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The Evolution and Development of Police Technology (July 1998)
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The Evolution and Development of
Police
Technology
A Technical Report prepared
for The National Committee on
Criminal Justice Technology National Institute
of Justice
By
SEASKATE, INC.
555 13th Street, NW
3rd Floor, West Tower
Washington, DC 20004
July 1, 1998
This project was supported
under Grant 95-IJ-CX-K001(S-3) from the National Institute of Justice, Office of
Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document
are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position
of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
----Part One: The
History and the Emerging Federal Role
----The Political Era
----The Professional Model Era
----Technology and the
Nationalization of Crime
----Crime Commission Findings
----The Advent and Lessons of 911
----The Computerization of
American Policing
----Computers and Community Policing
----The Early
Efforts of the National Institute of Justice
--Part Two: The
NIJ's Role and Obstacles to Progress
----Obstacles to Progress
----Liability Concerns
----Operating Assumptions
----The NIJ's Approach
--Part Three: The Future
of Police Technology
----Funding for Police Technology
----Fulfillment of Current Efforts
----Criminal Use of High Technology
--Part Four: Federal Efforts
----Coordinating Federal Efforts
----Funding an Adequate
Technology Budget
National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Centers Regional Offices
Police Technology Timeline
Return
to Table of Contents
Executive Summary
This report provides a
detailed look at police technology. It is meant to help readers as they consider
the evolution and future development of
police
technology and the role of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in
fostering that development. It was prepared with a diverse audience in mind, all
of whom have a stake in ensuring that the police are equipped to do their job
safely and efficiently:
-
police officers on the
street and policymakers responsible for their efforts;
-
citizens concerned about
crime;
-
the news media, and
opinion leaders interested in making the police more effective;
-
the private sector, the
manufacturing and marketing source of current and new technologies.
The job is exacting. The
police are asked to control crime, maintain order, and provide an intricate
array of services, from responding to emergency 911 calls to regulating the flow
of traffic. On occasion, they must perform remarkable feats of criminal
investigation, quell rowdy crowds and violent offenders, and put their lives on
the line. Much of the time, police resources are limited. It is estimated that
the workload crime imposes on the police has increased fivefold since 1960.
Their resources have not kept pace with their workload.
The Police
and Technology
To do their job, police
frequently have looked to technology for enhancing their effectiveness. The
advent of fingerprinting in the 1900s and of crime laboratories in the 1920s
greatly augmented the police capacity to solve crimes. The introduction of the
two-way radio and the widespread use of the automobile in the 1930s multiplied
police productivity in responding to incidents.
But, as noted in this
report, progress in technology for the police has often been slow and uneven. A
quotation from the President's Crime Commission in 1967 illustrates how the
police at times have lagged
behind other sectors in
reaping the benefits of technology:
--The police, with crime
laboratories and radio networks, made early use of technology, but most police
departments could have been equipped 30 or 40 years ago as well as they are
today.
The Crime Commission was
established in the 1960s in response to rapidly rising crime rates and urban
disorders. The Commission advocated federal government funding for state and
local
criminal justice agencies to support their efforts. It called for
what soon became the 911 system for fielding emergency calls and recommended
that agencies acquire computers to automate their functions. But even with the
start-up help of hundreds of millions of dollars in early federal assistance,
computerization came slowly. Only in recent years have many agencies found the
use of information technologies significantly helpful. Examples include
fingerprinting databases, computerized crime mapping, and records management
systems doing everything from inventorying property and cataloging evidence to
calculating solvability factors.
Police
Technology and the National Institute of Justice
Many police technologies are
drawn and adapted from the commercial marketplace. Cars, radios, computers, and
firearms are examples. But this report notes that the police have vital needs
for special technologies for
which there is no easily
available source. Examples are devices to use less-than-lethal force in
controlling unruly persons, to stop fleeing vehicles, and to detect concealed
weapons and contraband in nonintrusive
ways.
Private sector technology
developers and manufacturers are reluctant to meet many special technology needs
of the police. The fragmentation of the American police market, which numbers
more than 17,000 agencies, makes selling to the police a time-consuming and
expensive proposition. Liability issues are also a concern: Will the
manufacturer be protected if its product is used in a way that injures officers
or citizens?
