That's probably not true. I've gotten the impression that a sizable chunk of police funding comes from speeding tickets.
Paying an officer to do something low-risk like camping out next to a road for a shift isn't really expensive. Same with monitoring systems like cameras on traffic lights. Set-up cost is significant, but they probably pay for themselves within a year.
The initial cost doesn't matter. If an officer doesn't cost much, yet you don't have to pay him any more than that is a 100% decrease in cost.
Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?
> Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?
Arguable. It depends on how badly you want [insert autonomous car producer here] to run your local police department from the cloud.
I was thinking about this for other reasons (it is beneficial for the auto-car to know about road closures), but a reasonable implementation has the vehicle interpreting rules data provided by the governments where it is operating, so you can do certification by making sure the vehicle 'correctly' interprets a given data set.
Having the rules data provided by the government is a fairly straightforward way for the vehicles to work even after the builder repudiates maintenance (maybe that is better said as 'to continue to work longer after', but whatever).
(I'm not worried about the cloud, hand-wringing and paranoia are going to make these things at least function independently or keep them off the road altogether)
Paying an officer to do something low-risk like camping out next to a road for a shift isn't really expensive. Same with monitoring systems like cameras on traffic lights. Set-up cost is significant, but they probably pay for themselves within a year.