COMMUNICATION CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Communication Criminal Justice

Communication Criminal Justice

The external network of communications has been radically expanded and made more sensitive in the form of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and changes in the allocation of calls to the police in the form of 311 calls (for nonemergencies) and 911 calls. Technological advances in this realm have allowed, if not for greater direct contact with the public, for greater sharing of information with the public (James, 2009). For example, the Hartford police department has provided eighteen computers for community groups to access crime reports and other data (Abt Associates 2000). Distribution of commonplace information that had previously been done through newsletters, handouts, ads, or meetings can now be distributed via Web sites and citizen-accessible terminals (as in Hartford and Chicago). San Diego has the capacity to distribute warnings (of torna-does or other disasters) to local areas via e-communication, faxes and telephone, and to alert officers via e-mail to their laptops (Abt Associates 2000: 54).

Criminal justice Web sites, now prominent among some 200 million Web sites registered with search engines, were shown at centuries end to be maintained by 5 to 6 per cent of criminal justice agencies (Dykehouse and Sigler 2000). Criminal justice use the Internet and intranets for a wide variety of functions. One use of the Internet involves the posting of crime information for citizens. Criminal justice are able to use their departments' Web sites to portray maps, diagrams, statistics, and pictures. The FBI in June 1997 placed some 16,000 pages of case files on the Internet and plans to post a total of 1.3 million pages. This is said to serve public requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. Other uses of the Internet include posting the names and offenses of sex offenders in several states, ...