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Even if they can record all phone calls then what? What are they doing with all that info on everybody? they're certainly not using it for anything even if they know how to utilize the information they might have.

"The chase continues north in the city! Police helicopters are converging on Avenue 87 and Elm Grove Park!"
Granger nodded. "They're faking. You threw them off at the river. They can't admit it.
They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night.
So they're sniffing for a scape-goat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll catch Montag in the next five minutes!
"But how--"
"Watch."
The camera, hovering in the belly of a helicopter, now swung down at an empty street.
"See that?" whispered Granger. "It'll be you; right up at the end of that street is our victim. See how our camera is coming in? Building the scene. Suspense. Long shot.
Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It saves face. Oh, God, look there!"
The men at the fire bent forward.
On the screen, a man turned a corner. The Mechanical Hound rushed forward into the viewer, suddenly. The helicopter light shot down a dozen brilliant pillars that built a cage all about the man.
A voice cried, "There's Montag! The search is done!"
The innocent man stood bewildered, a cigarette burning in his hand. He stared at the Hound, not knowing what it was. He probably never knew. He glanced up at the sky and the wailing sirens. The cameras rushed down. The Hound leapt up into the air with a rhythm and a sense of timing that was incredibly beautiful. Its needle shot out.
It was suspended for a moment in their gaze, as if to give the vast audience time to appreciate everything, the raw look of the victim's face, the empty street, the steel animal a bullet nosing the target.
"Montag, don't move!" said a voice from the sky.
The camera fell upon the victim, even as did the Hound. Both reached him simultaneously. The victim was seized by Hound and camera in a great spidering, clenching grip. He screamed. He screamed. He screamed!
Blackout.
Silence.
Darkness.

Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It saves face. Oh, God, look there!"

Great. So which is it?
1. As is expounded daily upon here and many other forums and sites, the police are inept and can never do a good job at anything.
or
2. When it suits the alarmists and conspiracists all of the sudden all the police in the USA turn into some sort of super-turbo-hyper perfect force where they do everything so magnificently that they work as a hive-mind and are to be feared in totality.

So it's either/or one of those because it can't be both and then have the same outcome of the conspiracy theories.

Then, of course, is the fact that there is the massive separation of cooperation between those (the boogiemen-in-black) who have all the petabytes of information on everyone, and the police forces of the USA whom have no perfect computer networks that work together agency-to-ageny nor state-to-state with some barely having interconnect-ability. Then also there's the fact that many police agencies are woefully behind modern standards for computing and information storage themselves.

Then, of course, there's the fact that things like Coast-to-Coast AM and a whole myriad of forums and websites exist full of alarmist and conspiracy theories of which none are forced off the air by the boogiemen-in-black and the people on the radio shows and tv shows and web forums don't mysteriously disappear. They continue to exist and broadcast.

The logic and practicality of such a vast conspiracy & the reality of what all the pieces have to do to become a whole, tells me that they're no closer to what the alarmists and conspiracists have been howling about than they were 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
The magnitude of what it would take to make all the pieces into a cohesive whole is infinitely impossible in the world we live in.