Leveraging technology in law enforcement

Law enforcement agencies today face questions about their level of technological prowess amid a dizzying environment. Opportunities and risks abound, but two budgetary considerations constrain decisions about individual law enforcement agencies’ adoptions of new tech:

1. Are the new tools affordable and sustainable?
2. Does the agency have the staff to process the gains in information?

Couple that with citizen wariness about law enforcement’s over-reliance on mass surveillance — or so-called dragnet techniques — and you have an environment that is very difficult for many police departments to navigate.

While not all new technical capabilities are suitable for the task, some have the potential to transform policing. Choosing the right tech tools to best help your officers serve and protect your community remains the top dilemma of many agency leaders.

We’ve designed this e-book to help decision-makers at the agency level make sense of newly available tools and examine the ways in which these technologies can improve policing and investigation.

Chapter 1: The foundation of modern law enforcement

In recent decades, digital technology has enhanced various aspects of public safety that law enforcement agencies — such as crime, civil enforcement, order maintenance, and traffic control — often cover. Today, law enforcement agencies have widely adopted advancements such as drones, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and body cameras; however, keeping orderly records for casework, information sharing, and data analysis — essentially the foundation of modern police investigation — is not keeping pace.

Historically, each advancement in the professionalization of police forces has set a new floor of minimum expectations and made law enforcement agencies acutely aware of what is missing in modern policing. Recordkeeping and sharing, in particular, still face logistics problems — as they have for decades — that hamper cross-referencing and broad-area record searches. Fingerprint matching, for example, dates from the late 1800s, but fingerprint records have remained in local police stations for decades. It took 100 years to fully deploy a national database of fingerprints and criminal history files into the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) in 1999.

The development of central records bureaus in each agency was vital in improving inquiry on cases. However, reporting, standardization, and publishing of data on crime nationwide, in the form of the Uniform Crime Reports to the FBI, began with recommendations from the Wickersham Report in 1931. Indeed, this tactic remains a good example of what information sharing can provide across jurisdictions. Still, it took years to be widely adopted.

Yet, initial reticence among stakeholders doesn’t necessarily reflect future practices, especially as success stories accumulate. Meaningful incorporation of new methods, practices, and tools requires both agencies and communities to have a stake in the possible benefits those tools can offer.

Today’s rapid advancements in digital technology offer a wide variety of problem-solving tools that can address long-standing difficulties like interagency communication and the siloing of different kinds of investigative data.

Chapter 2: How to harness vital technological advancements in crime investigation

Law enforcement agencies’ prioritization of technology adoption and developing more proactive policing approaches depend on an individual agency’s most pressing needs and awareness of positive and negative use cases. Fortunately, various new digital tools have arrived, and many are aimed precisely at long-standing problems in police work, particularly around conducting more efficient investigations.

Right now, police departments report that they are looking for ways to facilitate the organization, search, and analysis of evidence they already gather, such as cell phone data, video, and social media activity. Some of these technologies can reduce the manual processing of existing evidence and information and agencies should prioritize them since they can help with chronic staff shortages.

Indeed, the transformative impact of data on law enforcement practices, particularly in enhancing accuracy and efficiency during investigations, cannot be overstated. New advancements in predictive analytics and the use of advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data can move investigations forward significantly and identify patterns and associations between subjects.

Digital enhancement in evidence and crime analysis, driven by artificial intelligence, has enormous potential. These AI-driven processes can uncover valuable insights and connections in cases by analyzing digital evidence or sifting through vast data sources like social media posts, public records, or law enforcement databases. This capability allows law enforcement agencies to better understand criminal behavior patterns, accelerate case progress, and allocate resources more strategically.

Effective data management and utilization can play a crucial role, particularly in investigations. Using software that can streamline data collection and analysis — and centralized databases that allow officers and investigators to access relevant information efficiently — can go a long way to providing the kind of organization, connectivity, and efficiency that law enforcement agencies need most.

Unfortunately, while most jurisdictions desire to participate in inter-agency information sharing, technology solutions are often adopted piecemeal and individually, hampering this goal. Agencies should consider asking overlapping and neighboring agencies where they see their digital enhancement going in the next few years.

