Ha, totally dude. Slackers rule!
But after watching the clip below, even this slacker reporter must say that Watson came up with some pretty awesome points about his town's choice to purchase two $62,000 H3 Hummers for use as police patrol vehicles.
Lone Tree comprises newer housing developments on the southern end of Denver's well-to-do southern suburbs. With town coffers fat off sales-tax revenue from Park Meadows Mall, the Lone Tree Police Department was apparently looking for some new toys and found a willing supplier at Medved Hummer in nearby Castle Rock.
A police spokesman tells Watson that a recent small plane crash on a bluff in Lone Tree prompted the department to look into buying some off-road response vehicles. The problem, explains a Castle Rock mechanic: H3s pretty much suck in difficult off-road terrain compared to Jeeps or large trucks.
But that doesn't matter, because the police have been using the Hummers daily as patrol vehicles on the mean, newly paved streets of Lone Tree. This, despite the fact that the behemoths guzzle significantly more gasoline than the typical Ford Crown Victorian police cruisers. Watson breaks down the numbers and figures the Hummers end up costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars each year.
Maybe the department got a deal on the vehicles, since most consumers now regard them as dinosaurs. But, hey, at least Hummer cop cars look kinda cool, in an arrogant-global-warming-inducing-meathead-enforcer sort of way. And hopefully they'll help keep those slacker high-schoolers in line, too.- Jared Jacang Maher