The job of fulfilling
special technology needs for state and local law enforcement belongs to the
National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the
criminal
justice research arm of the U. S. Department of Justice. NIJ's Office
of Science and Technology fosters technology research and development when it
otherwise will not occur.
To determine technology
requirements, the Office of Science and Technology regularly surveys the police
through its Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Advisory Council (LECTAC),
which is comprised of top law enforcement officials from throughout the country.
It also develops voluntary product standards, compliance and testing processes,
and it disseminates a wide range of information on
police
technology. The vehicle for much of this activity is the NIJ-sponsored
National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center (NLECTC), a network
of national, regional, and special purpose offices.
For the first 20 years after
the federal government began supporting local
criminal justice agencies, NIJ's role in technology was limited. Its
most notable accomplishments were the development of soft body armor for the
police and establishment and dissemination of performance standards for police
equipment. Beginning in the 1990s, however, the Administration and Congress
recognized increased needs for technology and began funding NIJ to meet them. A
current example is a five-year project to improve the quality and availability
of DNA technology to local and state law enforcement. A second example is
funding to detect concealed weapons and contraband. Often in cooperation with
other federal agencies
such as the Departments of
Defense and Energy, NIJ sponsors scores of efforts to develop new technologies.
Observations
for Policymakers
The purpose of this report
is to inform. However, in preparing it, observations were formed that may be
useful to federal policymakers. One set of observations suggests ways to
coordinate federal technology
development efforts for
avoiding fragmentation and duplication of effort and ensuring certain systems
are compatible. On the basis of its mission and partnerships with other federal
agencies, NIJ seems well suited to play a coordinating role in these efforts.
A second observation is that
the coordination of technology development, as well as the emphasis on its
importance, would be better served by the appointment of a science and
technology adviser to the Attorney General and a senior law enforcement official
to the Technology Policy Board of the White House Office of Science and
Technology. Here, again, it would appear that NIJ could provide excellent
support in this endeavor.
Other observations address
ways of encouraging industry to manufacture and market technologies developed
under NIJ's aegis; of strengthening compliance with product standards; and of
encouraging the federal government to help police agencies acquire new
technologies through such means as buying consortiums, low-interest loans, and
distribution of surplus equipment. A final observation addresses the issue of
inadequate funding to support technology development for state and local police
and of the necessity to provide a stable budget as a matter of highest national
priority.
Through this report and
these observations, we hope to accelerate the process by which the police
finally become full beneficiaries of our eras continuing technological
revolution, thereby enhancing their vital work in the nation's fight against
crime. Our citizens deserve nothing less.
Vice Admiral E. A.
Burkhalter, Jr., USN (Ret.)
Chairman, National Committee
on
Criminal Justice Technology
President, Seaskate, Inc.,
Washington, D. C.
Return
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The Evolution and Development of
Police Technology
Introduction
"Those were desperate times
for policemen in a hostile country with unpaved streets and uneven sidewalks,
sometimes miles from the police station, with little prospects of assistance in
case of need.... It took nerve to be a policeman in those days." So reported
Chief Francis O'Neill of the Chicago Police Department in 1903. Then came
technological progress with the "invention of the patrol wagon and signal
service (which have) effected a revolution in police methods (O'Neill, 1976)."
In 1909, Chief J.H. Haager of Louisville, Kentucky, was "proud to say that the
police department of Louisville is in such a line of progress that we feel
ourselves beyond the utility of the horse, and can now boast of three
power-driven vehicles (Haager, 1976)."
This report is about
American policing in the line of technological progress. It goes from a time in
the last century when, in Chief O'Neill's words, "the introduction of
electricity as a means of communication
between stations was the
first notable advance in the improvement of police methods" to today's high-tech
frontiers.
The report is divided into
four sections, and includes a time line that charts the course of police
technology.
Part One reviews the history
of police technology, the formation and growth of federal assistance for its
development, and the early accomplishments of the National Institute of Justice.
