A wanted poster might have some people watching faces more closely, but they aren't compiling a history of every face they saw and when and where they saw it, and sending that in to law enforcement where it can be combined with other histories and used to generate suspect lists based on coincidences.
Right, that's just saying "we prefer built-in random inefficiencies" with extra steps. The heart of investigation is pulling coincidences into an actionable pattern (which is different from trial and conviction, which relies on far more than coincidences).
Given how much crime currently goes uninvestigated because the backlog is so high, is automating some of the coincidence-sniffing a bad thing?
See my other comment in this thread, but I’d venture to say yes. Changing the efficiency of enforcement naturally will throw something else in the economy out of balance, particularly if the money spent to increase confidence-sniffing is not being well dispersed into the local economy.
If in the past you’d have to hire more local policemen, they’d need more police vans made, they’d need more uniforms made, more wear on police vans means more work for the mechanics, etc etc etc, now you just pay Protector Co. once for your new surveillance software. Now you haven’t dissuaded people from crime with good plentiful local jobs (as a gross oversimplification, but hopefully you can see this would still apply to a more realistically complex economy)
