Scooters littering US city streets alarm: 'Unlock me or I'll call the police'

Anyone know if people have started to gather these scooters up and part them out?

This article says the word "police" is racist.

>Built-in alarm sparks anger from city officials amid concerns over racism and policing: ‘This is a threat to people’

Unfortunately, until we have a secondary form of law enforcement that is what you should do if someone is stealing...

No, it doesn't.

Just from reading the title you know this is a CA startup because the scooter threatens to call the police. If it were a TX startup the scooter would threaten to defend itself with force in proportion to the threat. (In case you were wondering, that's a joke).

The city has all sorts of tricks it uses to make life easy for people on it's side and hard for its perceived enemies.

If the city cared about resolving this it would do these (or similar) things because that's how government works. It makes a bunch of rules that are insane when followed at either extreme, normally runs near the middle and then picks and chooses which extreme to apply for situations it thinks warrant special treatment (when the government is bad at choosing this is called corruption).

They can impound the scooters without due process and then just say "oops" when ordered to return them. If you're a big enough jerk (as defined by the city's opinion which doesn't necessarily correlate with the truth) to be known to the traffic enforcement people this is probably exactly what would happen.

Alternatively they can just make a big show out of not prosecuting people for stealing them.

Clearly this isn't really a problem as far as the city government cares so they're just letting it run its course.