Part Two examines in
considerable detail current and prospective police technologies as they are used
in performing key functions: safeguarding life, protecting citizens, solving
crimes, communicating with citizens and police colleagues, traffic enforcement,
and managing the police agency, particularly in terms of the growing use of
information technologies.
Part Three deals with policy
issues and practical matters and the National Institute of Justice's role in
addressing them, and briefly looks to the future of
police
technology.
Part Four offers
observations which federal policymakers may wish to consider in seeking to
foster development and adoption of new technologies for the police.
A series of appendices is
provided to document developments in
police technology.
Return
to Table of Contents
Part One: History and
the Emerging Federal Role
The
Political Era
Scholars divide the history
of U. S. policing into three eras. The first, from 1840 to about 1920, is called
the Political Era, so named because of the cozy, mutually beneficial ties police
and politicians had in many urban areas. During this era, the police came to be
armed with two forms of technology -- the gun and the nightstick -- that, with
some modernizing, they continue to use today when called upon to use force.
Whatever technological progress the police have made since the second half of
the 19th century, they still rely to a considerable extent on basic tools
available 100 years ago to protect innocent life and themselves.
Technological advances
included the use in the late 1870s of the telegraph and telephone, installation
of police callboxes, development and adoption in the 1880s of the Bertillon
system of criminal identification, and the development and use at the turn of
the century of fingerprinting systems to assist in criminal investigations.
The Professional Model Era
Historians call the period
from 1920 to 1970 the Professional Model Era. Reformers sought to rid government
of undesirable political influences and create what they deemed professional
police departments. Technology, according to one scholar of the era," helped
emphasize discipline, equal enforcement of the law, and centralized decision
making," hallmarks of the Professional Model of policing.
August Vollmer, considered
the foremost champion of the Professional Model, was also a champion of police
technology. Vollmer pioneered the use of the polygraph and fingerprint and
handwriting classification systems. The crime laboratory he started in the
Berkeley, California, Police Department was the model and training ground for
the nation. In 1932, the FBI inaugurated its own laboratory which eventually
became recognized as the most comprehensive and technologically advanced
forensic laboratory in the world. The 1930s saw the widespread police adoption
of the automobile and the introduction of two-way radios.
Technology and the
Nationalization of Crime
There were other
technological innovations reaching into the next two decades. For example, radar
was introduced to traffic law enforcement in the late 1940s. In the 1960s--120
years after the inception of the modern era of policing--the federal government
for the first time launched a concerted effort to foster the development and use
of new technologies for the police.
That effort had its roots in
the 1964 presidential campaign when Republican candidate Barry Goldwater made
crime a national political issue for the first time. Goldwater lost the election
to incumbent Lyndon
B. Johnson, but Johnson took
two steps to assuage the nation's concerns about street disorders and crime
rates, which had doubled between 1940 and 1965. First, he appointed the
President's Commission on Law
Enforcement and
Administration of Justice to examine the problem. In 1967, the Crime Commission
produced a 308-page report that offered more than 200 recommendations, 11
dealing with police technology.
Johnson's other step was to
begin the flow, a trickle at first, of what eventually became billions of
dollars in direct and indirect assistance to local and state law enforcement.
Never before had the federal government
taken on the job of
providing massive assistance to state and local
criminal
justice agencies. The federal government became committed to
addressing the problem of crime in America's streets and neighborhoods. Hundreds
of millions of dollars went to fostering police use of existing and new
technologies.
Crime Commission Findings
The President's Crime
Commission found that the nation's
criminal
justice system suffered from a significant science and technology
gap. The commission reported:
--The scientific and
technological revolution that has so radically changed most of American society
during the past few decades has had surprisingly little impact on the
criminal
justice system.
Of the police specifically,
the commission observed:
--The police, with crime
laboratories and radio networks, made early use of technology, but most police
departments could have been equipped 30 or 40 years ago as well as they are
today.
and:
--Of all
criminal
justice agencies, the police traditionally have had the closest ties
to science and technology, but they have called on scientific resources
primarily to help in the solution of specific serious crimes, rather than for
assistance in solving general problems of policing.
