The money spent by the public institutions in their operations is the public money. We must all be very concerned, therefore, in the procurement policies and transactions that the public law enforcement, health, education, municipal etc departments enter into. They are spending the money collected as a result of taxing the members of the society. A little part of the money spent by the police department on purchasing and installing the roof mount light bar and sirens are your money and mine. Similarly, if you are the person in charge of making the procurement decisions on behalf of the public institutions, it is your fiduciary responsibility to be very careful and trustworthy when you make decisions about spending the public money. When the city police department of your district sends a requisition to purchase vehicle lights, durability is one the fundamental points needed to be check marked.
The purchase of less durable but cheaper products ends up costing us more than the little expensive alternatives. The money we might think that we save in the cost of the product itself ends up leaving the pocket in the form of repairs and replacement. As prudent buyers, we must check the build quality of the products before using them to fight crime, especially since it is the public money out of which the payments are to be made. In addition to the long term economic benefits, good quality lights also provide the confidence to the law enforcement personnel that the hardware would not break when they need it the most. It is generally said about guns that one gets to use a gun for self defense maybe once in his lifetime and if the gun does not work that one time, then it is useless to carry it around all his life. The same is true for good police sirens and roof mounted lights: Imagine that you are a police official in pursuit of bank robbers and you direly need the people to move towards the edge of the road and right this very movement, one of the hardware components of the police vehicle melts down. There is nothing more horrendous than the robbers getting away from the punishment they should rightly be facing, just because the person in charge of procurement for the police department was negligent in the performance of the duty entrusted to him.
When it comes to public spending, quality should be the foremost criterion for the choice of the products. One cannot begin to imagine the consequences of, for example, using low grade transmission system for the space ships, how then can we even imagine that the police department can make do with any less than the best of the products? Lives depend upon it.