The ostensible purpose of the criminal justice system is to stop guys from stealing scrap metal obtained by vandalizing public structures in order to buy drugs. Perhaps by arresting them and locking them in a building with armed guards so they can't vandalize and steal things and also can't get drugs anyway.
Insofar as the actual criminal justice system is doing a bad job with this, I want it to do a better job - which may entail "use more public security cameras to detect copper thieves" - and not just accept that pieces of infrastructure in public places might get vandalized and stolen by drug addicts.
It'd be nice to live in a world where the criminal justice system used technologies like these to help prevent theft and vandalism.
And to a certain extent, in our reality, they do.
The problem comes from the fact that these technologies also enable surveillance at a massive scale, and that we have a long history (not only as a country, but as a species) of people abusing these technologies for human rights violations.
When you have the likes of Donald Trump in charge of the country's law enforcement, and he's routinely working with the likes of Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel, all without consequences for the human rights abuses, well, you just can't have things like this. When children use a toy to misbehave, you take the toy away, and that's essentially what's happening here.
Now, if we were to have an actual national dialogue about these abuses and the responsible parties started suffering consequences for their actions, I'd be more open to the use of these tools. But we haven't and likely won't, so...
Insofar as the actual criminal justice system is doing a bad job with this, I want it to do a better job - which may entail "use more public security cameras to detect copper thieves" - and not just accept that pieces of infrastructure in public places might get vandalized and stolen by drug addicts.