Overall, the commission's
science and technology task force reported that many technological devices
existed, either in prototype or on the market to help
criminal
justice agencies. Others deserved basic development and warranted
further exploration. "But for many reasons, even available devices have only
slowly been incorporated into
criminal justice operations," the task force
said in a statement that still has relevance today. "Procurement funds have been
scarce, industry has only limited incentive to conduct basic development for an
uncertain and fragmented market, and
criminal justice agencies have very few technically trained people on
their staffs."
Perhaps the most
far-reaching recommendations dealt with computerization and what came to be
known as 911.
The Advent and Lessons of 911
The commission called for
establishment of a single telephone number, eventually available nationwide,
that Americans could use to call the police. At first, AT&T personnel balked.
They cited several reasons
including problems involving
boundaries of dialing areas and police jurisdictions, according to Dr. Alfred
Blumstein, who headed the commission's science and technology task force. But
then there was a change of heart, Blumstein said. AT&T decided to launch 911 as
the single police and fire emergency telephone number, thus getting rid of
dialing zero, the costly and personnel-intensive procedure that was then in use
for summoning emergency help. "They were peddling a new product which was 911
and it was going to be automated and they were clearly ahead," Blumstein said.
AT&T announced creation of
911 in January 1968. Within a few years, 911 systems were established in many
urban areas. Within ten years, police chiefs of large departments were beginning
to complain that ever-increasing 911-generated calls for service were starting
to distort and even overwhelm the balanced deployment of police resources. In a
study of U.S. policing in the mid-1980s, two scholars wrote, "In many cities the
911 system with its promise of emergency response has become a tyrannical
burden." Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s, police departments employing 95 percent
of the nation's police officers had 911 systems.
The 911 experience
incorporates two recurring themes in the history of police technology. The first
is that when private industry can forecast an assured profit, it quickly
provides the police with a technology created or adapted to their needs. The
dilemma is that there are relatively few instances where industry can anticipate
a fairly immediate and steady profit stream by providing a new technology to the
police.
The second theme is, as in
other areas of life, new technologies for the police can bring new problems. The
rules of unintended consequences apply. The 911 system has become essential to
summon emergency police, fire, and medical services. It also created new
headaches for many administrators of large urban police departments.[1]
The Computerization of
American Policing
The President's Crime
Commission encouraged the computerization of American policing. The essential
ingredient needed to spur this effort was money. Federal funding was soon on its
way through a large, long-term subsidy program managed by the Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration (LEAA).
The Omnibus Crime Control
and Safe Streets Act of 1968 created LEAA in, as one commentator noted, "an
environment of social turbulence. Crime rates were climbing, the incidence of
drug abuse was on the rise,
riots and disorders were
becoming commonplace, and America's political leaders were targets for
assassination attempts."
In this climate, LEAA sought
to spur the computerization of policing. The big push started in the early
1970s. It is uncertain how much LEAA spent on police computerization, but police
agencies began to acquire computers. However, many departments with access to
computers in the 1970s and even into the 1980s seemed reluctant to use them for
more than routine tasks. Why were many police agencies not making more effective
use of computers? Leading police chiefs blamed the complexities of the new
technology, the cautious, conservative nature of many police officers, and
citizens' "fear of Big Brother." Lack of funds for computer training and
equipment maintenance also played a part.
A leading police computer
consultant of the day had another answer: Computer manufacturers lacked great
interest in the police market. "Despite what they may say to the contrary, they
don't really view law
enforcement as an important
money-maker and have been reluctant, for this reason, to invest in development
of new application software or specialized hardware ...," he said, adding:
"After all, there are only 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the entire
country. This is paltry when you compare it to the 100,000 hospitals, 500,000
hotels, or millions of individual businesses there are."
As we will see in Part Two,
perhaps the most recurring fact cited in deliberations about the difficulties of
interesting private manufacturers, and in developing and marketing new police
technologies, is that there are
17,000 agencies, each with
its own budget and technical specifications for many products including
computers. The police market, fragmented among so many agencies, is too
cost-inefficient and complicated to reach; the police market, with only 17,000
scattered components, is too small to pursue when there are much larger and
potentially remunerative markets to exploit.
