Yes. As a grad student in ML, on a few occasions I worked with sponsors under the US military trying to help them use some code from projects I'd open sourced, and it was always a struggle.

Frankly, the suggestion that government agencies -- let alone local police departments -- have sophistication in AI/ML years ahead of publicly known work from academia, industry, or even side projects on reddit, will verge on comical to anyone who's actually worked with these folks.