Technologies for Police Patrol Improvement Strategies (Essay Sample)

Technologies for police patrol improvement strategies
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Introduction
Technology has improved tremendously in this century. Computer technology, in particular, has proliferated almost all areas of social life with positive impacts. The police service, however, remains one of the areas that technology adoption has lagged as compared to other sectors of the society. This calls for a critical look at the possibilities to impact the police force positively using technology. In the next sections, the use of decision support systems to improve police patrol strategies will be evaluated to assess their effectiveness for the application.
Literature review
Decision support system
Decision support systems refers to a set of technological tools used to support the decision-making process of organizations. They typically comprise of complex algorithms that process input data to make predictions that can then be used for decision making. In the context of police patrol strategies, the technologies could be used to make predictions of vital policing aspects such as crime rates or the police resources required. The information can then be used to come up with more improved strategies.
Basis for adopting decision support systems
Several pieces of research have come up in the recent past to demonstrate the usability of decision supports systems to improve police patrol strategies. Perhaps the most relevant of these is one by Thompson (2016). This research looks at whether the whole idea of predictive policing to improve law enforcement initiatives is noble. This question should be answered first before thinking of deploying predictive technologies such as decision support system in the police force. The researcher notes that the concept of predictive policing is a recent idea in law enforcement and has, therefore, not received much rigorous analysis to assess its effectiveness. His research on the subjects adopts qualitative and quantitative techniques. His concludes that predictive policing is a much more efficient way to police societies as compared to traditional approaches. This research provides sufficient justification to deploy decision support systems to improve policing strategies such as patrol strategies.
Examples of decision support systems to improve patrol strategies
Camacho-Collados et al. (2015) developed one such decision support system and compared the results from using the system to those when such as a system was absent. The researchers developed a multi-criteria police districting problem for patrol sectors in Spain. Key attributes needed for effective patrol strategies were identified and incorporated into the problem. They include the target area, the level of risk, and compactness. The problem was them solved using an algorithm. The technology was deployed in the Central district of Madrid in Spain. The solutions suggested by the algorithm proved to be better than those made by public safety coordinators in the city. This case