CCJ5078- Discussion #4 classmates response
Technology is a vital part to modern day policing. I have just gotten back from a Crime Analyst Conference where there were endless booths of different companies selling variations of technology stating that they will help prevent and solve crime. I have yet to have seen a department that doesn’t use some sort of mapping software for their crime intelligence or Compstat meetings. Every year, there seems to be further advances in policing technology that states that it will be the next best thing to solving crime. From these point-of-views, it seems that we are upon another technological revolution in policing. According to Byrne and Marx (2011), the first technological revolution for policing came with the telephone, two-way radio, and the vehicle. We are in the beginning stages of a second technological revolution that involves mobile data centers (MDCs), online records management systems, computer-aided dispatch (CAD), automatic fingerprinting, license plate readers, and facial recognition. While all these technologies appear to be great and advertise themselves to make the life of law enforcement more efficient, do they? One of the most important issues when it comes to policing technology is that there is no one who is empirically assessing if it is even successful in preventing or solving crime. There is limited evidence on the success of the more popular technological tools in research. Police departments are allowing the novelty of new technology sway their adoption of crime prevention techniques instead of turning to empirical research (Byrne & Marx, 2011). Technology does allow officers to become more efficient and predictable in their actions. The spread of McDonalization has reached into the criminal justice sector with the implementing of new technology (Bohm, 2007). While being more efficient isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it requires trust in the technology and if that technology hasn’t been tested then how does anyone know it will truly work? For instance, in my department, with the implementation of license plate readers (LPR), officers have reduced the amount of vehicle plates they run to check to see if the car is stolen. The assumption is that the LPR will catch the plate of the stolen vehicle and send an alert to the officers. While this may appear to be more efficient way of catching stolen vehicles, there is limited research in how effective that method is at obtaining stolen vehicles and if the LPR is consistent with its plate reads.
