It’s not laziness, it’s hyper focus on compliance. CJIS is the policy maintained by the FBI that handles information security, which is derived from standards built around paper.

Adding more weirdness, the details get worked out by each state.

My guess is they encrypted whatever is criminal justice information (license plate hotlists, etc) or protected by local laws (DMV data) and left the rest to make it easier to deploy and service. Remember pictures of you or your car taken in public are not protected or in scope.

Police tech is garbage and usually driven by federal grant spending. So it’s going to be interesting to see how Flock and Axon grow the business as it turns into a service model.