By Rick Muir

This report, produced in partnership with Virgin Media O2 Business, provides a strategic roadmap for police forces to make the most of digital systems, data and technology. It addresses the challenges with using technology, including upgrading outdated technology and unifying data management systems – both of which will be critical to modernisation.

We found that police forces are grappling with outdated legacy systems, complex procurement procedures, fragmented data-sharing, and a lack of digital knowledge and skills at all levels of policing. These challenges are stifling the full potential of data, digital and technology to transform modern policing.

With expertise from an advisory panel of leaders across national policing, the report makes a number of recommendations to enable officers to work more efficiently and use data to empower them with real-time insights:

• Develop a national strategy for interoperability enabling all 43 police forces to integrate their technology and share data.

• Invest in modern, scalable technology to transition from outdated systems to cloud-based platforms, real-time data and AI insights.

• Change the leadership culture to promote technological literacy at senior and executive leadership levels, ensuring that decision-makers understand the benefits of innovation and act accordingly.

London: Police Foundation, 2024. 28p.

By John S. Hollywood, Dulani Woods, Samuel Peterson, Michael J. D. Vermeer, Brian A. Jackson

Deficiencies in the quality and interoperability of law enforcement data have been identified as major problems that hamper law enforcement decisionmaking and operations. Data governance and data management (DG/DM) can address these issues by improving the quality and shareability of data. On behalf of the National Institute of Justice, the Police Executive Research Forum and RAND convened a panel to identify the most-pressing needs to leverage DG/DM knowledge to enable major improvements in the quality, availability, and interoperability of law enforcement data.

The panelists identified five themes: improving law enforcement's DG/DM capabilities; improving protections on law enforcement data; improving community participation in data decisionmaking; developing novel data and processes to support broad, multiagency conceptions of community safety; and improving the value of traditional law enforcement data. The panelists rated the problems and potential solutions they described to identify a set of high-priority needs for improving the quality and integrity of community safety data for law enforcement agencies and all other agencies and groups involved in the community safety enterprise. These needs and supporting context are described in this report. The highest-priority theme emerging from the workshop was using DG/DM to improve community safety data protections in various ways, including developing guidelines, core processes, training, and guidance for agencies to work with vendors and improving community participation in data decisionmaking.

RAND - Sep. 11, 2024

By Elda Celislami, Stephen Kastoryano, Giovanni Mastrobuoni:

Police accountability is essential to uphold the social contract. Monitoring the monitors is, however, not without difficulty. This paper reveals how police departments exploit specific laws surrounding death investigations to facilitate the underreporting of police killings. Our results show that US counties in which law enforcement can certify the cause of death, including counties which appoint the sheriff as the lead death investigator, display 46% more underreported police killings than their comparable adjacent counties. Drawing on a novel adapted-LATE potential outcomes framework, we demonstrate that underreported police killings are most often reclassified as 'circumstances undetermined' homicides. We also show that law enforcement agencies in counties with permissive death certification laws withhold more homicide reports from the public. The main underreporting results are primarily driven by underreporting of White and Hispanic deaths in our analysis sample, with the effect on Hispanic people particularly pronounced along the US-Mexico border. We do not find that excess underreported killings are associated with more violence directed towards police. We do, however, note a nationwide positive correlation between the permissiveness of gun-laws and underreported police killings. In addition, we find more underreporting in counties which have both high per-capita Google searches for Black Lives Matter and which allow law enforcement to certify the cause of death. Our results do not indicate that other differences in death investigation systems - coroner vs. medical examiner, appointed vs. elected, or physician vs. non-physician - affect the underreporting of police killings.

Bonn, Germany:  IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2023. 72p.