The Utilization of Mobile Technology for Crime Scene Investigation in the San Francisco Bay Area

The research presented aims to explore factors affecting the decision to adopt a mobile crime scene investigation application in police departments throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. To accomplish this goal, the mobile technology acceptance model was used in designing a survey for data collection. This model utilizes four categories to interpret the factors that influence a police officer’s decision to accept or reject mobile technologies: performance, security and reliability, management style, and cognitive acceptance. Nine police departments were sampled through a series of in-person and over-the-phone interviews to obtain data regarding factors affecting the adoption of a mobile crime scene investigation application. Results suggest that if a mobile crime scene investigation application were made available, a vast majority of the police departments in the Bay Area would implement this new technology

Predictive policing management: a brief history of patrol automation

Predictive policing has attracted considerably scholarly attention. Extending the promise of being able to interdict crime prior to its commission, it seemingly promised forms of anticipatory policing that had previously existed only in the realms of science fiction. The aesthetic futurism that attended predictive policing did, however, obscure the important historical vectors from which it emerged. The adulation of technology as a tool for achieving efficiencies in policing was evident from the 1920s in the United States, reaching sustained momentum in the 1960s as the methods of Systems Analysis were applied to policing. Underpinning these efforts resided an imaginary of automated patrol facilitated by computerised command and control systems. The desire to automate police work has extended into the present, and is evident in an emergent platform policing – cloud-based technological architectures that increasingly enfold police work. Policing is consequently datafied, commodified and integrated into the circuits of contemporary digital capitalism

Body Cameras for the Buffalo Police: Best Practices for Policy Creation

This policy brief was drafted by Sarah Wooton, policy analyst at Partnership for the Public Good. It recommends that the Buffalo Police Department adopt policies governing the use of body cameras with a focus on six areas: activation, pre-report viewing, footage retention, footage protection, public disclosure of footage, and public input. Research suggests that simply adding body cameras may not improve policing without strong policies in each of these six areas

Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017, Boston, MA, US

[Community Oriented Policing (COP) Evaluation]

An in-depth review of the use of force policies and practices used by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) was conducted after the alarming rate of officer involved shootings was publicized by the Las Vegas Review Journal (RJ) in 2011. The 75 recommendations handed down to LVMPD after the review not only helped guide the agency towards procedural and reporting changes, but also paved a way for the agency to begin rebuilding trust in police within the community. This program evaluation focuses on the community engagement efforts put forth by the Bolden Area Command (BAC) community oriented policing (COP) program, from events they sponsor to youth leagues they coach, in the realm of community engagement. The evaluation will serve as a tool to determine what works with community engagement and what opportunities may come. The ultimate goal of COP programs across the United States is to improve relations between the police and the communities they serve, building trust and mutual respect. This relationship building process is imperative to effectively address underlying issues and change negative behavioral patterns not only in Las Vegas, but across the country (U.S. Department of Justice, 2017)

Police Knowledge Exchange: Full Report 2018

[Executive Summary] This report was commissioned to explore the enablers and barriers to sharing within and between police forces and between police forces and partners, including the public. This was completed from an interdisciplinary review of international literature covering sharing, knowledge exchange, learning and organisational learning. The literature broke down into four main factors; who, why, what and how. An introduction to the literature is presented with ‘Who’ is sharing which considers both personal identity and different institutional issues. The ‘Why’ literature covers issues of cultural and community motivators and barriers. The ‘What’ segment reviews concepts of data, information and knowledge and related legislative issues. Finally, the ‘how’ section spans face to face sharing approaches to technologies that produce both enablers and barriers. A series of 42 in-depth interviews and focus groups were completed and combined with 47 survey responses . The aim of the interviews, focus groups and survey was to show perceptions and beliefs around knowledge sharing from a small sample across policing in order to complement the findings from the literature review. The survey was adapted from a standardised questionnaire (Biggs, 1987). The Biggs questionnaire focused on what motivated students to learn and how they approached their learning. Our adapted survey looked at what motivated police to share, and how they approached sharing. The responses showed a trend, across the police, towards a motivation for sharing to develop a deeper understanding of issues. However, the approaches and the strategies they used to share with others, which were primarily driven by achieving and surface approaches (to get promoted and get the job done). According to Biggs (1987) this could leave them discontented as they never progress to a deeper understanding of issues. Scaffolding sharing within the police through processes that are clearly defined, effective and valued could help to overcome these issues. Within the interviews and focus group findings a similar structured approach to sharing was adopted. Within the ‘who’ section some key aspects around personal relationships, reciprocity and reputation were identified. The ‘why’ the police share was one of the largest discussion points. Not only was there a deep motivation to solve key policing issues there was an approach of reciprocity. Police sharing was deeply motivated to support ‘good practice’ in the prevention and detection of crime. However, a sharing barrier was identified in the parity of value given to different types of knowledge for example between professional judgement and research evidence knowledge. Sharing was achieved when there were reciprocal benefits, in particular with personal networks or face to face sharing which was noted as ‘safe’. Again, this was inhibited by misunderstandings around the ‘risks’ of sharing, frequently attributed to data protection legislation; producing cautious reactions and as an avoidance tactic to save time and effort sharing. However, a divide was noted between technical users and those who avoided any online systems for sharing; often due to poorly designed systems and a lack of confidence in how to use systems. The police culture was identified as being risk-adverse, and competitive due to multiple factors, a lack of supported time to share, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) reviews and promotion criteria. The result was perceived to be a poor cultural ability to learn from mistakes and a likelihood to repeat errors. A set of strategic recommendations are given and include the use of a sharing authorised professional practice for HMIC reviews, sharing networks and training. A further set of operational recommendations are given such as; sharing impact cases for evidence based practice, data sharing officers and evaluating mechanisms for sharing. This full report is supported by the Police Knowledge Exchange Summary Report 2018 which gives an overview of the findings and recommendations

Quality of Service over Specific Link Layers: state of the art report

The Integrated Services concept is proposed as an enhancement to the current Internet architecture, to provide a better Quality of Service (QoS) than that provided by the traditional Best-Effort service. The features of the Integrated Services are explained in this report. To support Integrated Services, certain requirements are posed on the underlying link layer. These requirements are studied by the Integrated Services over Specific Link Layers (ISSLL) IETF working group. The status of this ongoing research is reported in this document. To be more specific, the solutions to provide Integrated Services over ATM, IEEE 802 LAN technologies and low-bitrate links are evaluated in detail. The ISSLL working group has not yet studied the requirements, that are posed on the underlying link layer, when this link layer is wireless. Therefore, this state of the art report is extended with an identification of the requirements that are posed on the underlying wireless link, to provide differentiated Quality of Service