Depending on size(ie. New York’s ghastly experiment in building an entire national security state, in minature, probably has a lot of in house expertise, Podunk County Sheriff’s Office and Bait Shack, less so); but I’d actually suspect reasonably high levels of IT access by US police forces, whether shared with the municipality, in-house, or contract:
Computerized dispatch and information fusion systems don’t exactly maintain themselves (nor do those laptops you see in all the squad cars), evidence storage and acquisition, and interaction with the legal system aren’t getting any more papery as time goes on, basically all institutions over a certain size are genetically disposed to suffer a mailserver and payroll system, etc.
Obviously if they wish to sit on or bury your tedious little ‘input’, they will come up with something; but basic amounts of IT competence (and/or embittered cynics who know the workarounds for lack of it) is something so increasingly inescapable in the operation of operations larger than your stereotypical lemonade stand that it probably wouldn’t make a particularly good excuse.
It also wouldn’t help that police departments are usually appendages of some other state entity that probably also has IT types (even a relatively small town probably can’t escape them, and you don’t get much larger before a GIS person and other substantially more specialized, now IT-ified, functions come online.) and can be bombarded with angry messages if the police email is mysteriously broken all the time because reasons.
It sounds like the guys in Delhi had gotten lazy, and used to ‘losing’ paper records, rather than developing a Duly Triple-Officialized-And-Legally-Approved mechanism for accepting, processing, and ignoring incoming complaints.
