Excellent point: typewriters do not BSOD, are entirely impervious to malware, and demand only ribbon replacement plus occasional oiling (vs. the Wintel upgrade racket.)
But the costs of scanning, indexing and tracking the paper documents is almost certainly greater than that of producing the same documents on computer. I'm guessing your comment is tongue-in-cheek, but anyhoo...
Police cars in many major US cities have laptops in them, along with a private wireless network, allowing them to look up vehicle licenses, outstanding arrest warrants and so forth. While I'm sure this system does not work perfectly and incurs an IT overhead in addition to the installation cost, I imagine the police officers would prefer to keep using them.
If computers are good enough for police officers to use on the road, they are definitely good enough to be used inside the station. When you get down to it, the requirements are not so very different from a specialized CRM system.
Also: Public records show that the city signed a $432,900 contract for typewriter maintenance with Afax Business Machines in 2008
For >$400k/year I think you could put together a very good IT maintenance team.
Thats pretty cheap when you consider that there are easily 30 different large precints in variously aged buildings the predate being wired for ethernet and are old enough that they are likely opaque to wifi. As a budget item in a city that easily has a larger budget and population than some states, .5 million dollars for a given department to get pervasive support for any single nontrivial service is pretty reasonable
Excellent point: typewriters do not BSOD, are entirely impervious to malware, and demand only ribbon replacement plus occasional oiling (vs. the Wintel upgrade racket.)