I think this echoes very true in a lot of places, not just in the US. Here in the UK I'm pretty sure the police/the state more broadly know perfectly well who is doing a lot of the low level quality-of-life crime in most areas, but for structural reasons either can't or won't bother acting in many instances. Investigative work has never been easier: oftentimes there's multiple cctv angles of offences being committed, endless digital records, etc., but unless something can be done with this information in the real world, it's useless and actually takes resources away from other areas of public services.

Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.