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17 hours agoIn theory, these are a good idea. The issues with them, however, include:
- Mission-creep, whereby they become tracking tools that are easily abused to invade privacy, among other potential abuse.
- Budget-dependencies, whereby the money earned from their initial purpose starts to decline significantly once they’ve achieved their objective, and yet budgets have been planned around the assumption that level of income from them would remain ongoing. To make up for the loss in income they’ve become reliant upon, they start ticketing things that almost never were ticketed before because they were borderline judgement calls, or other similar circumstances that previously would have been given the benefit of the doubt.
This has happened in many other cities, and while it usually settles into some sort of uneasy balance eventually, it typically takes a minimum of several years of legal challenges to get there during which time many people are squeezed for money they can ill afford (now more than ever).
It’s an ugly process, and the fact the equipment is not owned by the city, but a for-profit operation only makes things that much more likely to turn ugly.
It features prominently in the fourth movie, The Voyage Home (which was funny AF when released, but unfortunately a good amount of the jokes fall flat now). It’s where Starfleet HQ is located, and so is a recurring setting in pretty much all the various spin-offs & movies.