Criminal Tech

William Clay

Criminal Technology from the Past into the Future

Instructor:  Prof:  Brian Danigole

May 30 2011

To do their job, police frequently have looked to technology for enhancing their effectiveness. The advent of fingerprinting in the 1900s and of crime laboratories in the 1920s greatly augmented the police capacity to solve crimes. The introduction of the two-way radio and the widespread use of the automobile in the 1930s multiplied police productivity in responding to incidents.

But progress in technology for the police has often been slow and uneven. A quotation from the President’s Crime Commission in 1967 illustrates how the police at times have lagged behind other sectors in reaping the benefits of technology “The police, with crime laboratories and radio net works, made early use of technology, but most police departments could have been equipped 30 or 40 years ago as well as they are today.”

The Crime Commission was established in the 1960s in response to rapidly rising crime rates and urban disorders. The Commission advocated federal government funding for state and local criminal justice agencies to support their efforts. .It called for what soon became the 911 system for fielding emergency calls and recommended that agencies acquire computers to automate their functions. But even with the start-up help of hundreds of millions of dollars in early federal assistance, computerization came slowly. Only in recent years have many agencies found the use of information technologies significantly helpful. Examples include fingerprinting databases, computerized crime mapping, and records management systems doing everything from inventorying property and cataloging evidence to calculating solvability factors.

Many police technologies are drawn and adapted from the commercial marketplace. Cars, radios, computers, and firearms are examples. But the police have vital needs for special technologies for which there is no easily available source....