I was watching the John Dillinger gangster movie, Public Enemies, on cable the other night. Time and again, Dillinger and his gang rob some Depression-era bank and then disappear into the countryside in a fast car, eluding police with ease.
Dillinger, no dummy, capitalized on the fact that most police departments of the day didn't equip their patrol vehicles with radios. In fact, he gave a wide berth to those advanced cities that had radio cars.
The savvy gangster was adept at exploiting gaps in the law enforcement network -- which is what criminals have been doing forever.
And they're still doing it today. The drop in the overall crime rate in recent years attests to the professionalism and competence of 21st century police departments. But many of these departments, particularly the smaller ones, lack modern support mechanisms that can give officers a deep and comprehensive picture of criminal activity in their communities.
Crime in the United States is still a terrible burden on society. According to FBI statistics, in 2009 there were 1.3 million violent crimes in the U.S., 9.3 million property crimes and 6.3 million larceny/thefts.
Nevertheless, any child accustomed to surfing the Web would be dumbfounded at the lack of modern tools available to many detectives investigating serious crimes.
In many departments, vital information is spread among several databases, making it extremely difficult to piece together facts quickly. And sometimes a database is little more than a box stuffed with paper files under a desk in the squad room.
This cumbersome arrangement can prevent important information from getting to detectives in the crucial hours immediately following a crime. Police are at an even greater disadvantage in battling Internet crime, with criminals constantly devising ever more devious tactics.
Fortunately, there is an equalizer. Police can now rely on computer and communications systems that provide immediate access to everything that is known about a particular criminal -- arrests, convictions, hangouts, associates and distinguishing features like scars and tattoos.
In addition, powerful analytics software can process vast amounts of crime data. For example, New York City's Real Time Crime Center can comb through millions of pieces of information -- criminal complaints, arrests, 911 calls and criminal records -- to quickly identify suspects, detect crime patterns and transmit information to police officers on the street via handheld devices. Crime has dropped 27 percent since 2001, and New York is now one of the safest large cities in the U.S.
Making a dangerous place safer is one of the best ways to enable business investment and elevate the quality of life. A community freed from the shackles of crime blossoms in wonderful and unexpected ways. Those hideous security gates disappear, new stores open up, citizens come out from behind locked doors and get involved in the life of the neighborhood.
Dillinger isn't around anymore, of course, but criminals haven't stopped probing the seams of society, looking for the weak spots. We must give the police every advantage as they work to protect us.
The general good comes from the fact that most criminals repeat offend. For those who do not re-offend and for first offenders, progressively more and deeper surveillance and computer control over the whole population will not succeed in finding them before they commit crimes, but will sap the liberty that freedom from being constantly inspected provides. Short example: Ted Kennedy being kept from an airline flight because he was on a no fly list.
This is an ABSOLUTE JOKE!! Do you consider raiding ghettos, racial profiling, throwing people away for life and/or taking away their homes, right to vote, housing, employment... It isn't professional or competent to throw millions away and take away their rights for a minor drug crime at all.. It's inhumane. It's one of the worst human right's violations in the world right now. The U.S. has broken all incarceration rate records of any country in the history of the world in less than 20 years.
This is going off on a bit of a tangent, but the Libertarian idea that all public sector functions could be taken over and done better by the private sector is simplistic and just flat wrong. The police, Fire Department and public schools especially are services that it behooves us to invest our tax dollars in.
To take policing the streets as an example, having a well-funded police force take responsibility for keeping our cities safe is a much better plan than arming the citizenry and leaving them to take care of themselves is.
So this is how it works in the VERTICAL scaled U.S. society. Government hires grade 12 educated people, weaponise them, have them patrol the streets too prevent the lower 1/3 society from over running the neighborhoods of the middle and upper class.
People from the lower 1/3 society can't afford the best law firms to defend themselves, as the people in middle and upper class society can, so they fill the privatized jails to capacity.
So the police have these in car computers connected to a bunch of databases. And all the names in those databases are from the lower 1/3 society. Whoop-tee-do.
But there is one database that the police do not have access to, Mr. IBM man. That is the IRS data which would tell the grade 12 educated police personnel who are evading their taxes and committing huge amounts of white collar crimes in doing so.
And when those grade 12 educated police personnel show up in a court room to testify, they are met with university educated lawyers and judges and the justice playing field is not level (we all remember the incompetence of the police in the Simpson TV trial when the lawyers had at them).
So lets strip the tax code to two lines denoting personal and business income tax rates (no exceptions). Lets hire university PhD's into the police forces and start investigating the frauds and tax evasion crimes of the Corporate State.
for any reason. That is to include cutting off one of their minions in Traffic on your way to work or home.
I think you have been drinking the IBM, Kool-aid much too long and have become far removed from the trappings of everyday American LIFE. Just because your JOB title and your pay check reflect more than you ever dreamed of, does not mean that you are correct and more invasion of privacy
is required. There should be reasonable restriction on all of its use and much more study is certainly required to truly evaluate the worthiness of what you are championing here. Your suggestion will only enrich your present employer and by default you as well and not necessarily the American people at Large. I suggest you do further research and re-evaluate your thinking. I am sure the executives at IBM are proud of this article from you. Here! there is a PAT on the HEAD! Since when did it become so popular to submit to those 1's and 0's so trustingly!
Which costs a lot of taxpayer dollars, and all the more reason to lessen the load of law enforcement and the courts with insignificant drug possession charges. How much more will the public tolerate in wasted taxpayer dollars?