TECHNOLOGY AND STRATEGIC PLANNING (police)

Introduction

Every criminal justice organization needs to occasionally examine its core values and evaluate the process by which it provides the advertised goods and services. Strategic planning provides the tools and steps required to examine the efficiency of an agency’s product delivery systems. Both public and private agencies have an obligation to their service population, and without such planning, agencies risk failing to meet the needs of their customers. Therefore, strategic planning is an integral part of modern agencies concerned about fiscal responsibility and adequate service delivery (Haines 2000).

The push toward professionalism and public accountability has led police departments to adopt strategic planning measures and to apply concepts borrowed from the business world. The advent of information technology (IT) provides new opportunities and challenges for police strategic planning. Modern technologies have become indispensable parts of today’s police planning process, whether to manage personnel or to anticipate how best to address the crime problems of tomorrow.

Basic Strategic Planning in Policing

Strategic planning holds many benefits for police leaders. It can help an agency to identify and anticipate key trends and issues facing the organization, both currently and in the future. The planning process also explores options, sets directions, and helps stakeholders make appropriate decisions. It facilitates communication among key stakeholders who are involved in the process and keeps organizations focused on outcomes while battling daily crises. Planning can be used to develop performance standards to measure an agency’s efforts. Finally, and most important, it helps leaders to facilitate and manage change (Glensor and Peak 2005). Table 1 illustrates some strategic planning steps and the required actions.

The need for IT in strategic planning becomes even more acute where the organization has adopted and is practicing the community-oriented policing and problem solving (COPPS) strategy. For example, under COPPS, the organization necessarily needs to maximize communication with and obtain feedback from the citizenry. Some technology applications for these purposes can be quite simplistic, such as issuing cellular telephones to officers and publishing officers’ telephone numbers. Or, on a higher plane, the agency might consider the development of a website. A web page can solicit input from the community concerning Such information can be very helpful for strategically planning the agency’s future. In addition, such areas as the agency’s history, mission, vision, values, and philosophy/methods under COPPS can be presented and explained in this website.

Table 1 Strategic planning steps and required actions

• Criminal events or neighborhood problems

• Perceptions of the department overall as well as of individual officer contacts

• Programs or activities that citizens would like to see implemented

IT thus can assist the organization in meeting its goals and objectives. The chief executive must ensure, however, that all personnel are aware of these technologies and are knowledgeable in terms of their use. To merge strategic planning and IT, then, law enforcement chief executives must do the following:

• Recognize that the agency should first prepare a strategic plan that articulates the organization’s overall mission, goals, and objectives.

• Recognize the mission-critical role of technology in policing and develop a vision for IT and its role in the agency, keeping in mind that the strategic IT vision directly supports the mission, goals, and objectives of the agency.

• Create a systematic process for continual planning, maintenance, and support of information systems. The use of IT for strategic planning is not a one-time effort and requires a cyclical process for planning, procuring, implementing, and managing IT.

• Develop a strategic IT vision document. This document will articulate how technology will assist the agency in meeting its core mission and establish an ongoing process to evaluate, upgrade, and enhance those technologies as agency goals and technology change.

Police Strategic Planning and Technology

The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), created by the Crime Control Act Of 1994, was largely responsible for bringing police departments up to date in terms of IT. ”Under the MORE (Making Officer Redeployment Effective) program, the OCOPS delivered more than $1.3 billion to nearly 4,500 police departments for the acquisition and implementation of IT systems” (Dunworth 2005, 7). This increase in IT has helped police organizations meet their objectives by integrating technological advances into the strategic planning process.

As noted above, it is extremely important for law enforcement organizations to engage in strategic planning. Just as important, however, is the need for the chief executives to understand how IT can assist in strategic planning, as well as the kinds of technologies that are available for this undertaking. Technological improvements can now provide crucial information for strategic planning. As examples, computer-aided dispatching (CAD) now has the ability to supply real-time statistical information, do screen mapping, prepare alarm bills and warnings, and issue and store various permits; records management systems (RMSs) now analyze crime statistics and maintain files related to people, vehicles, prisoners, and officer activities. Other technologies have been developed more recently and can provide a much better picture of the situation being examined and related long-term planning efforts.

Strategic Planning and Crime Reduction Applications

Strategic planning that involves preventive efforts or addressing specific, recurring problems can also benefit by employing IT. A few examples are as follows:

• Crime prevention. COPPS and IT can assist with strategic planning for crime prevention through its crime analysis function, by looking at means for denying offenders the opportunity to act in the first place. Using the SARA process, analysts can scan for crime problems, analyze the nature of criminal activity, respond by allocating the necessary police resources to thwart offenders, and assess by performing periodic evaluations to determine effectiveness (Helms 2002).

• Mapping criminal events. Computerized crime mapping combines geographic information from global positioning satellites with crime statistics gathered by the department’s CAD system and demographic data. The result is a picture that combines disparate sets of data for a whole new perspective on crime. For example, a map of crimes can be overlaid with maps or layers of causative data: unemployment rates in the areas of high crime, locations of abandoned houses, population density, reports of drug activity, or geographic features (such as alleys, canals, or open fields) that might be contributing factors (Rogers 1997; Pilant 1997).

• Accident investigation. Some police agencies have begun using a global positioning system to determine such details as vehicle location and damage, elevation, grade, radii of curves, and critical speed. A transmitter takes a series of ”shots” to gain the exact location and measurements of accident details such as skid marks, area of impact, and debris; that information is then downloaded into the system and the coordinates are plotted out onto an aerial shot of the intersection or roadway. Using computer technology, the details are then superimposed onto the aerial shot, thus re-creating the accident scene to scale. Finally, digital photos of the accident are incorporated into the final product, resulting in a highly accurate depiction of the accident (Bath 2003).

• Gang intelligence systems. Police now use their laptop computers and cellular phones to assist in solving gang-related crimes. Some states now have an intranet-linked software package that connects sites throughout the state. It is essentially a clearinghouse for information about individual gang members, the places they frequent or live, and the cars they drive. Within a few minutes, a police officer in the field can be linked to the net, type in information, and wait for matches (Dussault 1998).

• Personnel and deployment applications. Police departments need to deploy personnel efficiently. This can be achieved using different technological tools. For example, computerized personnel databases can identify officers with unusual sick time, or those who accumulate numerous public complaints. The biggest application of IT in terms of strategic planning involves patrol allocation. Using geographic mapping software, police officials can now calculate the crime problem at the beat level and allocate resources based on need within very small boundaries. This differs greatly from the traditional division of a city into four geographic quadrants or from the static beat allocation that often remains identical for many years, regardless of the changing crime problems.