They’re silent, they’re agile, and they’re fast.
Today and Sunday they’ll be the transportation of choice by the Manteca Police Department at the 2015 Manteca Convention and Visitors Bureau Crossroads Street Fair in downtown Manteca where tens of thousands of people are expected.
They’re Segways, and while they’ve mostly been written off as a lofty idea of the dot.com boom of the late 1990s and preserved primarily as a tourist-driven service that allows people to ride them in destination cities, they’ve carved out a niche for those in enforcement positions that appreciate the speed, mobility and the elevation that they provide.
Hollywood just made their second movie about a mall security officer who claims to be an expert using Segways.
But their practical application, especially in an environment where there are thousands of people and officers need to both establish their presence – the way that they did with mounted units years ago – and have a tactical advantage, is undisputable by those who train on them and have incorporated them into their policing scenarios intended on keeping all who come out to the event safe.
“I’m not a very tall guy, and this adds about a foot and allows you to kind of see over the crowd and what’s going on in front of you and that’s a big benefit,” Manteca patrol officer Pat Danipour said in a previous interview. “They’re also very maneuverable. They can literally spin in a circle without taking up any more room than the size of their tires, and that makes them very handy when you’re in a setting like that.
“We have those GEM electric cars, but with those you have to ask people to move when you back up and can’t really cover as much ground. With these you can just go.”
Back in 2013 the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District gave the city $46,000 to overhaul its fleet to quick-response police units for crowd scenarios – replacing either aging and often gross-polluting golf carts with the GEM units, or taking things a step further and going with the Segways.
The move seemed unconventional at first and garnered a fair bit of media attention. But even Police Chief Nick Obligacion is trained to ride one of them, and if Manteca’s aren’t enough to handle the job, a quick phone call to Ripon will bring in the Segway-esque “trikes” that were privately donated for use by the school resource officer at Ripon High.
“He really loves the thing,” Ripon Police Chief Ed Ormonde said of the officer who uses it daily in a past interview. “It can go up to 16 miles per hour and it allows him to get between classes and buildings really easily and carry everything that he needs to carry. He’s able to quickly and efficiently cover more area that he did before.
“We’re getting good use out of them.”
