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The obvious question then becomes why 4 military-grade surveillance Tech Tahoes are needed.

Was three not enough for the current demand for military grade surveillance by the police?

Why is there so much demand for military grade surveillance? Is there a better way to address that core need?

A million bucks buys a lot of essential services.

Every police station needs to be a mini-CIA, surely.

Maybe the Chevy Tahoes were priced as the initial capex, and a maintenance and support contract covering capex and opex for the next X years with a local dealership? I’ve sometimes seen this in corporate budgeting. Some companies prefer to lock in support and maintenance in advance for a more expensive fixed price instead of pay a variable but lower price over the same time period because of the budgeting vagaries that entails.

Considering the amount of time and the number of expensive management staff involved in them I’ve seen some budgeting knife fights burn up, I see the logic.

Most criminals are dumb, some of them not only carry their phones with them, they even post their crimes on social media. With that and Flock I would think police work has never been easier.

They don't care about catching criminals. They can use real police work for that. They care about being able to profile everyone going back some arbitrary amount of time so that when someone who isn't homeless with nothing the state can steal gets out of line they can come up with a short list of who done it.

Another story in the same publication is about one of their writers being arrested because of Flock cameras (falsely IDing their test-drive car).

They do have their own BTS. If that BTS is the one strongest advertising itself to your phone (most often simply the closest one), your phone will connect to it.

As a country, we spend nearly as much on domestic police (~$250B) as China does on their military each year. And from what I've seen, there is no correlation with increases in police spending and drops in crime rates. It's pretty disturbing if you think about it.

It's an interesting question: Isn't Texas widely marketed as a 'low tax area'?

It may be a 'low income tax area', with more regressive taxes used to fund the state and an equal or higher total? Texans need to pay for the same things, generally, as people in Massachusetts (though maybe they don't invest as much in schools, health care, etc.).

I think the vast majority of the public has no comprehension of what a trillion even is. All the “*illions” are units they will never have to deal with in their personal lives.

However, I suspect a family of four could start to understand $300k of cash they (and everyone they know) couldn’t have because the money was used for such purposes...

Even over 20 years, that’s like a nice new car every other year…

Sure, taxation isn’t uniform but this is an enormous amount of money!

And what do we get for it? Cops that think they are in the military, acting as a hostile occupation force and killing our own citizens. Their personal urges should have led them to put up (join the actual military) or shut up (don't). Instead they were given an easier and safer option that requires all of the bravado of shooting fish in a barrel, so they took it.