I get a biweekly email from the Kennedy School's Government Innovators Network that summarizes unique technological advances and new techniques being used throughout the country by municipal governments.
A couple of the items in today's email caught my attention:
New "Spymobile" catches vandals at work.
Of course, building strong cases against graffiti vandals has always been difficult, even with enhanced police attention paid to the problem. The vandals invariably try to strike when no one's looking, and the only evidence they leave, typically, is damaged property.
It helps, however, that graffiti vandals are so vain that they are compelled to leave a distinctive tag at the scenes of the crimes - in effect, signing their work.
Authorities have become especially adept at compiling a data base on these tags and matching them to new graffiti. That's what happened with the Grant City arrests.
But in this case, the cops had a secret weapon - the brand new, $55,000 spymobile, which is equipped with a periscope, video recorder and digital cameras.
"These guys are great," Mr. Oddo said of MTA Police Officers Mike Yannelos and Chris D'Onofrio, who made the first-ever arrests mounted from the new vehicle. "The first day this thing was out and it paid immediate dividends," and within an hour of when it first hit the road.
We shouldn't forget that Philadelphia has its own unique and award-winning method of dealing with graffiti - The Mural Arts Program. But there's no reason we couldn't use both.
And...
Robots put garbage on a new path: Several South Florida cities are swapping the muscular biceps of their human garbage haulers for robotic arms
Pembroke Pines is the latest South Florida city to replace its noisy garbage trucks with new "one-armed bandits," whose sleek hydraulic robot arms scoop up custom cans and deposit the waste cleanly into the truck's bin.
The driver, like some heavy-duty video gamer, manages the entire operation with a joystick inside the clean, air-conditioned cab.
Not only does this reduce the need for sanitation workers, possibly freeing them up to for other tasks, but the workers who do operate the trucks are spared the wear and tear that leads to sick days, disability claims and early retirement. Of course the initial investment is large, new trucks and custom made trash cans for every property, but the long term payoff could be huge. That is, if they ever figure out how to keep this from happening:
But every new technology has bugs, and some of the automated trucks appear to have a big one: For reasons that are in dispute, they occasionally burst into flames.
Oh well, maybe not. That spymobile still seems pretty cool. Just some neat stuff for a Friday afternoon.