This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 13th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Using special software, many police agencies are now able to assign you a threat score to help them decide how to handle

their next interaction with you.

Jim Harper, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says as bad as that sounds, it's important

to separate the technological capability from how that capability

will be used.

Police are now able to generate a threat score for suspects. What does that mean?

Well, according to news reports, and it's not terribly surprising given the vector of technology

and data, law enforcement, are using software to try to amass information about suspects

people involved in ongoing situations in real time so that law enforcement officers heading to a scene can be better informed

about who they're going to encounter when they get there.

Police in the past have had problems with wrong door raids, with, you know, having the wrong people in

custody for long periods of time. So my concern with something like that is how armed the teeth are police going to be when

dealing with somebody that turns out to be no threat at all.

Well, let's start at the beginning in an earlier bucolic time like Mayberry.

Police had a lot of success on the Andy Griffith show and in Real America knowing who people were.

One of the important dimensions of law enforcement was knowing who you're

interacting with. Is it the town drunk? He presents this much of a concern. Is it so and so the shopkeeper?

No concern at all. A new person in town? Not sure. We're going to have to learn about that.

And this process is trying to not sure we're going to have to learn about that.

And this process is trying to replicate that on a mass scale

...