Cis500 Week 2 Assignment

Today, the world is experiencing significant technological revaluation at the main part of which is the information technology. There is a general belief that information technology eases and contributes to many aspects of our life (Nunn & Quinet, 2002). And new technologies has drastically changed our way of life to include attitudes, thoughts, perceptions and community at large. In particular, Information Technology has transformed our big world into a global village. Unlike the traditional means of law enforcement, in this case through street patrols, the adoption of Information Technology has brought a tremendous improvement to the law enforcement community and hugely impacted crime rate. In the past, random patrolling of the streets were carried out without proper organization with regards to insight, predictions of crime activities and the nature thereof. The use of IT in law enforcement centers around predictive policing which is the term used to describe “any policing strategy or tactic that develops and uses information and advanced analysis to inform forward-thinking crime prevention”. (Predictive Policing Symposium, 2010). Predictive policing focuses on some strategies which will be used in the remaining of this paper to address the comparison and cotrast of the use IT in policing versus random street patrols, how Inormation Systems have allowed police departments that implement tools such as COMPSTAT to respond to crime faster, and implementing the SWOT analysis on behalf of police departments that intend to implement predictive policing.
Some of the strategies to be discussed are: integrated information and operations, seeing the big picture, cutting-edge analysis and technology, linkage to performance, adaptability to changing conditions. There are a very large number of ways technology used to implement these strategies: Patrol staffing and resource allocation, time and location of future incidence in a crime pattern, identifying individuals

References: • Predictive Policing Symposium (2012) Technical Breakout http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/strategies/predictive-policing/symposium/technical-breakout.htm • Zink, Robert (2004) The PBA Magazine: The Trouble with CompStat http://www.nycpba.org/publications/mag-04-summer/compstat.html • Turban / Volonino (2011) Information Technology for Management: Improving Strategic and Operational Performance 8th Edition • Godown, Jeff (2012) The Police Chief, The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement: The CompStat Process: Four Principles for Managing Crime Reduction http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_archHYPERLINK • Willis, J. J., Weisburd, D., Mastrofski, S. D., & ), P. F. (2004). Compstat in practice, an in-depth analysis of three cities. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/112730142/Willis-Et-Al-2004-Compstat-in-Practice