TrybalRage said:
Don't police do stakeouts anymore? You know, watch who's coming and going?
You know, you're right. It doesn't even have to be a 'manned' stakeout. Especially in today's world, it should be the easiest thing in the world to mount a couple cameras around a neighborhood(temporarily, at least with a warrant) to watch a single house.
24 hours should be enough to give you a 90% accurate estimate of who's inside. Give it a week and you can be 99% certain.
With today's technology, you wouldn't have to spend 24 man-hours minimum to watch a place 24 hours/day. A little motion detection equipment/software in the package and you'd only have to review the bits with significant movement, perhaps 1-5 hours/day. You could practically fast forward through that.
How about this for an idea: Establish a 'compensation' fund for each police department. Each time the police cause damage to an innocent party, or even damage in excess of possible criminal penalties*, it would be paid for out of this fund.
At the end of the year, the remaining fund is divied up and paid to the individual officers and personel. Now, I had the idea of cutting the fund in half, where half is divied out to individual officers and supervisors, and any deductions for damages come out of their share first, then the departmental share, before finally going to unrelated individual shares again. That way good officers can still get their bonus, even if one officer screws up(at least not monumentally).
*Burning somebody's house down then 'finding' the stub of a MJ cigarette in the back yard would be 'in excess'. Knocking out a bit of drywall in a house to find 20 kilos of cocaine isn't.