An Artistic Approach to Fighting Crime

I spend most of my waking hours deep in thought, figuring out ways to help mankind. This likely explains why my lawn looks the way it does, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, today I’ve been considering ways to bring high-speed freeway car chases to less violent conclusions. Yesterday, I watched on CNN as a SWAT team shot and killed a murder suspect who led them on a chase along a California freeway, and I wondered if there wasn’t a better solution.

One answer would be to equip all vehicles with tamperproof, radio-activated engine kill-switches, and give the police the transmitters to control them (sort of like the transmitters that allow the firetrucks to remotely change traffic signals in order to clear the traffic ahead of them). This approach has many flaws, not the least of which is the potential — OK, the certainty — that those transmitters would fall into the wrong hands. [Like mine, for example. I’d love to have one to rein in drivers who I consider to be idiots or jerks, recognizing that the likely upshot would be that mine would occasionally be the only moving vehicle on the road. But, think about it. Wouldn’t you just love to kill the engine of that guy who just ran a red light in front of you?]

Another drawback is lack of specificity. You wouldn’t want a Matrix-like EMF transmitter that shut down everything within transmission range (I guess we’d need to make sure that the other police cars were shielded…but then what happens when one of them is stolen?). A solution would be to tie the receiver frequency to the vehicle identification number (and then to make the receiver into a transmitter as well, which would broadcast the VIN).

Well, this is all very complicated and not as artistically satisfying as the solution that I think should be given further consideration, and that is to employ technology that convinces the lawless driver that it’s in his best interests to stop… without actually throwing up a physical barrier.

How to do this? Well, look no further than the timeless feud between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, where the former cartoon character often endeavors to trick the latter into knocking himself senseless by running through a tunnel opening that is actually just some black paint thrown on a solid rock face. (Never mind the fact that Road Runner generally successfully disappears into the tunnel, whereas the coyote tries it and knocks himself silly. It’s just a cartoon, folks.)
But the philosophy’s the same: use a trompe l’oeil display to fool the offender into thinking he’s about to smash into something unpleasant.

Simple, huh?

The execution is the tricky part, but I’ve got that figured out, too. Enter one Julian Beever, the world-acclaimed practitioner of the art of anamorphic illusions. Beever’s sidewalk art is simply amazing. He uses photorealistic illustration techniques combined with perspective to make paintings that seem to rise up from the sidewalk when viewed from just the right angle.

It’s that latter phrase that we have to address in order to perfect this solution, as the apparent reality of the anamorphic illusion disappears as one gets too close to the image. But this is a problem that’s easily solved with a radar gun and a laptop. All you have to do is mount the image on a large flat surface which is itself mounted on a hydraulically-controlled mechanism that tilts up and down. This mechanism would be towed and stationed across the highway where the offender was heading. As the vehicle approaches, the image comes into view. (Let’s say that it looks like a deep ravine suddenly bisecting the highway, one that no criminal in his right mind would want to drive into. [Let’s hope that Keanu Reeves never actually hijacks a bus.])

As the vehicle gets closer, the radar gun/GPS device plots the precise location with respect to the image, and sends a signal to the computer controlling the hydraulic angle-adjuster. Voila! You have an anamorphic illusion that maintains its effectiveness right up to the last second, where, presumably, the driver will either stop or attempt to turn around (at which point the coyote drops a huge net over the car…but that’s another installment).

Of course, a more satisfying variation on this technique would be to actually have a massive barrier dragged across the highway, coupled with an anamorphic illusion that makes it look as though the highway is clear. But the creation of replacement illusions and tilting devices could get expensive.

OK, I’ve done my job. It’s up to you guys to take this idea and run with it.