What, exactly, defines a vehicle as “suspicious”???
Let’s, for the sake of the topic, rule out potentially stolen vehicles.
I am thinking more along the lines of, someone sees a car down the road from their home, at 2 am, through the window, and calls the cops, and reports a “suspicious vehicle” in the neighborhood. The cops come out, and the vehicle turns out to be, indeed, “suspicious.”
Umm, what the??? Ruling out the stolen car scenario, and assuming one sees nothing strange occuuring inside of the car, (or around it) what constitutes “suspicious” in such an instance?
A guy I used to work with inherited some rental apartments
in a bad part of town. We would kid him by calling him the “slum lord.”
One afternoon when he went into the neighborhood to make repairs a cop pulled him over because (this is what the guy was told) his car was too good for the neighborhood. He might be selling drugs.
Our co-worker is a minority, BTW.
In Northern Ireland it can mean a vehicle with its rear suspension scraping the road. Years ago terrorists importing a large amount of guns tried transporting them in the backs of two Ford Granadas. When the police pulled them over the two cars were dropped right down to the ground on the rear.
My Dad is an expert on this sort of stuff though. In the 70’s when visiting my Mum in Dublin he couldn’t get parked anywhere near her flat until he found a large space where noone was parking. Next morning Mum and Dad are woken early by a police officer asking them to evacuate as a controlled explosion was about to be carried out on a “suspicious” vehicle parked in a control zone (zone where parking is prohibited) near some government buildings. Out comes Dad and says “oh don’t worry it’s only my car I’ll move it now.”
Or the time he bought a car of a police sergeant and neglected to fill out the forms for change of ownership. When Mum was stopped by an Army checkpoint they were very suspicious as to why an RUC sergeant’s car was been driven by a complete stranger with no sight of the sergeant who apparantly was still supposed to be the owner.
Of course my Dad is the sort of person who was pulled in for questioning simply because of how his beard looked, nice one Dad :rolleyes:
Here in rural England you can get a car sticker which means the vehicle should only be driven in daylight / work hours. Schools put it on their minibuses for example.
If the police see the sticker at night they will pull the vehicle over.*
“Here in rural England you can get a car sticker which means the vehicle should only be driven in daylight/work hours. Schools put it on their minibuses for example. If the police see the sticker at night they will pull the vehicle over.”
In Toronto, you can get the opposite: a sticker for cars that AREN’T supposed to be driven during working hours, authorizing the police to pull over the car if seen on the streets from 10am to 3 or 4pm (I forget which). This was instituted to curtail car theft from train station park&ride lots, which were easy targets for car theives because they could rely on the owners being gone for eight or more hours.
I suggested the same thing to my insurance company and the local (Chicago) transit agencies. I got a “thanks for your suggestion, it’s under consideration” from a couple of the transit agencies, but that’s it.
Nothin to add on suspicious vehicles, but here’s a suspicious activity. A buddy of mine was meeting me at a movie theater the other day, he was early. Rather than walk directly to the door, he took a meandering path across the parking lot parallel to the building. The parking security guard raced over and asked him what he was doing, etc. Simple to pick out somebody not following the pattern of walking radially to/from the door.
So anything that seems out of place or irregular is “suspicious”.
I don’t know about the States or anywhere else, but in the UK it’s technically perfectly legal to buy an old tank/amphibious vehicle/whatever, as long as the guns have been disabled and the wheels won’t damage the road, and drive around as if you’re in a Honda Civic. I believe the practical reality, however, involves being pulled over roughly seventeen times an hour and forced to go through tonnes of paperwork and/or telephone calls, to prove this amusing fact to irritable, overworked cops. Nonetheless no conviction will be forthcoming.
It also occurs to me that proving the gun is disabled might be pretty high on some cops’ agendas. I shouldn’t think it’d go down too well in Northern Ireland, either. However I did hear it was somehow legal.