The police has never made economic sense. If you look up your local PD's budget, you will be shocked.

There's only so much military-grade vehicles you can spend that on, I guess. Cameras will do.

Gonna have to write more speeding tickets to pay for these, I guess

>How does that make any kind of economic sense?

It's not about economics, it's about control.

Honestly, not really. If you actually want to have decent coverage to observe crimes and track criminals, that's a ballpark reasonable figure.

And it's not really that expensive, and the idea is that it ultimately saves money in terms of the crime it prevents and fewer police and detectives needed.

I'm not defending it, but in terms of economic sense it's quite well justified. Opposition to it is moral/ideological around privacy/freedom, not economic.

The cameras don't make economic sense unless the goal is to enrich contractors or generate money on speed/red light tickets.

The bottleneck in solving crime is going after the criminals. There's already not enough resources to go after the crimes that are open and shut.