After 13 years and the
expenditure of about $7.5 billion on all of its efforts, LEAA was formally
abolished in 1982. Robert F. Diegelman, who was acting director of a smaller,
successor agency to LEAA, summed up
the views of many when he
wrote that the "LEAA program ran afoul of unrealistic expectations, wasteful use
of funds, mounting red tape, and uncertain direction." But he observed that LEAA
had registered significant achievements such as educating and training thousands
of
criminal justice personnel, implementing new and worthwhile projects,
and developing new skills and capacities for
criminal
justice analysis, planning, and coordination.
Despite LEAA's absence,
police departments continued to invest in computers and eventually apply them to
more sophisticated tasks. In this they were helped by a useful LEAA legacy,
software developed under a
series of grants.
By the 1990s, a Bureau of
Justice Statistics survey provided conclusive evidence that the use of computers
was growing and police agencies were using them for increasingly diverse
purposes. For example, a 1996
analysis of survey data
reported:
--Two thirds of local police
departments were using computers in 1993, compared to half in 1990.
--Departments using
computers employed 95 percent of all local police officers in 1993.
The more crucial point, the
data showed, was that many police agencies were using computers not just for
routine record keeping, but also for relatively sophisticated functions such as
criminal investigations, crime
analysis, budgeting, and
manpower allocation.
One of the most important
computer-based innovations in American policing during the past 30 years was the
advent of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), administered by the FBI.
NCIC is a central
computerized index of
fugitives, stolen property, and missing persons. Beginning in the late 1960s,
this system was in many instances the first practical application of computer
technology used by American police agencies. NCIC demonstrated that the diffuse
organization of American law enforcement could be tied together in a centralized
system used by all agencies in a common effort to improve service and
functionality.
Computers were essential in
the development of Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS).
Unfortunately, AFIS has been developed in a piecemeal manner. Systems may be
regional, covering several states, or they can be statewide, or they may
encompass only a city and a few surrounding municipalities. The obvious
disadvantage to a fragmented national AFIS network is that roving criminals can
still escape detection because one state may not have access to another state's
AFIS system.
The development of 911 and
the computerization of policing are two instances demonstrating that the federal
government can affect the development and adoption of technologies benefiting
the police. The
President's Crime Commission
called for establishment of a program which quickly became the 911 system. The
same commission urged the computerization of policing, and a flood of federal
money in the 1970s
soon flowed to police
departments for that purpose. Some of the money doubtless went for police
computers not used productively or not used at all. But federal cheerleading and
money for computers -- and the federally funded development of some useful
police software -- undoubtedly helped
accelerate police
computerization.
Computers and Community Policing
The introduction of
computers into policing corresponds roughly to the beginning of the third and
current era in American policing, what one scholar calls the Community Policing
Era beginning about 1970. Lee P.
Brown, formerly the chief
police executive of New York City, Houston, and Atlanta, has suggested that
computers are essential to community policing. Brown has written:
--The use of high-technology
equipment and applications is essential to the efficient practice of community
policing. Without high technology, officers would find it difficult to provide
the level and quality of services the community deserves. Computer-aided
dispatching, computers in
patrol cars, automated fingerprinting systems,
and online offense-reporting systems are but a few examples of the pervasiveness
of technology in agencies that practice community policing.
Dennis E. Nowicki, chief of
the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police Department, is building a $10
million "knowledge-based community-oriented policing system" for his department.
The computer
system will focus "on the
needs of the problem-solving officer in the streets," he has said. "We're
designing our system not as a management information system but as an
information system to support problem
solving."
Nowicki exemplifies a class
of current police chiefs with faith in computer technology as crucial to
successful police work. "My vision is that when an officer comes through the
academy, we give him his weapon, we give him his radio, and we give him his
laptop computer."
William Bratton,
the former New York City police commissioner, has said that computers have
provided police with important technological advances. Computer mapping to
pinpoint crime was a notable element in what a growing number of criminologists
have concluded was Bratton's successful crime-fighting effort in New York City.
Dr. Alfred Blumstein, who,
as noted, was director of the Crime Commission's science and technology task
force, joined in agreement about the place of computers in the realm of police
technology. The statement of the Crime Commission was recalled for him: "The
scientific and technological revolution that has so radically changed most of
American society during the past few decades has had surprisingly little impact
on the
criminal justice system."
