Enable Technology-Powered Law Enforcement

It might seem counterintuitive that police departments are simultaneously trying to leverage more personal community relationships and deploying new technologies as means to decrease crime. Those two tactics seem like they would directly conflict with each other.

In fact, a recent IBM report explains that investing in new technologies actually helps police departments better reach communities and, as a result, better combat crime. These new technologies complement community outreach strategies by:

• Extending the reach of police through the use of surveillance, shot spotters, and license plate detection technologies
• Providing data analytics to inform resource deployment
• Increasing the speed and accuracy of reporting functions
• Improving investigations with a broader array of integrated, actionable intelligence

Many of these technologies provide unique benefits to community engagement and crime management. But to truly reap the benefits of these policing technologies, law enforcement should integrate them within the IT enterprise and deploy them in concert. Because law enforcement is a process of prevention, detections, response, and solving crime, technologies must also be deployed in a single, end-to-end process to support those efforts.

That’s why IBM created a suite of technologies that complement each other in a constant cycle. They realize that integrating operations and the supporting technologies across core law enforcement processes is key to optimizing performance.

Via the IBM Crime Management Center, law enforcement officials can execute seven IT-enabled steps to better combat crime. Those steps include:

1. Incident detection – Generate data that be used to inform responding united and engage public safety resources sooner

2. Incident reception and dispatch – Improve response times by feeding incident data into case management tools in real time

3. Incident response and case management – Detect non-obvious relationships and generate tactical leads from case analytics, informed by incident data feeds and analytics

4. Incident investigation and clearance – Aggregate investigation and clearance data to generate crime trend analyses, enhance the efficiency of incident investigations, and increase clearance rates

5. Crime trends analysis and intelligence assessments – Inform resource deployment and tactical deployment strategies with crime trends and reporting data, ultimately improving operational effectiveness and efficacy

6. Strategic and operational planning – Create preventative policing strategies by analyzing impact and success rate data

7. Preventative policing – Track repeat offenders, focus resources in areas with high likelihood of crime, and plan resources accordingly

 By following this technology-driven process, law enforcement agencies can combat crime in new, more effective ways. For instance, if a city witnesses a spike in burglaries, the police department can track those via incident detection technologies. Then, they can use that incident data to map the geographic distribution of those burglaries and compare that data with actions of previous offender’s and their known territories. Based on that analysis, the department can form a data-driven, “hot spots” tactical plan to target those neighborhoods and offenders, ultimately preventing further burglaries from occurring.

But this seamless process of incident detection to prevention can only be achieved if the surveillance, data and analytics platforms used to inform decisions are also seamlessly integrated. To learn more about how IBM’s Crime Management Center solution can help your law enforcement agency achieve its missions of community outreach and crime prevention, read the full whitepaper.