Networked Guns Are A Smarter Attempt To Keep Cops In Check

It seems insane that it's taken this long to get here, but at long last, people are finally using the myriad tech at our disposal to hold cops accountable for their actions. Most recently, its a simple, relatively tiny chip being put in guns to one massively important job-telling headquarters every time a police officer fires a weapon. And its for our protection just as much as their own.

Specifically, it's the police departments in Santa Cruz, California and Carrollton, Texas that will be testing out a new type of networked gun from California company Yardarm, part of a solution to what's become an alarmingly lax attitude tpwords tracking cops' firearm usage. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, while no comprehensive database of police shootings exist, some police agencies do self-report-750 out of 17,000 total agencies, to be exact. And while the self-reported number of "justifiable homicides" is about 400, academics and other journalistic agencies claim that number to be over 1,000.

As D. Brian Burghart, editor and publisher of the Reno News & Review and the only person purportedly attempting to track police shootings, told the Washington Post:

Don't you find it spookey? This is information, this is the government's job. One of the government's major jobs is to protect us. How can it protect us if it doesn't know what the best practices are? If it doesn't know if one local department is killing people at a higher rate than others? When it can't make decisions based on real numbers to come up with best practices? That to me is an abdication of responsibilities.