Police Cis Essay

This is known as predictive policing. Predictive policing has led to a drop in burglaries, automobile thefts, and other crimes in some cities. From the 1800’s until about the 1980’s the strategy of many agencies was to have uniformed police randomly patrol the streets, the outcome of these patrols were to hopefully deter crimes with the police presence, interrupt crimes in progress and to apprehend criminals. Since then the random police patrol has in fact lessened with the use of IT to optimize the patrolling. IT is a very important part of law enforcement since we live in a world where talking to the police is shunned upon, so if we can use a software to track and deter crime then it will be vey beneficial. The goal of this was to reestablish relationships between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve. With the use of IT together the two parties would implement strategies that would examine and resolve many of the issues or concerns in the community, but most importantly the trust between the two groups would be rebuilt. Random patrolling is still necessary to let the community see the police presence. Without the community physically seeing police their opinions of them would be negative. It’s very important to know that IT is used in addition to the normal patrolling method not as a replacement. The four key components of COMPSTAT are time and accurate intelligence, effective tactics, rapid deployment, and relentless follow-up and assessment. Accurate information on crime should be entered daily rather than waiting a long period of time. Time and accurate intelligence usually consists of inputting the following information in the system: the type of crimes taking place, the locations the crimes that are occurring, how the crime is committed and who is committing the crime. Effective Tactics or Processing are tactics that law enforcement officials use to examine the accuracy of the data inputted in the system input. Effective Tactics will examine the data compiled both old and new, develop new strategies, implement tactics that will have a positive effect on social and situational changes, develop tactics for the correlating crime trends. Rapid deployment or Output is the act of effective strategies’ put in place. Rapid deployment normally encourages law enforcement agencies to work together as a joint task force to achieve the goal of the agency as a whole. Relentless Follow-up and Assessment to me is the most important part of COMPSTAT because you see the achievements and failures of policies put in place. Relentless Follow-up and Assessment also called Feedback is reviewing strategies implemented, confirming the outcomes of the implements strategy, identifying if the outcome was positive or negative and confirming the strategy resolved issues that it was intended to. Because COMPSTAT utilizes Geographic Information System (GIS) to display the vicinities where crime is taking place, identifies high crime rate areas known as â€Å"hot spots† and potential problematic areas as well. COMPSTAT gathers an immense amount of old crime data which it converts into algorithms that cross reference old crime data which foreshadow crime in the future to law enforcement agencies. The evolution of technology has enabled law officials to determine the high crime areas and staff them appropriately, which leads to a faster response time, and successful crime deterrence. The program is cost effective to large agencies but available to all. Like all new technology proper training is required to learn how to efficiently and properly utilize this system. Many would say, the greatest advantage of this system is that police presence is continuously felt and criminals tend to think twice before acting, as response time will be immediate. With the existence of this presence community relationships have shown to grow stronger and the citizens feel safer and more compelled to share information about criminal activity, which can help solidify nformation that is inputted into the system. Since many police agencies intend to implement predictive-policing in their departments they should know the advantages and disadvantages of it. The most popular advantage is the reduction in cost to the agency, this is popular presently because there are so many cuts happening due to the economy this helps out a lot. The budgets of many police agencies are getting smaller and smaller year-by-year, so by being able to pinpoint the exact location of crimes and to put your offices in the â€Å"hotspots† can potentially be a big money saver for the force. Another advantage is the software is very user friendly and easy to use, the amount of training for the officers would not be as much as with other software’s have proven to be and it is also less expensive for larger agencies. However, like everything there are also some disadvantages. The biggest one is the software is not compatible with other software’s that are currently used by most agencies, which will keep agencies from effectively communicating with outside agencies.