Going where no patrol car has gone before; electric vehicles dart into alleys, run on sidewalks
By John Scheibe
Ventura County Star
VENTURA, Calif. — Jack Richards wasted no time and confidently stepped onto a 21st-century chariot.
“It’s easy to maneuver,” Richards told a group assembled in front of the Ventura Police Department recently as he sped away on one of two high-tech T3 Motion electric scooters.
The department bought the black-and-white fiberglass scooters from T3 Motion, a company with headquarters in Costa Mesa, using a $25,000 grant from the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District.
As with the charioteers of old, T3 riders stand up, holding on to a motorcycle-like handlebar for balance.
The T3 is powered by an electric motor.
Richards, a police sergeant and spokesman for Ventura Police, does a U-turn in the parking lot, accelerating the scooter to 25 mph before coming around again.
After braking to a stop, he turns on the scooter’s flashing red-and-blue light-emitting diodes.
“This is the future,” he says proudly, as he smiles and stands on the scooter’s deck and looks down on a group of cops and journalists standing next to him.
For close to a century now, the department has depended on internal-combustion gas-powered vehicles. Richards said those vehicles are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. Ventura police want to use vehicles powered by cleaner and more efficient energy and technology.
Richards figures the T3s will save the department an average of $4,800 a month in fuel and maintenance.
The T3 uses about $30 worth of electricity a month.
The scooters have drawn curious stares from many in the 133-member department.
Soon, they will also be catching the public’s attention as officers use the T3s to patrol sidewalks, alleyways and other hard-to-get-to spots not accessible to a patrol car.
“They will make a difference,” said Rick Payne, a corporal with the department. Payne is among a handful of officers who have been trained to operate the T3.
Police had considered putting the vehicles on patrol in January. But they opted to start doing so on Thursday as shoppers crowd the downtown.
“We want to get these vehicles downtown to make it a safe shopping environment,” said Richards.
Even before their official debut this week, police used one of the scooters to nab a shoplifter.
“It would have been a lot harder to make the arrest had we not had this,” Payne said.
T3s are not available to the general public, but they are being used by many law-enforcement agencies. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recently bought 25 of them.
Richards is busy writing up a set of rules officers will have to follow while patrolling on a T3. Among them: Each officer will be required to wear a helmet.
Richards is confident the scooters will make a difference, if for no other reason than they give a patrol officer an extra foot in height, allowing him or her to more easily scan a crowd.
“I’m confident we will have more of these some day.”
Copyright 2008 Ventura County Star