Complete overkill. 90% of the worlds Police forces use smaller and more agile models. Ridiculous waste of money. You could run a few MD500 / Notar equivalents to carry as many guys for a fraction of the cost. Much of their work is camera work and guiding ground forces.. do you really need a 139 for that? They are too big to land in many of the locations they need to and as noted above, they will load them up to the roof with crap and dramatically reduce the payload. Yes they do winch missions, but do they need 3 units to support this capability?
The EC135 suffered that fate early on and with so much crap on board, it has about a 1.5 hour total mission range. A $6m waste of tax payers money.
As for the KingAir. They used to run Aerostars years ago but got rid of them in favour of helicopters. They used to use them for interstate trips to transport prisoners also. History repeating itself? It will be used for training apparently amongst other things like searches... presumably training the camera operators etc, do you really need a 350 for that? Probably not. A Vulcanair might have been an economical option instead.
How about spending some of this cash on programs to assist Police with further training for dealing with mental health cases for example? If they put more effort in here, they wouldn’t need to cram 8 SOG officers with sub-machine guns into a 139 to head to the next siege and then do nothing when they arrive.