“Technology,” defined by Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Ninth Edition) as “a particular means for achieving ends,” is a denotative definition, that is, it is glossed as (extended in meaning to) the totality of means employed to provide objects necessary for human sustenance and comfort. Academic definitions range widely (for a daunting list, see Roberts and Grabowsky 1996, 411). The most sensitive of these suggests that technology includes what is seen and visible, as well as the material, logical, and social facets of technology.
In operation, technology requires the cognitive and imaginative work that is required to understand, fix, maintain, and use technology (Roberts and Grabowsky 1996). Organizational “technology,” in general, is the means by which work is accomplished within a bounded authoritatively ordered social system defined in a narrow sense. It is a means of converting “raw materials” into ”processed outputs.” However, what is “raw” and what is “processed” remains complicated when both are the result of human interaction. A narrow definition, like Webster’s, is inadequate when both raw materials and the means used are interacting persons.
Information technology (IT) is best seen as a means by which ”raw data” or ”facts” are converted or processed to become information, something that makes a difference in context. When applied to organizational analysis and when implemented with a clear intent and evaluated as to consequence, it is “knowledge.” Framing technology as a means avoids the larger question of the values and purposes, the hopes and dreams of those who use it and the connotations of its working. Technology is not just used; it is imagined, and it is therefore always more than is seen.
Each technology competes for space, time, and legitimacy with other known means and is judged in policing by somewhat changing pragmatic, often nontechnical, values: its speed, its durability and weight, and its contribution to the uniformed officers’ notion of the essential role and its routines. New equipment is generally introduced without experimentation, clear expectations or standards, or proper repair and maintenance contracts. There is little evidence that thirty years of funding technological innovations have produced much change in police practices or in their effectiveness. Recent developments suggest that informational technology is a new and useful management tool, rather than an effective deployment of resources for environmental impact.
Types of Technology
Six types of technology are seen in police organizations (Manning 2003, 129-33). They are of quite different significance operationally. The most important of these are the last three, the communicative, transformative, and analytic technologies.
The first type of technology is mobility technology, or ways of getting around— motorcycles, cars, trucks, SUVs, boats, bicycles, and horses. These are taken for granted as essential and are assumed to add speed, efficiency, and capacity to the force. The movement from foot patrol to mobile patrol increased the costs of patrolling beyond measure and when linked to computer-aided dispatch fueled the belief that reduced pass-through time increased the quality of policing. The consistent leader in expenditure and maintenance costs for technology is means of mobility. The purpose of mobility technology is to allocate officers to areas, and poise them to respond. The role of material technology in this connection has changed little since the 1930s, except for increases in the speed, number, and types of available vehicles. This cluster of technological advances grew in popularity with the recent emphases on satisfying citizen demand, active presence, and availability.
The second cluster of technologies includes those associated with training— lectures, demonstrations, simulations, and field training. Little is known about the content of police training curricula, and there are no national standards, but the core remains physical and symbolic (shaming, harassing, conditioning, rapid response to orders) and to a lesser degree “academic learning” about the law, diversity and cultures, interpersonal relations, and problem solving. There is some training in specialized weapons and tactics. There is little known about the impact of training. The general consensus of those who have studied training is that little is learned and most forgotten and that officers are systematically instructed to ”. . . forget what you learned in the academy.” Field training tends to be highly variable, a function of the skills and interests of a senior and respected officer, and produces variable skills in young officers (Fielding 1986).
A third type or cluster is transformative technology. These are devices used to extend human senses and to present evidence in scientific form. They have been vastly improved by the development of forensic sciences and their application in processing criminal evidence. Police cars are often equipped with video cameras, allowing police to capture, in video and audio, their interactions with suspects. Forensic scientists, once restricted to fingerprint evidence and blood typing, are now able to identify individuals by their DNA, or place them at the scenes of crimes using a variety of trace evidence (for example, hair or fiber). The Federal Bureau of Investigation and some states are also creating a DNA bank of known felons convicted of certain crimes. These have enormous potential to extend police power as well as to augment civil liberties of the accused and wrongly convicted. Increasingly, police departments have online data on mug shots, fingerprints, and criminal records.
