44.493 Issues in Criminal Justice and Technology

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• Cell phones
  • 1985: St. Petersburg, FL used cell phones to send incident reports via modem from laptops. Could "have conversations over the telephone that would have been impossible over police channels, which require brief, cryptic messages. They communicated with other officers, supervisors, detectives, or other agencies, and often talked directly to the citizens. Patrol officers talked to 911 callers while responding to crimes in progress to get clarifying information as they approached the scene. Citizens used them at accident scenes to call family members, and officers used them at crime scenes to coordinate the activities of backup officers. The biggest benefit reported by the officers was that cellular phones saved time. They were more efficient with less assistance from other officers and dispatchers; there was less need for dispatchers to relay information or for other officers to come by, go by or stand by. "(Pilant, 1989).
  • Major changes since this report was written (1998): many more cell phones, plus Wi-Fi, etc., but current devices use bandwidth more efficiently.,
    
• Integrating voice and data transmission, cross-jurisdictional integration
  This was just a vision in 1998 ("With all of this impressive technology, one of the biggest communications problems still remains to be solved - that of law enforcement's inability to communicate across jurisdictions"), now a reality.
  • Examples in recent months:
    • Russet Communications, (Tom Meyer of the company will be a guest speaker in April) recently designed a demonstration program for the state's Southeast region, providing integrated voice-data for 19 communities, which can now share broadband data and video seamlessly.
    • Similarly, the Greater Washington region has an integrated system now, CapWIN -- illustrating Stephenson's Law #1 (they have particularly accute problems because of having to protect the federal government, high crime in DC, and the 2003 sniper case).
    • Florida is launching the first statewide integrated emergency communications system (the first test came in a recent large fire). Again, Florida would be a natural for such a system because of the annual need to coordinate response to hurricanes.
  • Internet Protocol (IP) and Packet-switched communications are critical to this: because they can integrate a wide range of communications.
  • another critical tool will be roll-out of various XML schema specifically for public safety and emergency communications, such as EDXML, because they will allow seamless integration of data from incompatible legacy data bases.

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