Stolen Cars Research Articles

The city of (stolen) cars - Gabriel Feltran (ed.), Stolen cars: a journey through urban Conflict in São Paulo (Oxford, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, 2022, 272 p.)

The city of (stolen) cars - Gabriel Feltran (ed.), Stolen cars: a journey through urban Conflict in São Paulo (Oxford, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, 2022, 272 p.)

Hungry Hearts and Broken Dreams at the Springsteen Motel

ABSTRACT Over the course of his career, Bruce Springsteen returns to certain characters and preoccupations that he first chronicled in his album The River. One recurring scenario involves a man in a committed relationship who becomes dissatisfied, meets a woman at a bar, has an affair (sometimes at a nearby motel), and in the process blows up his seemingly stable life. Each time Springsteen returns to this scenario he offers interesting variations that evolve in perspective and tone. This article charts a musical road trip, beginning with “Hungry Heart” and “Stolen Car” on The River, descending into “One Step Up” on Tunnel of Love, detouring down “Highway 29” on The Ghost of Tom Joad, and culminating at the “Moonlight Motel” on Western Stars. It is a journey encompassing love and loss, faith and betrayal, self-knowledge and self-destruction, and the insatiable hunger for something to fill the void in the directionless lives of his characters.

Development of Iraqi License Plate Recognition System based on Canny Edge Detection Method

In recent years, there has been expanding development in the vehicular part and the number of vehicles moving on the road in all the sections of the country. Vehicle number plate identification based on image processing is a dynamic area of this work; this technique is used for security purposes such as tracking of stolen cars and access control to restricted areas. The License Plate Recognition System (LPRS) exploits a digital camera to capture vehicle plate numbers is used as input to the proposed recognition system. Basically, the developing system is consist of three phases, vehicle license plate localization, character segmentation, and character recognition, the License Plate (LP) detection is presented using canny Edge detection algorithm, Connect Component Analysis (CCA) have been exploited for segmenting characters. Finally, a Multi-Layer Perceptron Artificial Neural Network (MLPANN) model is utilized to recognize and detect the vehicle license plate characters, and hence the results are displayed as a text on GUI. The proposed system successfully identified and recognized multi_style Iraqi license plates using different image situations and it was evaluated based on different metrics performance, achieving an overall system performance of 91.99%. This results shows the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with other existing methods, whose average recognition rate is 86% and the average processing time of one image is 0.242s which proves the practicality of the proposed method.

Something’s Happening Here: A Sixties Odyssey from Brooklyn to Woodstock by Mark Berger