A fourth type is analytic technology that allows police to aggregate, analyze, model, simulate, and otherwise shape data to facilitate crime mapping, crime analysis, and crime prevention. These are in effect anticipatory technologies, whereas all the others in this list are reactive and ex post facto, or ways to respond after crime has occurred. This growing function has been complemented by crime analysis meetings, visual presentations, hiring crime analysts, and current interest in more data-driven crime control efforts. Collection, storage, and retrieval of data by police, however, do not mean that the data are used for analytic purposes. Perhaps the technology of greatest interest to law enforcement currently is crime mapping, in large part due to its ability to facilitate problem solving and community policing via the identification of repeat calls for service or areas of concern.
Depending on the software used and the skill of the data analysts, crime mapping can be used to identify the locations of crime incidents and repeat calls-for-service, make resource allocation decisions, and evaluate interventions. Where crime mapping is used (typically larger, urban police departments with greater resources), one of the most important innovations has been the crime analysis meeting. In such meetings, data on problems including such things as crimes, gunshots, traffic problems, phone call traffic, arrests, drug problems, and problems of disorder are displayed. In Boston, for example, in monthly meetings, multimedia presentations are used to project maps, pictures, tables, graphs, and animated figures onto a screen while officers present a narrative to an audience of top command and others. A topic is created and rehearsal used to polish the presentation. Questions are asked and officers are urged to use the problem-solving SARA model and present results. Districts rotate in their presentations, and sometimes a special presentation such as a recent successful drug raid and seizure is highlighted. In these meetings, a management approach is combined with data and feedback and evaluation to integrate the technological-derived data with practice and accountability.
The final type is communicative technology or information-processing technology used to link units within the department and the public.
Deciding
What is the relationship between these five types of technology and police decision making? An answer to this requires stating the organization’s mandate. What does the organization presume its every day-any day activities are about? This cannot be answered by review of formal mission statements, value commitments, general orders, or rules and regulations. The fundamental police concern is to deal immediately with negative uncertain occasions, and to do so with dispatch. They define their overall aim as crime control, but their everyday practices are overwhelmingly responding to citizen-generated demand.
In this sense, the police in Anglo American societies are a democratic, demand-led service, not a form of political or high police concerned with national security. They do not much solve problems, control crime, or produce order: They process demand for service and, incidentally, selectively store, retrieve, and manage data. Ironically, given that the everyday world of policing is banal, policing operates in a crisis mode, that is, with concern for the current matter at hand. Even the top command is frequently overwhelmed with the present, the impending, or the possible crisis. This is often media driven and amplified. Police work is seen as being done on the ground, what can be considered the call-or-incident cynosure (the idea being, what it is I have to do now to clear this call?). Paperwork, abstraction, and long-term planning are anathema. The context of deciding varies in that the ”on the ground” view is situational and short term, management and supervision take a retrospective-prospective view of deciding, and top command consider that planning has a role in the immediate deciding done.
Three kinds of deciding (making choices among options within the context of the law) take place in police. The first are “street decisions” made by officers in uniform. The second are detective or investigators’ decisions. The third are management or top command decisions concerning policing, resource allocations, organization change and reorganization, as well as promotion to top positions.
Street decisions are the most studied and those most characterized in texts, and they constitute the public face of the organization. They usually are nonviolent, courteous, characterized by compliance on the part of citizens, and reflect citizens’ preferences. They are shaped by the number of officers present and features of the situation and the people involved. The reasons for stops and inquiries seem intuitive and in that sense are not “decisions” (these involve weighing, comparing, and contrasting in reference to an imagined outcome). The role of technology, setting aside the technology required to make a mobile response (bicycle, SUV, van sedan), is to shape the options available on the menu if the decision is to be recorded once accepted.
Whether the officer queries the vehicle, record, of other details is typically dependent on whether the officer intends to act further concerning the stop or the answered call. Officers differentially query records and databases, and the more active they are in such inquiries, the more they are active to show results: arrests, stops, tickets (Meehan and Ponder 2004). In this sense, IT in the car, mobile data terminals, cell phones, radios, and even fax machines increase the speed of response, given a decision to intervene. In this sense, Pease argues that IT increases output and has increased impact on the environment.
