I very much doubt it. Far more likely to be a memory leak in the baseband which is exposed when the devices are unable to talk to the cellular network for a period of time.
If that's what's going on, it might be the best example of "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" ever.
Ya, I'm guessing these cops don't have iPhones because if they did they would know that iOS is just buggy. I mean, the last time I restarted my iPhone before iOS 18 was when I installed the last iOS 17 patch. Since installing iOS 18 I've had to restart it twice because it stopped responding.