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A comment on Woman catches state police attaching tracker to her car, now they want it back. Parent comment

Re:Woman catches state police attaching tracker to her car, ... by wearywanderer on Monday May 31, 2021 @03:26PM (#27347354)
> she didn't know what it was and was concerned it might be a bomb. Given that someone has attached a device to your car without informing you of the intent of that device I think it's perfectly fair to destroy the device

Fair? Yes. It's 100% fair as far as I'm concerned.

But rational? If I thought I found a bomb, I'd be running as fast as I could from it, then once I was a hundred meters away at least, I'd call the bomb squad. Trying to destroy the bomb myself sounds like a momentously stupid idea for a number of reasons. Foremost being, what if this homemade bomb with potentially unstable explosives goes off in my face? Or what if it's remote controlled and the bombman pulls the trigger once I start messing with it? Or what if I successfully destroy the bomb myself.... what do I tell the cops and my neighbors? That I blew up a bomb but it wasn't my bomb? How many weeks would I spend in jail before my lawyer manages to convince everybody that I didn't make the bomb I blew up and for some reason I never thought to call the bomb squad? I think an unlucky man might end up in prison for many years if he did that.

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Re:Woman catches state police attaching tracker to her car, ... by DangitBobby on Monday May 31, 2021 @07:50PM (#27349365)
Well, if you had reason to believe that the police placed a bomb then it makes sense to me that you might not trust whoever you get on the other end of the line when trying to contact a bomb squad.
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Re:Woman catches state police attaching tracker to her car, ... by Google234 on Monday May 31, 2021 @09:43PM (#27349959)
If you believe that the place placed a bomb on your car in the Us then you probably belong in a psychiatric hospital.
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Re:Woman catches state police attaching tracker to her car, ... by perl4ever on Monday May 31, 2021 @11:10PM (#27350371)
It was in the news five years ago when the Dallas police (in the US) used C4 to blow up a suspect in a parking garage. It seemed to startle people then, mainly because they repurposed a normally bomb-defusing robot to do it.

In fairness, while it was in a garage, it was not on a car.

"We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas Police Chief David Brown told a news conference Friday. "Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777...

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Re:Woman catches state police attaching tracker to her car, ... by ravel-bar-foo on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @12:10AM (#27350657)
While the use of a bomb in that case soubds like an affront to justice, I would think the police had probably cordoned off the area such that no untargeted bystander would find the bomb by accident.

To me it would only be reasonable to suspect a bomb on one's car if one did not know that the police placed it there.

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Re:Woman catches state police attaching tracker to her car, ... by wearywanderer on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @02:51PM (#27359485)
Not if you have actually seen the device and it looks like a goddamn pipe bomb, as at least some of these tracking devices do. But if your response is anything other than running, I think you belong in a psychiatric hospital. Normal people run like hell when they think they've found a bomb.
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