Was this still true? No,
said Blumstein, technology is "finally starting to take hold and the dominant
transformation has been the one in computing. So much of the
criminal
justice system can be seen as an
information-processing
system -- dealing with information about events, about individuals. We are
starting to see, still in a surprisingly limited way, the diffusion of that
(computer) technology so that even fairly small police departments today have at
least their own computers."
Blumstein added, however,
that police officers on the beat still require new technologies to assist them
directly. He cited the need for advances in such areas as less-than-lethal
technology, concealed weapons detection, and ways to stop fleeing vehicles.
The Early
Efforts of the National Institute of Justice
The Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration paid for big ticket technology items such as
computers, software, and crime laboratories, but the National Institute of
Justice (NIJ), an agency for many years under the LEAA umbrella [2], was the
designated federal source of research and development in law enforcement
technology. In its review of its first 25 years, the Institute made special note
of two accomplishments in
technology -- the
development of lightweight body armor and support for
DNA analysis
to improve evidence used in investigating crimes.
But for many of those 25
years, technology research and development seemingly took a back seat to other
NIJ activities. For example, a 1977 report of the National Research Council
labeled NIJ's technology R&D
efforts an abandoned child.
The "abandoned child"
assertion may have been an overstatement. Stepchild may have been more accurate.
The fact is that, for much of NIJ's first 20 years, efforts in technology
research and development were to a
considerable degree a
one-person effort, that person being Lester Shubin, a chemist.
Shubin played a pivotal role
in the serendipitous origins of soft body armor for police. A colleague at the
U. S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory told Shubin that DuPont had a new fabric,
Kevlar, "stronger than steel,
lighter than nylon," to
replace steel belting for tires. "I asked him if the fabric would do just as
well to stop bullets," Shubin recalls. "He didn't know, so we folded some up and
shot at it and the bullets bounced off."
The successful firing range
experiment led in 1972 to an Institute-sponsored project in which the Land
Warfare Laboratory used Kevlar in a new, lightweight, flexible, and protective
body armor. It also led to the creation of a new industry, an instance where a
federally initiated technology for law enforcement moved rapidly into the
commercial marketplace. To date, the soft body armor introduced by the Institute
is credited with saving the lives of more than 2,000 police officers, a savings
estimated in terms of survivors' benefits and other costs to total more than $2
billion.
The Institute began its
support of developing
DNA technology in 1986 as the technology's
potential value to crime solvers became increasingly evident. That support is
much expanded in the form of a current five-year, $40 million program.
Another important NIJ
contribution to policing was the establishment in 1971 of a national program of
standards for police equipment. No such program existed before, Shubin noted;
"Nobody knew, for example, how strong a pair of handcuffs should be." The
standards were voluntary. "We had no regulatory power," he said.
By 1975, the Institute's Law
Enforcement Standards Laboratory had completed performance standards for:
o Portable, mobile, and base
station transmitters; mobile receivers; and batteries for portable radios;
o Walk-through and handheld
metal weapons detectors;
o Portable x-ray devices for
bomb disarmament;
o Communication equipment
such as voice scramblers, car location systems, and radio transmitters,
receivers and repeaters;
o Active and passive night
vision devices;
o Magnetic, mechanical, and
mercury switches for burglar alarms;
o Handcuffs, riot helmets,
crash helmets, police body armor, ballistic shields, and hearing protectors
By the mid-1980s, NIJ
created two mechanisms for advancement of its work in testing equipment and
setting standards. It established the Technology Assessment Program Information
Center to pick laboratories for testing equipment, supervising the testing
process, and publishing reports of test results. It also established the
Technology Assessment Program Advisory Council, a large advisory body of senior
local, state, and federal law enforcement officials. Both the center and the
council are predecessor operations to current programs described in Part Two.
In the almost 30 years since
the Crime Commission's report, other technological advancements have also helped
the police. Portable radios have been made lighter, more powerful, and easier to
use. Police are now
using cellular phones in
many agencies.
