“Do we want to police in the future the way we are policing today? I don’t think so,” Police Chief Jim Fox explains in a recent publication on policing trends. We want to highlight some of those trends here and find out where your police department falls when it comes to the integration of all the current technology, tools, and trends on the rise.
The 2014 publication, Future Trends in Policing, was possible through a joint partnership between the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and Target, and presented results from a national forum and survey that measured and analyzed changing practices in policing.
Here are just three of those highlights.
- Results Show that More Agencies are Planning to Adopt Predictive Policing and Intelligence-Led Policing: The PERF survey results suggest there will be considerable growth in the practice of two strategies: predictive policing and intelligence-led policing. That being said, we shouldn’t worry that computers will make human analysis obsolete. LAPD Captain Malinowski spoke on this topic to analysts who were concerned that software might make their job unnecessary. Malinowski is quoted in the publication as saying, “I told them, if I can automate targeting and tasking for patrol, I can have you do deeper analysis about problem locations. I have a million things for analysts to do.”
- A Turn to Police Foundations: Promising Partnerships Help Bridge Funding Gaps: Today, police departments nationwide struggle with getting the funding needed to maintain a number of police programs, equipment, and special needs which aren’t readily provided through public sector funds. According to the article, “foundations not only offer a ‘promising source to help bridge funding gaps,’ but they can also help business leaders to become active partners in crime prevention and community safety. For example, some corporations have opened up their leadership training to police officers, shared their expertise, or provided law enforcement with access to equipment, technology, meeting space, and other resources.”
- Police Increasingly Are Using Social Media Another trend rising quickly is the adoption and use of social media in police departments across the country. This trend is expected to continue, with 98 percent of the PERF survey respondents answering that their agency plans to increase their use of social media in the next 2-5 years. The PERF article explains further that “Police departments are using social media for a variety of reasons for two basic purposes: disseminating their own messages to the public, and gathering information from social media platforms to prevent and investigate crimes.” In fact, according to an MTV news article “The International Association of Chiefs of Police reports that95% of police agencies use social media (mostly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) in their work” and that “last year [2015], social media sites helped crack a case for 79% of these agencies.
Click to read the full article, Future Trends in Policing.
Do you know where policing will be tomorrow? Or where your police department will be and what tools it will be using to solve and prevent crime? iRecord supports cutting edge technology, most recently in the development of the Anywhere Tablet, the adapted-for-law-professionals Microsoft Surface tablet. Learn more about this and other technology we’ve developed by clicking here.