POLICE TECHNOLOGY

Police Technology

Police Technology

Introduction

Policing, like other occupations, claims a mandate. Especially since the advent of “professional policing,” the school of thought and practice that combined applied science, radio communication, and rapid transportation to aid in crime control, the police have encouraged public dependence on them by soliciting demand for their services and by selectively adopting new technologies. Police administrators have welcomed each new innovation in information technology (IT), the means used to process matter viewed as significant to the organization, since the introduction of the telegraph and alarm systems in the late nineteenth century. The impact of early advances in IT (i.e., patrol cars, two-way radios, and the telephone) was profound, transforming the way police carried out their work, interacted with the public, and supervised officers.

The impact of more recent technological advances, however, is not as clear-cut. For the most part, recent advances in IT have outstripped the ability of police departments to keep up with them; the capacities of available information technology are considerable but are underused (Chan, 2001). Moreover, police have embedded new technologies into their traditional structure rather than changing their practices. As a result, current use of IT by police is characterized by experimentation and curiosity, coupled with unsystematic integration, planning and evaluation (Abt Associates 2000: 150-165).

Technology and technological advancements are generally thought to present only positive developments for organizations, and rarely is serious attention given to the potential negative consequences. Information can help police organizations to plan both strategically and tactically, but there are many instances that document well the failure of information systems to “facilitate increased 'service,' lighten work loads …, [or] ultimately reduce crime” Manning (1992: 356). Due to problems with poor planning, improper technical specifications, or organizational resistance, information and information systems sometimes fail to live up to their potential. For example, in 2001, the FBI noted that the City of Detroit has been systematically overreporting crime data by as much as 10 percent for nearly seventeen years, and that therefore the data would be excluded from the 2000 Uniform Crime Report. The problem, according to the FBI and Detroit Police Department, was caused by a technical error in the system that compiled the data. There are, however, a host of reasons that technology often fails to achieve its intended goals.

Discussion

The fundamental concern of the police typically concerns processing demand for service, not storage, retrieval, analysis, or even record management per se. Policing runs in a crisis mode, and it is overwhelmed with the present, the impending, or the possible crisis. Each information technology at first competes for space, time, and legitimacy with other known means, and it is judged in policing by somewhat changing pragmatic, often nontechnical, values: its speed, its durability and weight, and its contribution to the officers' notion of their role and routines.

New equipment is generally introduced without experimentation, clear expectations or standards, and proper repair and maintenance contracts. In other words, innovations are taken up on an ad hoc, here and now, ...