It's a situation where, if I was selling the product, I'd probably go with the 'Wow' factor combined with a "Who can put a value on the life of one child saved?" pitch.
And not mention the "Oh, and it also picks up private conversations on the street" aspect unless asked.
From Government Technology Magazine, Jan./Feb., 2019:
Drones. AI. Bodycams. Is Technology Making Us Safer?
Across the country, law enforcement agencies are using emerging tech to gather an unprecedented amount of data to drive down crime statistics. But are their efforts actually making a difference?
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio looks at data from ShotSpotter's gunfire tracking technology.
In 2017, the Chicago Police Department created six high-tech police hubs located throughout the city’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods. Dubbed “Strategic Decision Support Centers,” the hubs are a blend of human expertise and high-end technology, including surveillance cameras, gunshot detection platforms, predictive mapping and data analytics.
Since the centers went live, crime in adjacent neighborhoods has gone down. In two of the districts that have had some of the city’s highest crime rates, the decline in crime rates has been so significant, the numbers are helping to drive down the city’s overall crime numbers. “Before this project started, I would have said there’s no way technology can have this kind of impact,” said Jonathan Lewin, chief of CPD’s Bureau of Technical Services. “But it does.”
Chicago’s experience highlights the advances that law enforcement has made not just in adopting new, high-tech crime-fighting tools, but also with integrating the various tools, systems and platforms and then turning massive amounts of data into intelligence that can make cities safer. Some of Chicago’s technology has been around for a while. Some of it is new. What’s different is how CPD has optimized and integrated it with human experts, according to Lewin. “There’s a daily intelligence cycle we didn’t have before that leverages all of this information,” he said.
But, as experts will tell you, it’s too simplistic to suggest that technology is solving the country’s crime problem. “Technology is a piece of a larger puzzle, and so you can have the greatest piece of technology, but if you don’t implement it well, it’s not going to have its intended effect,” said Dave McClure, a research associate at the Urban Institute. “The good news is that the police are getting better at turning data into useful information.”
Crime is down; tech spending is up
For anyone who remembers the surge in crime, especially murders, during the 1970s and ’80s, the precipitous drop in the crime rate over the past 25 years is nothing short of remarkable. The national crime rate peaked in 1991 at 5,856 crimes per 100,000 people, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. By 2016, the overall crime rate had declined to 2,857 offenses per 100,000, less than half of what it was in 1991. While some cities have seen increases in violent crime and murder in recent years, there is no evidence that the public safety gains of the past 25 years are being reversed, according to the center.
During this period of declining crime rates, city budgets for policing have steadily grown. In 1977, state and local governments spent $58 billion on police and corrections, according to the Urban Institute. Today, the U.S. spends $100 billion on policing and another $80 billion on corrections, according to a 2017 report from Statista, an online statistics and market research firm.
What individual cities spend on policing varies significantly. Oakland, Calif., spends 41 percent of its general fund on policing, while New York City spends a modest 8.2 percent on law enforcement, according to Statista. Whatever the policing expenditure, city and county law enforcement agencies have increased their investments in technology. Globally, law enforcement agencies are expected to spend $11.6 billion on software tools and systems, according to MarketsandMarkets, an online B2B market research firm. Spending is expected to grow at an annual rate of 9.3 percent, reaching $18.1 billion by 2023.
While figures on what U.S. local and state governments spend on policing technology are hard to come by, the global growth in law enforcement tech spending has been driven by evolving policies that focus on community policing and by advances in software for mapping, various types of surveillance and analytics. For cities that can afford the new policing technology, it’s the dawning of a new era.
Today’s PD: A big data organization
When Maggie Goodrich was CIO for Public Safety with the city of Los Angeles, the joke was that the Los Angeles Police Department was a big data company disguised as a law enforcement agency. “We are inundated with data,” she said. Goodrich, who is now chair of the Public Safety Technology Alliance, pointed out that the key to making sense of the burgeoning data is distilling it down and deciding what’s important in the moment. Doing that won’t be easy, however. Policing data continues to pile up, thanks to technology that’s better and faster than ever....MORE