Chapter 3: Shining a spotlight on crucial tools

Thomson Reuters CLEAR, a public records portal offering a wide variety of record and database types, tackles the age-old problem of having to work only using the agency's own data. These challenges have limited search capabilities that, in the past, often resulted in investigators simply never seeing certain kinds of information about a case, event, or individual. This platform allows users to set flags and alerts for notifications and map links among individuals and between potentially related data points.

Our time-saving interface facilitates easy access to both public and proprietary information, such as consumer and credit bureau data. Analytics capability within the system provides a more complete picture from the start, which eliminates hours of manual and multiple siloed-system searching.

In some cases, quick access to broader information about individuals can save lives. In the wake of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, CLEAR enabled an officer to find an alternative address for the fleeing suspects based on other consumer data that would have been invisible to someone searching only public or department databases.

CLEAR also works well in the common situation where only limited amounts of information are available about a subject. Using this interface, an analyst in Springfield, Massachusetts, found the suspect with several small pieces of information from a kidnap and sexual assault victim. Armed with only a first name and what turned out to be an incorrect street name, the investigator queried CLEAR, which returned several names and addresses, including one with a similar street name. From there, police were able to fortify evidence by searching social media accounts and reducing the list of suspects to just one name — someone who had a long list of previous offenses against women. The social media search, in this case, did not have to start from scratch.

Similar technologies like license plate recognition (LPR) and real-time incarceration and arrest data are available through CLEAR, improving existing search methods and accelerating search time and portability. The system also currently integrates with the CrimeTracer platform.

Chapter 4: Using technology to help build trust and support in the community

The concern about whether citizens feel that they have consented to the kinds of surveillance they currently experience or may experience in the future has been a central concern of police reform efforts for decades. The 1967 report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society from the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement, emphasized that while adopting technology in police work is important, it must be balanced with public involvement. The report highlighted the need for society to engage in discussions about whether the benefits of such technology are worth its financial and social costs. In practical terms, technology adoption is an agency-level process but should continuously involve the public.

Some tools — like those that improve the ease of searching and sharing information — can be somewhat controversial, as they leverage already existing and public data. In addition, those tools and methods that make ages-old practices more efficient, like tracking and analyzing calls from the community, can aid law enforcement agencies while also providing a clear net benefit to the public.

Others can potentially gather new data, but not necessarily data of high quality, which agencies have deprioritized. For example, the 1967 report was wary about location-based electronic monitoring’s high level of false alarms, which can create an expectation of danger and crisis for responders, who may arrive and act accordingly.

At the same time, the report advocated for a very widely supported and eventually successful innovation that took full advantage of the emerging computer age: the 911 system. This now-taken-for-granted system harnesses technological innovation with the common practice of community reporting, enhancing rather than replacing traditional call-response systems.

Some innovations in investigation present a mixed picture. Legal precepts and rulings related to the use of cell phone data, for instance, are quickly evolving. That means tools adopted by law enforcement agencies should be flexible enough to withstand changing restrictions on their use. The best means to achieve this flexibility is to partner with a digital-tool provider that provides ongoing consultation, training, and reliable system updates.

It's essential for agencies to remember that new technologies are not miracle tools containing inherent wisdom about proper use: they can either make investigations more efficient or bury an agency with too much information.

In closing

Research on the factors driving technology adoption at law enforcement agencies tells us that various factors are at play. Certainly, predictable factors such as budget and agency size matter, but agencies of any size are not uniformly aggressive or lagging on technology enhancement. Other factors, including the success or failure of previous tech adoption, staff experience with technology, and organizational structure, can all complicate the picture.

Sometimes, a new technology tool or solution that pays dividends for one agency may be neutral or negative for another, either in terms of public safety outcomes or agency efficiency. Further, some technologies might be inferior to legacy systems or existing practices.

Given law enforcement agencies’ limited budgets and a whole world of new options, all agency leaders should carefully consider what kind of digital solutions are likely to help them the most.

Find out more information about how your agency or office can benefit from Thomson Reuters investigation software

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