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.

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.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1633·
    1 month ago

    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

    • HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world
      59·
      1 month ago

      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.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
      12·
      1 month ago

      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.

    • 93maddie94@lemm.ee
      7·
      1 month ago

      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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      582·
      1 month ago

      "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.

      • tacosanonymous@lemm.ee
        34·
        1 month ago

        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.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 month ago

        I drive a school bus and it’s depressing how excited elementary and middle-school kids get when they see a cybertruck. Shit, they still get excited when they see a tesla and those things are everywhere.

        • thefartographer@lemm.ee
          3·
          1 month ago

          I used to work on a school bus and I get excited when I see a CyberTruck, too. Then I can look in the mirror and say, “you’re not the dumbest person I’ve seen today!” It’s a real ego boost.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 month ago

          I don’t doubt kids get excited over them since they’re marketed to people of that maturity level, but I doubt it would convince any of them to not use drugs if they were considering it.

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
    70·
    1 month ago

    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”.

    • kboy101222@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      36·
      1 month ago

      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

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 month ago

        Yeah, that was my experience. All those stories made me more curious about drugs than anything else even back in elementary school. Also, having people that used to have addiction problems come in to talk about them showed that you could get through them.

        Also didn’t really help that the one guy’s description of things going wrong for him was basically a bus ride with a hangover where he needed to puke out the window. And that he still did it after that, implying that there was something good about it.

        It wasn’t DARE exactly but some Canadian equivalent. I hadn’t really thought about drugs that much before that and didn’t shy away when I had an opportunity to try weed a few years later (thought it was interesting but not worth the money at the time).

        Also it only took taking psychedelics a few times to figure out the real problem authority has with them: they can help you break down your preconceived notions and see through the leaps of “logic” that the current system depends on.

        Like the first time I did mushrooms, I realized that authority figures (like doctors, police, etc) were just people like you or me and included people having bad days, people not focused on the current task, people who cheated their way through school or got to where they were via corruption, people who think they understand something better than they really do or base their knowledge on outdated information, trolls and bullies, as well as people trying their best in good faith.

        It was so obvious in hindsight, but I realized that up until then I had this implicit trust that even if there were times I didn’t fully agree with them, they were generally “different” in a “better” kind of way instead of a spectrum of the same kind of people you went to high school with, just with a selection process that is supposed to filter some out (with varying degrees of success).

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          3·
          1 month ago

          Same experience here.

          While in elementary school, the DARE guy told us that drugs just make you dizzy, like when you spin in circles. He told us to just go run around and we’d feel the same. I thought that sounded awesome! All the good feelings of exercise without the exercise. Fuck yeah!

          DARE turned little me into a proto druggie.

      • sibannac@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        The kids that did petitions in my experience seemed to have a chip on their shoulder to impress authority or they were related to a cop. Also, there would be prizes like a PSP or an iPod touch. Higher value stuff than any other fundraiser in the school.

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
      15·
      1 month ago

      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.

    • meant2live218@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 month ago

      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).

  • thefartographer@lemm.ee
    733·
    1 month ago

    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
  • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
    63·
    1 month ago

    Cops are a parody of themselves.

    Didn’t they see the episode of Reno 911 where they bought a Hummvee for “community outreach “?

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    553·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • Nougat@fedia.io
      23·
      1 month ago

      My son has an old school D.A.R.E shirt he got from Goodwill. He wears it sometimes to go play hardcore shows.

    • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
      13·
      1 month ago

      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.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    42·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
      9·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
        5·
        1 month ago

        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.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
    35·
    1 month ago

    I like how they’re trying to encourage people to say no to drugs with an expensive vehicle from a company headed by a notorious drug abuser.

  • x00za@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    27·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • stoly@lemmy.world
    22·
    1 month ago

    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.