Guess I have to dip my oar in here, give the view from the other side.
The police R44 I presently fly is very well suited for its task - OBSERVATION. Patrol, surveillance, call response. It is not meant to do anything else, and we don't. But as I'm sure TC will confirm, 90% or so of police aviation work falls in the above category. So we have a helicopter with the capability to do 90% of the tasks, at 20% of the price, of a modern UK police helo. Good deal, methinks.
Now for the historical argument: in the US, where police aviation got started rather earlier than in Europe, the only helicopters available in the beginning were single-engine - mostly Bell 47s. They served very well for years, and the net result was not an aluminum rain on US cities - not even at night. As police forces identified the need for additional capabilities, they traded up to larger, more capable airframes best suited to their identified needs, a process that is continuously ongoing.
Now, in the UK, before police aviation got started properly, the CAA in its wisdom
had decreed that single-engine helicopters were Unsafe, multi-engine helicopters were Safe, so the only way a police department was going to fly a helicopter over a city, at night, was if it was multi-engined. Any police officer, heck, any astute reader of newspapers can tell you that most criminal activity takes place in cities, during the hours of darkness, so a police helicopter to be useful at all, will have to be able to operate over cities at night. Therefore, ASUs had to start with multis, mostly AS355Fs.
Now you have a very capable, not to mention expensive, 6-seat machine, and all you're going to do is have two people look out the window? Of course, intelligent minds at the ASUs began investigating and utilizing the untapped capabilities of these machines. It's a lot cheaper to buy a hoist and train the appropriate personnel than it is to buy a hoist-capable helicopter, buy a hoist and train the appropriate personnel. Six seats is enough to transport the Bomb Squad and their toys, so let's do that, etc. Before you know it the ASU has all sorts of duties that just cannot be performed by a smaller single, regardless of what the regulations say.
We don't do any of that. The local police department has been running without for decades, and will continue to run without. What we do is provide a quick-reaction capability equivalent to 5 or more squad cars, and it's had an appreciable effect on crime rates. Of course we get queries all the time; the last one was about the local SWAT team rapelling from the helicopter. The way we handled that was to ask some questions and get them to admit it was just a macho show-off stunt, and then point out the limitations of the machine. If and when the budget and needs of the department coincide to put me in an SPIFR twin, I'll be very happy to fly it; but at the moment, an R44 is all we can afford, and it's excellent value for money.
As to the rest of Europe: with the JAA you now have a bureaucracy made up of, what, 15 bureaucracies? Machiavelli must be groaning in his grave, "Why didn't I think of that?" Have any of you ever seen a bureaucracy willingly give up a regulation or admit "Well maybe we DID go a little bit overboard here?" For your eludication, do a search on this forum for both the words "Kenyon" and "CAA" and carefully read the result. The final JARs will be a combination of the most restrictive rules anywhere in Europe on any given operation. So forget about single-engine police helicopters.
As to equipment: we have a combined FLIR/video camera in a gyro-stabilized nose mount; an SX-5 searchlight, slavable to the camera; a PA/siren system; and police and marine radios. No microwave downlink 'cause we don't have a ground station.
Oh, and on the reliability side: I'll bet an R44's engine against a Twinstar's electrical system any day - especially in the rain.
