Future trends – Of groundhogs, criminals and hackers

One of my recent, regular columns for a financial publication, managed to link together the issue of groundhogs (in my backyard), with the future of policing and financial crime.

The article relates my backyard war with a groundhog to what I refer to as an “anticipatory approach to those with a nefarious purpose.”

I go on to note that “the issue of policing and law enforcement …..is much like battling a groundhog. The police deal with unique challenges that constantly change, whether fighting white-collar or street crime.”

The future of policing? I comment that “through the next decade, police forces will start using sophisticated technologies such as clothing that will link to an in-car mapping system through a wireless network, allowing officers to perform a “hot-location” lookup of a colleague in the field during a ground operation. We’ll see today’s current generation of military hardware become a part of tomorrow’s crime-fighting infrastructure, such as unmanned aerial drones being used for highway surveillance to crack down on street racing. Police education will change as well, with a migration toward virtual reality training based on airline simulator models.”

I don’t know how I come up with this stuff, but the article has certainly generated a lot of welcome comment, some of it puzzled!

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