No great company would see some tech that’s going to make it much better at its job and say, “No, let’s not buy it, it would speed us up too much.” So if a police force is going to be well-run, they shouldn’t [say] that either.
But a company can’t shoot you or take away your rights. A police force can.
So let’s add one other goal: the law enforcers should [be] highly competent in the direction of safeguarding your rights, and extremely incompetent at taking them away. But that’s just a question of intent, right? The cop’s tools don’t care whether he’s showing up to take away your attacker or take away your guns. How do you arm the police with awesome tech to do the former without making it easier for them to do the latter?
The answer is actually central to gun rights: the way to solve problems with a new technology is to make more new technology. From “OSD 246: Eroom’s law”, quoting Steven Sinofsky:
the [executive order on AI] is from a culture that wants to regulate away tech problems instead of allowing people to innovate them away. “The best, enduring, and most thoughtful [scifi] writers who most eloquently expressed the fragility and risks of technology also saw technology as the answer to forward progress. They did not seek to pre-regulate the problems but to innovate our way out of problems. In all cases, we would not have gotten to the problems on display without the optimism of innovation.“
So a self-regulating system for modern police tech is something you’ve seen on gun forums forever: the police can have whatever they want, as long as I can have it too.
That doesn’t solve every implication, but it’s a fine starting point to reason from.
— Open Source Defense in Benjamin, get the musket
Unfortunately most people will be content with the pending technofeudalism era.
Governments are monopolies. Their police are monopolies. You can’t solve the problem of abusive monopolies by giving them better tech. You need to end their monopolies.