Reviewed by: Something’s Happening Here: A Sixties Odyssey from Brooklyn to Woodstock by Mark Berger Devin R. Lander (bio) Something’s Happening Here: A Sixties Odyssey from Brooklyn to Woodstock By Mark Berger. Albany: SUNY Press (Excelsior Editions), 2019. 242 pages, 6” x 9.” $19.95 paper, $19.95 e-book. Historians have often bemoaned the subjectivity inherent in the writing of memoir, a tension that, as historian Louise W. Knight suggests, erupts “most intensely in the form of history’s grumpiness about memoir’s relationship to objective truth” as “history wants memoir to serve its purposes and finds memoir’s frank subjectivity and notorious unreliability irresponsible.”1 Yet, there is much historians can and have extracted from memoirs if they are but willing to ask the right questions. “Because memoir is first and foremost a text written by a living human being about her past and read by another human being,” Knight explains, “the truths it is best equipped to reveal are either cultural or interpersonal.”2 Which brings us to first-time author Mark Berger’s memoir of his life in the 1960s. Berger was born and spent much of his life in Brooklyn and during the 1960s was very much a part of the countercultural upheaval taking place. In many ways representative of the larger ’60s counterculture, Berger is the white son of working-class parents who rebelled against his conservative upbringing in the early ’60s by first hanging out at black R&B clubs, drinking and smoking pot, and taking joy rides in stolen cars. This youthful rebellion morphed into something different as the ’60s progressed, and by the summer of 1969, Berger found himself living in a commune that was serendipitously invited by the Hog Farm to help set up the comfort facilities, such as they were, at the Woodstock festival. Berger’s memoir is organized into five sections made up of short “chapters” that relate to the theme of the sections. Some of the sections are nonchronological, and the reader very much gets the sense that they are experiencing the remembrances of the author as he remembers them, not as they happened. Berger observed or took part in many events of interest to historians of 1960s New York, and his memoir has much to reveal about the culture of the times as he experienced it. Berger took part in the civil rights movement through [End Page 293] Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and attended fundraising concerts for the organization where the likes of Odetta and Pete Seeger performed, dropped LSD, hung out with the psychedelic researcher Peter Stafford and poet Allen Ginsberg at Ginsberg’s apartment, was thrown out of East Tennessee State University for possession of marijuana, lost his draft deferment and barely avoided being sent to Vietnam, then ended up living with the Catskill Mountain–based Ohayo Mountain Family commune on the eve of the Woodstock festival. The section on Woodstock is the largest in the book and timely considering 2019 is the fiftieth anniversary of the concert. The story of how the Ohayo Mountain Family (and Berger) came to attend Woodstock is of interest and directly related to the concert’s promoters asking the Hog Farm commune to take part in the festival by building trails and fire pits at the site. The Hog Farm’s de facto leader Hugh Romney (later known as Wavy Gravy) convinced the promoters that the concert would need a free kitchen as well as other comfort facilities due to the enormous number of attendees he knew would come. Once on site, Romney quickly realized the Hog Farm was undermanned and reached out to other communes in the area for assistance, including the Ohayo Mountain Family. Berger and the rest of his communal colleagues arrived at Max Yasgur’s farm, the Woodstock concert site in Bethel Woods, on August 11, 1969, four days before the first act (Richie Havens) went on at 5:07 p.m. on the evening of Friday, August 15. Berger spent the days leading up to the concert clearing rocks and brush to make paths, unloading supplies, helping to build the free kitchens, and generally making himself useful. While the...

ALPRs and the Law: "And I'm Driving a Stolen Car"

ALPRs and the Law: "And I'm Driving a Stolen Car"

Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood: Spaces of getting and becoming in post-apartheid Durban

ABSTRACTSifiso Mzobe’s Young blood (2010) generates much of its energy, this article will argue, through its representation of social and physical mobility and its articulation of space with modes of consumption in post-apartheid South Africa. The novel is set chiefly in the township of Umlazi, the city of Durban and some of its middle- class suburbs. The chief protagonist, a young car thief, moves between township, city and suburb with ease in stolen cars. The open space of the highway separates township and suburb, but also connects them. The novel shows how the spatial arrangements of power and control associated with apartheid are increasingly undermined and reconfigured by new practices of everyday life. Young blood suggests that a certain style of driving can offer new ways of inhabiting the South African city and of bringing its disparate parts together. The ability to move between places in the novel provides opportunities for upward mobility and also enables new forms of symbiosis, trade and consumption. Stealing and driving cars enable Sifiso and his friends to bridge the divide between township and suburb and turn the distance between the two places into a domain of attainment and performance. But the rapid upward social mobility that high-level criminal activity allows is exposed as uncertain and ephemeral by the end of the novel, and the slower route offered by education to self-improvement and class mobility is proffered in its place.

Participant perspectives on mitigated interactions: The impact of imposition and uncertainty

The present study, regarding the influence of imposition and uncertainty on mitigation, explored speakers’ and listeners’ perspectives on mitigation in interaction. Participants assessed the video playbacks of their own role play interactions, relating to four contexts. The four contexts, which combined imposition and certitude to manipulate mitigation, provoked interactions about: a missing car (severe imposition/uncertain), a stolen car (severe imposition/certain), a missing glass pitcher (mild imposition/uncertain), and a broken glass pitcher (mild imposition/certain). Following creation of 56 dyadic role plays, participant perspective data was collected using playback comments. The comments about the interactions, categorized initially through a grounded approach to qualitative analysis, expressed emotion words, discourse purposes, and discourse evaluations. Some of the notable findings were that too much mitigation may be detrimental and that speakers and listeners differ in the emotion words used to characterize their interactions and also their tendency to address discourse purposes or evaluations. Recommendations for future mitigation research included using both role play and naturally occurring interactions, an increased consideration of emotion in mitigation research, and further examination of the role of speaker and listener in mitigated interactions.

