The Law Fights Back - Top Cop Toys!

Never mind James Bond – it looks like the police force are getting all the cool toys.  Popular Science flagged down a cop-car and went shopping for some serious future law-enforcement tech, and came up with a list of must-haves that is by turns jaw droppingly cool or pants wettingly scary.  As the environment that todays police are tasked to work in develops – and by "develops" I mean the bad guys are swapping knives and pistols for machine guns and bombs – then so do their demands of the kit they're equipped with. Here's a quick run-down of just some of the stuff that the felon of tomorrow can look forward to...

This little beauty is a machine gun capable of spitting out 700 rounds of pepper-spray filled pellets a minute, creating a cloud of the stuff up to 200 feet away.  It's been designed to manage unruly crowds in a non-lethal way, and I imagine it'd be pretty effective.

Check out after the cut for more high-tech cop toys...

In the olden days you might have a mirror on a stick to peer round the corner with; in the not too distant future that's been upgraded to full 360-degree vision.  The Dragon Egg, shown above, is a 2 pound lump of polymer-encased camera and transmitter, which is thrown through a window to give an instant view of what's going on inside a suspect building.  It can transmit images from each of the four cameras to a handheld display up to 1,000 feet away.

If there aren't any windows handy, then how about a radar array capable of giving a view of what's going on inside a room by holding it up against the wall outside (shown above).  If, however, they're on the move, then a grill-mounted cannon up at the front of your cruiser can tag a getaway vehicle with a GPS-enabled projectile.  This has the added bonus of cutting down on the number of dangerous high-speed chases the police – and unwary public – are involved in.

This is just a few of the cool gadgets coming soon; make sure you check out the Popular Science article for the rest (plus some video of them in action!)

Cop Tech 2010 [Popular Science]