NYPD Unveils Creepy New Surveillance System Developed with Microsoft

I was under the impression those were rougue officers. The city is not going to defend them --tho their union is, but that's wat unions do, they represent their membership vigorously.

That's to say, they did not represent departmental policy and being such is not a "double standard".

There is some interesting questions here that is for sure. It was revealed that red light cameras kept a record of every license plate entering and exiting the intersection where they were 'looking'. Not surprisingly, you can exploit that data to figure out when a license plate has gone through an intersection, and with enough intersections get a pretty good idea of where it was at any given time.

I see no reason why one couldn't setup a bunch of web cameras looking out windows and some OCV software to watch for patrol cars going by. A simple P2P protocol and you've got the basis for creating a persistent state diagram of where every patrol car is at any given time. I think making such a system would certainly get the conversation going about distributed surveillance.