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In Baltimore Police headquarters I ask them what they think of the TV show The Wire. Opinions are mixed. Miami got a better deal with Miami Vice. It's a portrait of the 90s, not now. It has given the place a reputation for crime when it is no worse than most big American cities.

I've no wire tap, but I am recording and trying a bit of detective work. Everybody seems agreed that the president's State of the Union speech tonight will be about jobs. But there is a common complaint in the US that despite the billions spend on creating new jobs unemployment has hardly been dented.

It can be difficult to track down where the money has gone. More than $100m worth of grants has gone to Johns Hopkins University Hospital, the city's biggest employer. In Baltimore as elsewhere a lot is spend on updating houses so they use less heating: "weatherisation" is the ugly word for it.

But $3.5m is being spend on a project to give the police 2,000 smart phones, the "Pocket Cop". Officer Chris Peters shows me his device. It's pretty much a large Blackberry, with special security and a direct link to the police computer. He's a big fan , showing me how "if I go to my home page, it'll allow me to run names, tags, property. Boats, guns - all that good stuff. Warrant checks. Anything reported stolen."

He shows me how he can type in the number of his driving licence and pretty soon his picture appears on the screen.

"I wish I had this when I had this when I came off the street in 2000. I did a drugs lock up and he gave me his brother's identification. So his brother ends up in court. But with this I would have had the right information on the night."

Gayle Guilford, the director of Management Information Systems for the Baltimore Police Department, is an enthusiast too.

"Part of the Police commissioner's vision is to get the officers out of the cars, into the community. Today, an officer would run your tag on a lap top sitting in the vehicle, now we are getting them out on the street, but with more safety, knowing who they're dealing with. All of our patrol officers are going to have the same technology in their hands as the crooks have."

It doesn't stop there. She says that the device has GPS which means not only that they know in headquarters where an officer is at any given moment, they can review the data after an operation or incident to see whether officers were in the right place.

Pocket Cop is not a gimmick. Most of us who use a smart phone quickly find them indispensable. But I do wonder what on earth this had to do with a stimulus package that is about creating jobs. Gayle Guilford says: "Hopefully if the city is safer and the police can do a better job and people feel safer and more visit the city."

That seems pretty tenuous but Scott Peterson from the mayor's office chips in: "If this works here in Baltimore this is a technology that is made in America that can go around the country and even around the world. As the president has always said the idea is innovation, it is about where are we going to go next with new industries. I think Pocket Cop is one of those advances that could create a new home-grown industry." He ruefully reflects that if it makes the city of The Wire safer, the companies involved have a ready made global advertising strategy.
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It seems to me there is a real dilemma. Some people I meet in my rest of my time in Baltimore were asking where were the jobs now, while others thought it would take time to see the results of spending. There clearly is some frustrating that all that money hasn't produced a whole heap of new jobs.

But is Pocket Cop, and other projects like it, examples of stimulus money spent on a pet schemes only vaguely connected to jobs, or a really worthwhile investment in the future?

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