Since there is no evaluation, little feedback on what is done, and no systematic scrutiny between ends and means, policing, and its shape as an organization, is almost entirely dependent upon the officers in uniform. This presupposition has serious consequence, as other observers have noted (Goldstein 1960; Reiss 1971) because virtually all of the significant decisions outside investigative work are invisible, nonreviewed, and nonreviewable (see Manning 2003). That is, the decisions made on the ground, where no record is made, cannot be reviewed without a citizen complaint, and if there is a record made, it is a refined, edited, stylistic, and stylized rendition of what was done and why. The interaction between citizen and officer has been studied in several important research reports, but these decisions are shaped almost entirely by the verbal interaction, not other technology. The decision making that goes on between radio call, dispatch, and action is only vaguely known.
In detective work, there is some indication that computers have had an impact on confessions (Harper 1991), and certainly systems of accounting such as HOLMES and major incident formats used in Britain and Canada increase the likelihood of shared information on suspects and classifying and tracking work done, but there is no evidence that this increases clearances or “detection,” only that it makes detectives more accountable for the decisions they report to have taken. The most systematic studies of detective deciding, primarily about what to investigate and at what length (Greenwood, Petersilia, and Chaiken 1977; Waegel 1981) suggest that these decisions are made on the basis of hunches, feelings, and the oral culture absent any significant impact of technologies. As Innes (2003) writes, the officers decide the outcome that appears reasonable and assemble evidence, legal scientific, interviews, and observations to support this presumption.
The study of management decisions in policing is restricted. An early study, the work of Hunt and Magenau (1993), describes how management took on three big questions and decided them. The sense of their case studies was the relatively dependent character of the chief’s office, given the power of local political groups (both formal and informal), the police unions, and officers in the uniformed division. Chatterton and Hogard (1996) found that as authority to decide was devolved to basic units (subdivisions of the British police), it had negligible impact on operations. Their close study of superintendents in two forces revealed that little money was available for shifting from function to function, that superintendents tended to see their role as dealing with everyday problems directly by phone or in person, much as they did as patrol officers, and that they had no capacity or interest in long-term planning, setting objectives, or evaluating functions.
Thus, although it might be argued that as information passes up the organization, it becomes more abstract, transferable, and generalizable (what might be called knowledge), the mode of deciding remains focused on the incident and response to it. As a result, attempts to require higher degrees, management courses, or advanced education as a prerequisite to promotion has never been actively advocated within the occupation. The absence of a national police training system or a regional or national police college makes the United States unique in the Anglo American police world. The ideology of policing as a here-and-now service job for people trained primarily on the job remains strong, and thus technologies of various kinds are seen as ways to facilitate its practices rather than to alter them.
See also: COMPSTAT; Computer-Aided Dispatching (CAD) Systems; Computer Technology; Costs of Police Services; Crime Analysis; Crime Mapping; Forensic Investigations; Information within Police Agencies; Intelligence-Led Policing and Organizational Learning; Performance Measurement; SARA, the Model; Technology and Strategic Planning; Technology and the Police.
References:
- Chatterton, M., and P. Hogard. 1996. Management at the subdivision (BCU) level. Unpublished final report to the Home Office, Henry Fielding Center, Manchester University, Manchester, United Kingdom.
- Fielding, N. 1986. Joining forces. London: Routledge.
- Goldstein, J. 1960. Police discretion not to invoke the criminal process. Yale Law Journal 69: 543-94.
- Greenwood, P., J. Petersilia, and J. Chaiken. 1977. The criminal investigation process. Lexington, KY: D. C. Heath.
- Harper, R. R. 1991. The computer game.British Journal ofCriminology 31: 292-307.
- Hunt, R., and J. Magenau. 1993. Power and the police chief. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Innes, M. 2003. Investigating murder. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Meehan, A. J., and M. Ponder. 2004. Race profPolice Quarterly.
- Reiss, A. J., Jr. 1971. The police and the public.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Roberts, K., and Grabowsky 1996. Organizational technologies. In Handbook of organizations, S. Clegg. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Waegel, W. 1981. Case routinization in investigative police work. Social Problems 28:263-75.