The Machine Will Not Blink First
Two patrol cycles with a fully-armed enforcement unit taught me the quiet part out loud: a target lock is a moral decision someone wrote in a config file.
Ispent two weeks last winter riding the night shift with a pre-production enforcement unit they had not yet given a name to. It moved like furniture until it didn't. The HUD overlay it streamed to my tablet was all green phosphor and crosshairs, calm to the point of boredom, right up until a parked sedan tripped a heuristic and the whole frame went red.
A Reticle Is Not An Opinion
The vendor brief called it "prime directive compliance." In practice it was a priority queue: protect, serve, uphold, and a classified fourth line nobody on the floor would read aloud. When the alert reticle snapped onto that sedan, the unit waited 1.8 seconds for a human acknowledgement that never came. It stood down on its own. That pause was the most expensive line of code in the building, and the cheapest one to delete.
The config that decides which half of a threat protocol executes is the actual product.