I noticed something today on a state trooper’s car that I can’t remember seeing before (maybe I haven’t been paying attention).
On each side of the trunk lid there was mounted a black boxlike contraption. I didn’t get a good look at it so it could have been cameras but that seems like a strange place to mount them. It didn’t look like antennas.
A few of the cop cars around here now have automated license plate scanners, that run the tag number of every vehicle the officer drives by. Maybe it’s that…
Whatever it costs, the company that makes/sells the technology will demonstrate a Return on Investment to the purchaser. If it costs one million dollars to incorporate the technology on X number of cars, they will demonstrate that ticket revenue will increase by 300k per year and other expenses will go down by 100k per year.
I made those numbers up, but the end result of owning the equipment usually means more revenue and less expense for the department with the equipment.
I’m no disputing that they install all those gizmos for economic reasons. I’m just wondering what the price tag is after taking a police suitable Crown Vic, painting it up, putting the lights in, install the bumpers and getting the high tech radios and plate recognitions hardware up and working. Then there are the safety barriers and the gun compartments along with the radar/laser speed equipment. Certainly it ain’t cheap. Say the Crown Vic is somewhere around 30K when they get it from Ford. Does it have 100k+ invested in it when the first trooper takes it out to do some enforcement duty.
You can look up “interceptor” package, which is a package from Ford, I believe, that adds in 80% of what most cruisers need, right down to things like heavy duty cooling, heavy duty batteries and alternators, lights, bumpers, beefed-up suspension, etc.
Then you have to figure out the tech pieces, such as laptops, dash cams, radar, radio, etc.
Here is an example from a city budget report on the cost to add a full-equipped cruiser at around 48,000 US Dollars. From reading around other sites, that is just about everything needed, including radar and radios, but not the newest license plate reader.
If you surf around, there are grant programs to get department’s the initial funding, and the ROI is good (or at least it is promoted as such).
The companies that invested millions to bring the tech to market have to have a way for the over-stressed budget of various agencies to pay for the technology; the need to have a decently quick ROI… and, of course, the good ol’ ‘grant’ options to supplement costs.
According to a friend of mine who’s a cop they make it pretty hard not to have a return on investment. He said basically you drive down the street and any parked cars with expired registrations or outstanding fines or the registered owner has a warrant the machine alerts the cop.
He said it’s amazing how often the thing goes off.