Delete comment from: The War on Guns
I've been in the Houston police property "room".
It's not a room, it's a three- or four-story warehouse. The bicycles alone fill an entire floor; it's an amazing sight. Nevertheless, the building is old, run down, musty, and dingy. It was never designed for the level of security that's needed.
Under the circumstances, they lose very, very little. Can't remember the exact number, but it's vanishingly small.
The size of the place is such that if an item is misplaced by more than a few shelves, it's essentially lost forever, even though it's really still there.
The chief innovation of the new property building (aside from designed-in physical security, decent lighting, air conditioning, that sort of thing) is to put RFID tags on everything, not just to help thwart theft, but simply to keep track of stuff so that it can found when needed. The planned system will constantly log the location of every item -- and every person -- in the building, to within a few yards. (It's been more than a year since my little tour; plans may well have changed since then.)
Of course, that won't necessarily prevent deliberate theft by knowledgeable insiders. And of course, any civilian operation of equivalent size that lost even two or three guns would be likely be shut down by the BATFX, and the proprietors thrown in the federal pen. As always, the real problem is the Only Ones double standard.
May 19, 2008, 3:18:00 PM