An important technological
advance benefiting the police in their daily work has been the development of
pepper spray as a force alternative. Although it has proved notably useful, the
police need other force
alternatives. Steven Bishop,
former chief of police of Kansas City, Missouri, makes the point that policing
overall has been shortchanged in the slow development of technology for
protecting street officers.
For all the advances in the
past 30 years, there are still obstacles to the development of police
technology. These obstacles and what is being done to overcome them are
addressed in Part Two, which follows.
Return
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Part Two: The NIJ's
Role and Obstacles to Progress
As we have seen, in the late
1960s the federal government began to assume responsibility for fostering the
development, availability, and adoption of new technologies to help local and
state police. Part Two of
the report discusses (1) how
the government is fulfilling that responsibility through the National Institute
of Justice and its Office of Science and Technology (OST) and (2) the obstacles
to their progress.
The mandate of the National
Institute of Justice, the
criminal justice research and development arm
of the U.S. Department of Justice, is to improve and strengthen the nation's
system of justice with primary emphasis on local and state agencies. In recent
years Congress, with strong bipartisan support, has awarded NIJ significantly
increased funding to speed progress in police technology. The expanded funding,
through the 1994 Crime Bill and other measures, is federal recognition of the
important role technology can play in helping the police in their work.
The purpose of NIJ's Office
of Science and Technology is defined by it name. It is the focal point for
advancing
criminal justice technology. Through OST, the National Institute of
Justice has developed voluntary standards, tested new equipment, and
disseminated information on technologies. The newly increased funding has
intensified NIJ's efforts to (1) understand policing's overall operations and
its specific technological requirements; (2) encourage research and development
of successful technologies; and (3) overcome obstacles slowing or derailing
technological progress. The final goal is to move the best new
technologies from the
laboratory and from other agencies to the marketplace and the law enforcement
consumer.
Obstacles to Progress
Fragmentation of local
policing is the source of many of the obstacles to technological application. It
is the price that many believe is required if the nation is to have local
control of law enforcement. About 570,000 police officers serve in 17,000
agencies, 90 percent of which have 24 or fewer officers. Local and state police
handle 95 percent of the nation's crime.
Fragmentation makes policing
an often hard-to-reach, hard-to-sell, and, thereby, an unrewarding market for
potential developers and manufacturers of new technologies, products, and
services. Getting a product and product information to the police market can be
expensive.
Fragmentation means most
police departments have small budgets and make small buys of equipment. Almost
all police agencies spend most of their budgets on personnel and have relatively
little left over for equipment purchases. Thus, the local and state law
enforcement market have scant available funds to support research and
development.
Fragmentation means
equipment acquisition is usually on a department-by-department basis; there is
little pooled purchasing.
Fragmentation means
awareness and information about valuable new technologies seep into the core
expertise of police departments at markedly different rates. Some departments
are state of the art in
technological matters; some
lag years behind.
Fragmentation means
neighboring police agencies buy incompatible technologies -- notably in
communications equipment -- which undermine their ability to serve a common
area. The inability of several adjoining police departments to communicate
because of incompatible radio equipment and frequencies is commonplace.
Fragmentation means almost
all police agencies are too small to have on staff or on call experts who can
provide objective evaluations of proffered technologies. Policing has its share
of rueful tales of expensive
technologies, notably
computer systems, purchased in the glow of a salesman's pitch and without a
thorough examination of whether the technology could deliver what was promised.
Fragmentation means no one
has the authority to establish standards for law enforcement technology and
equipment. The police on their own have developed no national organization for
this purpose.
Criminal justice has no national regulatory
agency. Crime laboratories are not required to undergo accreditation.
Liability Concerns
Another brake on progress
involves liability concerns and questions of public and police acceptance
associated with some existing and proposed law enforcement technologies.
"The whole issue of
liability is a sobering issue," said Dr. Eric Wenaas, president and CEO of
JAYCOR, a leading manufacturer of police products. "You can't underscore the
importance of liability to any manufacturer of these products."
Some examples of liability
concerns:
o Technologies that use
graduated levels of acceptable force can spawn both lawsuits and bad press. An
example is pepper spray. Police increasingly use it, and some call it one of the
most useful technological
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