Design Considerations in the Proliferation of Police Body-Worn Cameras

Author(s):  
Joel Suss ◽  
Alexis Raushel ◽  
Adam Armijo ◽  
Brian White

More and more police departments are equipping their officers with body-worn cameras. To maximize the utility of body cams, designers have considered issues such as camera-mounting position, camera-mount stability, methods of activation, and data transfer methods. The human factors/ergonomics community can make important contributions to the design of body-worn cameras and identify and address issues that could arise from the introduction of new technologies (e.g., biometric identification and automatic detection of concealed weapons). Engaging with this ever-expanding technology will benefit law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve and protect.

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780122093082
Author(s):  
Laura Johnson ◽  
Elisheva Davidoff ◽  
Abigail R. DeSilva

In New Jersey, collaboration between police departments and advocates from domestic violence organizations is mandated by state policy, which requires law enforcement agencies to participate in domestic violence response teams (DVRTs). The purpose of this study is to examine factors that motivate police officers to implement DVRT. Twenty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted with DVRT coordinators and domestic violence liaison police officers. Findings suggest that police motivation for implementing the intervention is often influenced by perceived benefits to police response and investigation, perceived benefits to victims, the need to comply with mandates, and recognition of domestic violence as a serious crime.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Brayne

Law enforcement agencies increasingly use big data analytics in their daily operations. This review outlines how police departments leverage big data and new surveillant technologies in patrol and investigations. It distinguishes between directed surveillance—which involves the surveillance of individuals and places under suspicion—and dragnet surveillance—which involves suspicionless, unparticularized data collection. Law enforcement's adoption of big data analytics far outpaces legal responses to the new surveillant landscape. Therefore, this review highlights open legal questions about data collection, suspicion requirements, and police discretion. It concludes by offering suggestions for future directions for researchers and practitioners.


1970 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Pugliese

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) document, ‘Training Keys #581: Suicide (Homicide) Bombers: Part 1,’ is designed to assist law enforcement authorities in the pre-emptive capture of prospective suicide bombers. In this essay, Pugliese focuses on the training key to examine the manner in which essentialised biotypologies are mobilised and reproduced within the context of the so-called ‘war on terror.’ The use of biotypologies by both the military and law enforcement agencies reproduces a disciplinary biopolitical regime premised on normative conceptualisations of race, gender and bodily behaviour. Pugliese discusses these regimes in the context of the US Department of Defense and its advocacy of ‘identity dominance’ through the development of new technologies such as gait signature biometrics. Situated in this context, he shows how biotypologies of targeted subjects are instrumental in fomenting cultural panics concerning the Arab and/or Muslim and/or figure ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
Гаврилин ◽  
Sergey Gavrilin

The article is devoted to issues of safe staying of citizens in public places. The problem is quite relevant in light of the task set before the bodies of internal affairs in reducing the number of crimes and administrative offenses committed in public places. The introduction of new technologies in the life of the security of citizens´ public places and optimization of police activity in this area require qualitative study of public opinion on this issue, which will carry out certain adjustments to law enforcement agencies on one of the key areas of their work.


Author(s):  
Tariq Khairallah

Digital Evidence is considered as an important type of evidence in many legal cases. Many legislations have dedicated laws to the collection, handling and admissibility of digital evidence. New technologies and new devices are rapidly being developed, which creates new sources of digital evidence. This presents a challenge to law enforcement agencies and digital investigators to stay up to date with the rapid development in the digital field. This paper discusses a relatively new source of digital evidence which is the evidence extracted from Wearable devices. A Fitbit fitness tracker is one of the most common wearable devices used by many people today. This paper presents a case study whereby data extracted from a Fitbit was used as a digital evidence. The admissibility and the challenges of using Wearables as digital evidence is also discussed.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rushin ◽  
Griffin Edwards

102 Cornell Law Review 721 (2017)Critics have long claimed that when the law regulates police behavior it inadvertently reduces officer aggressiveness, thereby increasing crime. This hypothesis has taken on new significance in recent years as prominent politicians and law enforcement leaders have argued that increased oversight of police officers in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri has led to an increase in national crime rates. Using a panel of American law enforcement agencies and difference-in-difference regression analyses, this Article tests whether the introduction of public scrutiny or external regulation is associated with changes in crime rates. To do this, this Article relies on an original dataset of all police departments that have been subject to federally mandated reform under 42 U.S.C. § 14141 — the most invasive form of modern American police regulation. This Article finds that the introduction of § 14141 regulation was associated with a statistically significant uptick in some crime rates, relative to unaffected municipalities. This uptick in crime was concentrated in the years immediately after federal intervention and diminished over time. This finding suggests that police departments may expe- rience growing pains when faced with external regulation.


1975 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rafky

The highly emotional issue of racial discrimination in hiring by law enforcement agencies is examined. Circumstances that make this topic both salient and problematic are discussed, and a conceptual model is presented which outlines barriers to the em ployment of blacks in predominantly white police departments. Barriers are classified according to purpose (whether intentional or unintentional) and location (within the individual police officer, the law enforcement organization, or other social institution). The literature concerning all these obstacles is reviewed and data are presented which bear on one phase of this model—namely, barriers that are unintentional and departmental. The principal finding is that white officers, irrespective of racial beliefs, are un willing to relinquish certain role behaviors to black officers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (6-7) ◽  
pp. 536-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Lum ◽  
Heather Vovak

Arrest for minor offenses has become one tool that some police departments employ to fight crime and disorder in their jurisdictions. Dubbed by some as “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” policing, a few police agencies in the 1990s and 2000s notably and significantly increased their use of arrest for such misdemeanors, such as New York City and Baltimore. But was this the case for other law enforcement agencies in the United States? Our analysis is the first to examine long-term trends in the use of misdemeanor arrests in a sample of U.S. law enforcement agencies using group-based trajectory modeling. Results show that police agencies have distinct longitudinal patterns of use of arrests for minor crimes from 1990 to 2013; some agencies significantly increased their use of arrests for minor crimes while others did not. Further analysis of possible explanations for agency membership in any given longitudinal trajectory found that agencies with similar patterns in their use of misdemeanor arrests were not similar on demographic or crime characteristics. This finding suggests that the decision to increase the use of arrest for minor offenses may have been a policy choice by agencies influenced by factors not detected here.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley K. Farmer ◽  
Allen Copenhaver

PurposeThis study, a content analysis, aims to analyze general communications from law enforcement via agency websites about the COVID-19 pandemic and how this affected police roles. The authors study the extent to which police departments used their websites to inform the public about COVID-19, changes to their policies and additional information they felt necessary to give members of the public. This is important for understanding how the police inform the public during a pandemic and how the pandemic affected their police role.Design/methodology/approachThe data gathered for this project came from a content analysis of the official websites of the largest municipal police departments in the USA. The researchers collected quantitative data from the official websites of law enforcement agencies who serve the 200 largest cities in the USA in March 2020 and coded the information from the websites to determine what themes were most prevalent.FindingsThe messages most often provided on department websites included information about COVID-19 (52% of websites included this information), modifications to services (33%) and informing users that services such as fingerprinting would be altered (42%). Websites also reminded the public of restrictions on public gatherings (25%) and stay-at-home orders (38%). Further logistic regression analyses explored significant associations among these variables to understand how police/public communications influenced the role of law enforcement during the pandemic.Originality/valueLittle is known about how law enforcement communicates online with the public during a global pandemic like COVID-19 or how this might affect the police role. Police departments can use their websites to communicate important information to citizens and keep communities updated. Policy implications suggest that agencies continue to update websites with important information and be direct about expectations from the public regarding compliance while also being transparent about how police roles might change.


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