Frank and I strolled from west to the east of Manhattan yesterday, from Battery Park to the New York City Police Museum.
This photo shows some old billy clubs, one of which doubled as a teargas dispenser. Irish officers of that earlier era might whittle their own out of “bog oak” shipped in from the Old Country. And the point of a billy club, editorializing here, isn’t to kill or even arrest your bad-guy target, but to stop him from doing some stuff you don’t want him to do.
The museum has more than 100 years’ worth of artifacts, plus a bunch of police-narrated videos on different kinds of crime fighting. “Every time we arrest one, all the rest get smarter,” says one policeman–talking about the arms race against–not spammers or malware authors–but the organized gangs who steal automobiles.
Another POV that might be some help against internet crime:
“Crime doesn’t pay–or does it? Our goal is make the criminals work hard enough that crime does not pay.”
That seems like a much more plausible goal than catching all internet bad guys to send them to jail.