Recommendations For Improvements To US Local Police Departments
Nowadays almost all agencies dealing with public protection have adopted the most recent technology to help them carry out their jobs more efficiently. These agencies are able to transmit pictures of suspects, films of crime scenes, fingerprints, criminal proceedings, announcements and close watch footages. In the US, Federal Bureau of Investigation Officers and other bodies have adopted this reactive technology. It is however surprising that local police in the ground have no idea how technology such as radio technology works leave alone intricate technologies. It is evident that even as other security agencies adopt technology at alarming rates, in the police especially at the local level technologies are not being utilized to the maximum. Though most departments of the US police have recent communication and radio technologies, they are not able to relay messages beyond certain location boundaries. The radio systems in different boundaries are unsuited; this renders the local police’s capacity to respond to incidents poor. In case of serious disasters that need coordination with forces of other geographic regions, the emergency response local police teams fail terribly (Smith & Tolman, 2000). Communicating across long distances requires more sophisticated technologies such as use of runners or gadgets like hand signals to covey the messages. Interoperability in these local police stations is therefore compromised.
Apart from radio technology, these police departments also miss out on more technological advancements that could see patrol police officers communicate better to their stations when in the field and perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively. Language translators are examples of technologies that are needed by the police at street level. Local police patrols involve victims and witnesses who speak different languages with the police and if they had these translators, police would easily understand claims from people speaking different languages and hence perform effectively. The old way that is still used of involving people as translators is not reliable; it should be replaced by machine translation and internet operator translation which is less biased. Though machine translation is costly, very soon it will be an affordable communication tool.
Despite drug peddling being prevalent in the streets, patrol officers are having a hard time discriminating suspicious powders; this would not be true if officers utilized laser technology as it is able to reconstruct the formula of these suspicious compounds hence reducing the time wasted going back to the station for identification and increasing the daily throughputs. Specific drugs such as marijuana can also be identified with the recent thermal imager know-how; marijuana plants leave surrounding ground turned; vegetation around is also usually cleared to allow absorption of nutrients and water.
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