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Don in LaBelle, Florida asked: “I’m wondering what you think about current law enforcement technology being used. What might be the most cost-effective and useful for law enforcement purposes – and on the other hand, what is NOT so cost-effective and useful? “
Don, this stuff always comes down to what you need more than anything else.
If you’re really asking for the most cost effective and useful technology that cops use in general the answer would probably be something like “boots”, or “email”, or for electronics something boring like their radios, or we would imagine that speed guns and speed cameras pay for themselves pretty quickly.
Drones are so cheap and easy to fly that they’re likely to make the list these days, they’re basically a cheap helicopter replacement that you can fly right up to a window if you want to.
Least useful or worth it is probably a much longer list, there have been a lot of complaints lately that the famous Shotspotter is a failure in real world environments, and that MRAP that your local police department bought from DoD for an ungodly amount of money is probably useless unless someone happened to mine your streets recently.
There’s a police department in California that bought a Cybertruck, which is a questionable enough purchase in general with all the problems they seem to be having, but they even bought it only as an engagement tool not meaning to actually drive it outside of events, that seems expensive and not very useful.
If you asked a police department they’d probably try to give you examples of the very high tech very modern stuff they use as their most useful tech, but really the most useful stuff are probably the cheap tried and true tools that have been around for decades more so than the new gimmicky things that a startup pitched them 6 months ago.