Allen Ginsberg’s Kind of Psychiatrist

Allen Ginsberg’s Kind of Psychiatrist

Efficient processing of transportation surveillance videos in the compressed domain

Video surveillance is used extensively in intelligent transportation systems to enforce laws, collect tolls, and regularize traffic flow. Benefits to society include reduced fuel consumption and emissions, improved safety, and reduced traffic congestion. These video cameras installed at traffic lights, highways, toll booths, etc., continuously capture video and hence generate a vast amount of data that are stored in large databases. The captured video is typically compressed before being transmitted and/or stored. While all the archived information is present in the compressed video, most current applications operate on uncompressed video. The aim is to improve the efficiency of processing by utilizing features of the compression process and the compressed video stream. Key methods that are employed involve intelligent selection of reference frames (I-frames) and exploitation of the compression motion vectors. Although specific applications in the transportation imaging domain are presented, the methods proposed here can generally impact the ability to mine vast amounts of video data for usable information in many diverse settings. Applications presented include rapid search for target vehicles (Amber Alert, Silver Alert, stolen car, etc.), vehicle counting, stop sign/light enforcement, and vehicle speed estimation.

Motor Vehicle Recovery

Despite its importance for victims, and society as a whole, motor vehicle theft (MVT) recovery is rarely studied. The current research note draws on rational choice and opportunity-based perspectives, and police agency technology use, to develop and test a multilevel event history (survival) analysis model for MVT recovery. Contrary to the hypothesis that more expensive vehicles have a lower chance of recovery due to their attractiveness for permanent retention, the analysis found that recovery was least likely for incidents in which the stolen car had little value (less than $1,000), with no significant differences among the categories of $1,000 or greater. Measures of local opportunity for permanent retention MVT did not have statistically significant effects on recovery, but closer proximity to a major port or US-Mexico border crossing was associated with lower odds of recovery. Furthermore, police agency use of a stolen vehicle tracking system increased odds of recovery.

Narrative Function of Deafness and Deaf Characters in Film

Narrative Function of Deafness and Deaf Characters in Film

Design and Implementation of a GSM Activated Automobile Demobilizer with Identification Capability

The incidence of car theft in Nigeria has grown to nearly epidemic proportion. On daily basis, the numbers of stolen cars reported over the media are on the increase. Alarms and other deterrents are not enough. There is actually little one can do to prevent a car from being stolen. However, with a Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) activated automobile demobilizer with identification capability one can virtually take control of the virtually impossible incidence and hence increase the possibility of car recovery. This paper is aimed at implementing a security device capable of safeguarding cars from theft as well as provides picture and audio information of the culprits in an attempt to steal the car. To realize this work, use was made of a GSM phone

The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?

The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?

The Heterogenous Citizen

The Heterogenous Citizen

The Adventures of Michael MacInnes (review)

Reviewed by: The Adventures of Michael MacInnes Karen Coats Carney, Jeff The Adventures of Michael MacInnes. Farrar, 2006244p ISBN 0-374-30146-8$17.00 R Gr. 7-12 It's 1924, and Roger is traveling by train to his third boarding school (he's been dismissed from the previous two) when he meets the outrageous orphan and scholarship boy, Michael MacInnes. As entering juniors, they have a lot to prove, and Michael soon makes sure they are in the center of scandal. They enter school grounds with panache in a stolen car, and set up as chums with a taste for breaking the rules. They immediately run afoul of the overweight, morphine-addicted, corrupt proctor of their house, but it is Roger's fondness for boys (one boy in particular) and Michael's fondness for girls (one girl in particular) that spark their most dramatic adventures. As they crusade for the freedom to do as they please, they end up flying Roger's homemade zeppelin out of a tight spot, destroying a stash of potentially lethal home-brew that the proctor is selling the boys, narrowly escaping a showdown on the roof that leaves the proctor paralyzed and disempowered, and getting their romantic lives sorted in ways that make them both happy. Carney maintains a stylized 1920s sensibility in this densely plotted and well-paced school story; while its nostalgic flavor won't be to everyone's taste, there are enough twists, turns, and fistfights to satisfy old-school Hardy Boys fans, and the writing, plotting, and characterizations are solid and satisfying throughout. Occasional visitations and revelations to Michael by mystical characters add atmospheric drama without overwhelming the plot and they introduce an Indiana Jones/Allan Quatermain feel that heightens the sense of the time period; fans of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen may therefore also appreciate this offering. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Moral Indignation, Criminality, and the Rioting Crowd in Macquarie Fields

Three young men in a stolen car crashed into a tree in a narrow street in the public housing estate of Macquarie Fields on the night of Friday February 25, 2005 in which the driver survived the crash but two passengers died. An attempt is made to examine the case of Macquarie Fields from the perspective of the protesting crowd's moral indignation. The idea is that the protesting crowd might hold a legitimate claim to sentiments of 'moral indignation' appears to have escaped both the public and intellectual imagination, which has focused entirely on issues of 'law and order' and expressed in terms of 'outrage'.

