The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has a unique position in the federal government. NIJ is tasked to serve as the national focal point for work on criminal justice technology by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and to conduct programs to “improve the safety and effectiveness of law enforcement technology and improve access to such technology by Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies.” To carry out this mission, NIJ pursues a wide range of activities, from identifying practitioners’ needs to assessing available technology solutions; providing information, liaison, and outreach to enable matching technology applications to priority needs; engaging...

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has a unique position in the federal government. NIJ (specifically, the NIJ Office of Science and Technology [OST]) is tasked to serve as the national focal point for work on criminal justice technology by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (Section 232). NIJ OST is also tasked, in the same section, to conduct programs that “improve the safety and effectiveness of law enforcement technology and improve access to such technology by Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies.” To carry out this mission, NIJ is assigned duties including the following: provide recommendations to the...

Table 2.1 presents the complete list of all information technology needs for law enforcement, generated and prioritized from the studies described in the previous chapter. Needs are presented by technology area (specifically, top technology taxonomy division as shown in Figure 1.1), in alphabetical order:

Facility Operations Technologies

Information Analysis

Information Collection (Including Surveillance)

Information Delivery (Including Communications)

Information Management (Including Information-Sharing)

Management/Knowledge Development and Training

Personnel Clothing, Protection, or Augmentation

Weapons and Force.

Within technology-area tables, needs are sorted first by technology class (again, coming from the technology taxonomy) and then by priority, with higher-ranked needs presented first. That said,...

All of the needs described in the previous chapter can be thought of as “individual recommendations,” in that all are drawn from direct practitioner input or technical studies and might inform a funder’s or developer’s decisions about which S&T efforts to pursue next. In this concluding chapter, we take a more holistic approach, looking across the needs to identify patterns and develop some overarching recommendations that come from the identified needs as a group.

We identify major themes in the law enforcement IT needs, and we also summarize, in general, what has been done related to these themes to date...