swat671

FileMakerFeller said:

macgui said:

TheObannonFile said:

When I see articles like this, I realize how many assumptions I make. I assumed this was already happening at large. Adoption of things like CarPlay and USB-C at large has been painfully slow.

I can't fathom any reason why someone would reasonably assume police were using CarPlay to provide information regarding calls for service, not only at large, but at all.

It's innovative on the part of the WAP, and maybe other law enforcement agencies have done this, but at large? Hardly. I suspect an analysis of law enforcement world wide would find very few agencies with CarPlay in their enforcement vehicles. Every year more vehicles include CarPlay in their package options, some may even make it standard equipment. But most police agencies don't have the budget for that.

Twenty-some years ago there was a police chief on a FileMaker Developer mailing list that was so sick of the system foisted on his officers that he was building his own. The old system was text-based and slow; he managed to build a new one in less than 12 months that included visual data and was deployed on laptops fixed to the car structure that allowed for operation while parked. It was game-changing. Rather than relying on vague descriptions of suspected perpetrators this system could provide photographs and arrest history and special notes from previous encounters, meaning that officers were no longer bailing up citizens who might in some way match the BOLO (an approach that was, IIRC, about 10% accurate overall) but instead were spending their time "actually chasing criminals" and achieving ~85% correct matches. This led to improved community relations and lower stress levels for police officers, and was heralded for demonstrating the capabilities of the police force to adapt "new technology" to improve operations.

But what it really showed, in hindsight, is that the systemic process is one of inadequate planning where the end users have to go to heroic lengths to overcome the bureaucratic inefficiency that seems to infest large organisations. I had assumed that the project had continued to grow, but what little I can find online now suggests that it hasn't expanded beyond its initial deployment area.

With an extra few decades of software development under my belt, I'm not really surprised, but like TheObannonFile I recognise that my assumptions about that sort of stuff have been way too optimistic. Sigh.