Austin just made it harder to use tech to catch criminals. Austin ran a one-year license plate reader trial that was, according to an auditor, successful because it led to the arrests of and prosecutions of hundreds of criminals and led to no unjustified police stops. Despite -- or perhaps BECAUSE OF -- the success of the program, migrant advocacy groups lobbied hard against these tools and city council ended the contract last June. Now city council went further and put in place a byzantine and highly restrictive approval processes before any department can deploy plate readers, drones, or other surveillance tools. The data collected may also be less relevant due to strict retention restrictions. Other cities are moving the opposite direction and having good results. For example, SF is now deploying hundreds of more plate readers and drones and crime is now at half of its 2023 level, far outpacing the general national decline in crime. Similarly with Dallas. Besides making it harder to catch criminals, there's an unintended consequence of Austin's anti-tech move. Plate readers are narrowly scoped because they, for instance, flag a vehicle against a hot list and ignore everything else. Without them, the work falls back to humans: officers tailing suspects, reviewing more records by hand, looking over hours of footage of cameras all over the city frame by frame. This is not only slower and less precise, but it's arguably more invasive than police relying on an AI camera.