New Zealand police station’s “unmarked” car immediately identified

by womenonwheels

February 16, 2021

New Zealand's 'unmarked police car' is immediately identified by internet sleuths

Using unmarked vehicles to stop criminal activity is certainly a good idea, as it allows police to essentially sneak up on any perpetrators before they’re able to commit a crime. The Waikato Police department in New Zealand agrees with this sentiment, so much so that they decided to get their very own unmarked police vehicle.

The idea behind using unmarked vehicles only works if the general public doesn’t know what car to look out for, and the Waikato Police department learned this the hard way.

After taking to Facebook to boast about their latest acquisition with an image of a mysterious blacked out vehicle, internet sleuths quickly got to work to try and identify the vehicle, which they easily accomplished.

In creating the mysterious image, the Waikato Police decided to hide the vehicle behind a black veil by simply shading out the car. If they decided to go with a fully opaque covering over the vehicle the image would have been completely black. Because they simply shaded out the vehicle recovering the original image was a piece of cake.

All that needed to be done was to raise the light levels of the image as high as they could go and the vehicle was made visible. For those wondering, the vehicle in question is Holden’s version of the Chevrolet Equinox.

Waikato Police do deserve some credit though, as they seem to be good sports about the fail, taking to Facebook to own the mistake with a caption that read: “Well that may have been a fail but the message remains the same. Anywhere, anytime.” The original post has since been deleted.

Well that may have been a fail but the message remains the same. Anywhere, anytime 👀

Posted by Waikato Police on Thursday, February 11, 2021

Take a look at what the image looked like when the light levels were raised on the original picture below:

If a photoshop fail wasn’t enough, Motor1.com dug a little deeper into the unmarked vehicle and discovered that the Waikato Police department actually announced in a press release that the Equinox would be its new unmarked patrol car back July 2020. They even posted an unaltered image of the vehicle directly into the press release, making the aforementioned blacked out image even more redundant.

Picture: Twitter/@NZStuff