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| Finding and deploying the right technology |
| Accessing and sharing the right information |
Recent technological advances — particularly those relating to digital platforms and machine learning –— have the potential to transform law enforcement’s investigative and analytical work dramatically. However, law enforcement agencies have to choose wisely among the many options available — not all new technologies will be value-added for every department, and some may even be counter-productive if they require significantly more staff time to operate.
As pointed out in the recent Thomson Reuters E-book, Leveraging technology in law enforcement, it is critically important that law enforcement agencies identify what technology solutions or tools will address their needs, given their size, community, and level of technical expertise among their investigators and officers. The key questions for agencies become then: Which technologies will make investigations more efficient? Which are affordable, given ever-present budgetary constraints? And which ones will work well with those of other jurisdictions? 
Police departments are looking for ways to facilitate the organization, search, and analysis of evidence that they already gather, such as cell phone data, video, and social media activity, as the E-book points out, adding that there is a special focus on those technologies that can reduce the manual processing of existing evidence and information, allowing for greater automation and digital progress that can greatly help with short staffing.
Indeed, new advancements in predictive analytics and the use of advanced algorithms and machine learning has allowed many law enforcement agencies to analyze vast amounts of data and move their investigations forward.
Finding and deploying the right technology
Yet, there are challenges. According to the 2023 Future of Policing Research Study, two-thirds of police departments struggle with staffing and recruitment, and about 39% of departments say they are understaffed by 10% or more, making training and deployment of technology even more difficult. Small, midsize, and larger jurisdictions have to make decisions differently, as do specialized legal agencies.
Although there is a wide array of technological enhancements today, not all end up producing superior outcomes in terms of public safety or efficiency. In some cases, legacy systems and practices may well be the basis for good enhancements through careful technology adoption. Indeed, some of the most effective innovations in law enforcement administration, historically, have been ones that enhance existing practices and improved their efficiency, rather than insisting on a completely new technology.
Innovations in investigation through past decades have been mixed, and agencies are rightly worried about throwing good money after bad on technology that ends up burying the agency in data, without being really fit for purpose, or requiring too many staff resources. For example, communities, and increasingly courts, are wary of how cell phone data is gathered, realizing the best tools may be those that are adaptable to these kinds of limitations as well as to open to new opportunities to harness existing data.
To answer these challenges, law enforcement departments should remember that some of the most successful tools often leverage existing practices, making them quicker and better, or are fundamentally based on a legacy practice already in common use.
Accessing and sharing the right information
One of the most consistent concerns of law enforcement agencies has been the ability to search through and share existing information. Record keeping and sharing, in particular, still face organizational problems — as they have for decades — that hamper cross-referencing and broad-area record searches. While digitization has enabled investigators to search databases and platforms, these sources of information are often in separate siloes, meaning that manual searches have to be done on each potential information source. Enhancements that make this process more efficient and can search across information types can greatly reduce staff time spent on these tasks, and in some cases, offer quicker resolution.
For instance, in the wake of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Thomson Reuters CLEAR enabled an officer to find an alternative address for the fleeing suspects based on consumer data that would have been invisible to someone searching only government or public databases.
Law enforcement agencies also should avoid technologies that potentially create too many signals of danger where none exist. The past use of location-based electronic sensors (such as alarm systems) became troublesome simply because they went off too often and not in apparent relation to any danger. That problem is potentially even more acute today, and both communities and the agencies that serve them are taking a second look at the deployment of these tools at the potential expense of ones that enhance information gathering and analysis.
Today’s departments should be considering their limited budgets, organizational structures, and staff experience when seeking value-added tools, the E-book states. And, in a whole world of new options, not all agency needs and priorities are the same. That means all agencies need to ask themselves: What kind of digital solutions are likely to help our organization the most?
You can access the new Thomson Reuters E-book, Leveraging technology in law enforcement, here.
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