The importance of a well defined analytical strategy to solve complex murder cases

Forensic techniques are becoming more and more powerful and affordable. This allows labs to utilise precise strategies, permitting multiple analytical approaches on the same evidence, thus obtaining precious information to solve criminal cases. This paper refers to a murder in which we received a plastic bottle and four latex gloves. These items were collected near a stolen car used to perpetrate the murder, and then burnt in order to destroy evidence linked to the murderer. We collected samples of saliva from the neck of the bottle and one glove underwent three different analyses, which were:•Sampling and genetic analyses of sweat traces taken from the internal surface of the glove, corresponding to the lower palm area;•Detection of palm-prints from the internal surface of the glove, corresponding to the upper palm area;•Collection of gun shot residues (GSR) from the edge of the glove.Two full genetic profiles were obtained from the biological traces collected, one from the glove and the other one from the bottle. The analyses were instrumental in permitting the identification of the shooter who had played an important role in the murder.

Police pursuits in Queensland: research, review and reform

PurposePolice high‐speed pursuits present a difficult area for police managers and policy makers because of the important need to balance public safety with the mandate to enforce laws. The issue of police pursuits has been relatively under‐researched in Australia. The overall purpose of the paper is to provide a descriptive analysis of the characteristics surrounding police pursuits in Queensland, Australia.Design/methodology/approachConsiders recent events involving high speed pursuit‐related fatal accidents and research into police pursuits which has illuminated clearly the significant risks for both community and police organisations associated with pursuits. Uses data collected in Queensland over a five‐year period.FindingsThe results show that approximately 630 pursuits occur per year in Queensland across the study period, and that half of all pursuits are initiated for traffic offences while an additional quarter are initiated for stolen cars. A total of 29 per cent of pursuits involved a collision, 11 per cent resulted in some sort of injury, and 11 people were killed during the five‐year study period. In relation to an issue that appears to justify the initiation of some police pursuits – that fleeing drivers provide opportunities for police to apprehend serious offenders – examination of the charges data against the fleeing driver showed that very few apprehended drivers were charged with crimes more serious than what was known at the time the pursuit was initiated.Originality/valueThe findings in this study illuminate the importance of adopting more restrictive police pursuit policies.

National Ownership Laws as Cultural Property Protection Policy: The Emerging Trend in United States v. Schultz

The conviction of Frederick Schultz is the most recent turn in a storm of controversy that began 25 years ago and does not appear to be dying down. Schultz is currently serving a prison term and owes a fine of $50,000 to the United States government. He was convicted under the National Stolen Property Act (NSPA) for conspiring to purchase Egyptian antiquities that, according to Egyptian law, were owned by the Egyptian government. The Schultz case is the latest in an emerging trend whereby the NSPA, enacted to permit criminal federal prosecution for stolen cars taken across state borders, has been applied to help foreign governments with national ownership laws to keep antiquities within their borders.

International Trafficking in Stolen Vehicles

For many years, trafficking in stolen cars seemed largely to be confined to the Americas, with an estimated 200,000 cars per year flowing from the United States to Mexico and Central and South America. Trafficking in stolen cars is now a worldwide phenomenon. Perhaps half a million or more cars each year are transported from developed to less developed nations, hidden in containers or driven across national borders. Because vehicle trafficking causes less personal harm than other transnational crimes, governments have given it little priority. However, a recent spate of policy efforts has focused on identification and repatriation of stolen vehicles. Further development of policy would be assisted by a modest investment in research. This could produce detailed information about the methods used by criminals, provide more information about the involvement of immigrants, and yield improved measures of trafficking. The availability of comprehensive government and industry data makes this transnational crime a promising field of research.