deliberately do. I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
> Police visiting a home is form of intimidation.
Is it though?
I live in a weird location, but it's not uncommon to get a couple of police visits for random things in a year.
Separately, this suggests another question to explore.
Is visiting a civil servant's home a form of intimidation?
I don’t live at a weird location and have had one in a decade.
Why would police visit people periodically?
- There's a traffic accident on the street nearby and they're looking for someone who witnessed it
- Altercation at a neighbor's house and they come inform us what was going on
- A neighbor called the police and they're looking for the address
- Coordinating parking for a medical incident down the road
- Welfare check on the kids because the neighbors heard screaming
Just a bunch of little stuff over the years.
For me that would be annoying.
In my case, IIRC, once like 15-20 years ago for some paperwork that needs an adress verified by the police, or something like that. I don't remember if it was for me or my wife. I don't remember the details.
In this case they came to talk about the cameras he put up.
It's funny, reading that list, it all gives me an instinctual "less-nice neighborhood I wouldn't want to live in" vibe. But I'm sure it's perfectly normal for people who live in more exciting places.