The Law Enforcement Futuring Workshop, which was held at the RAND Corporation’s Arlington, Virginia, offices from July 22 to 25, 2014, was a key part of a research effort funded by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to assess and prioritize technology needs across the criminal justice community. Complementing previous research that focused on problems that arecurrentlyfaced by law enforcement agencies (Hollywood et al., 2015), this workshop was a visioning exercise to explore the range of possiblefuturelaw enforcement methods and operations that may be enabled by, or may be required to respond...

Three different types of methods were used during this workshop: (1) scenario development and analysis as a structured way to describe possible futures (Schwartz, 1991); (2) the “Three Horizons” visioning method (Curry and Hodgson, 2008), which was used to generate scenarios and associated technology needs; and (3) a Delphi consensus generation method (Gordon, 2009), which was used to prioritize the technology needs. The workshop agenda (Appendix A) was organized so that all participants met initially to frame the discussion of law enforcement futures, three separate breakout groups then developed scenarios and lists of technology needs, and all participants heard reports...

This chapter describes the future law enforcement scenarios developed at the workshop. While the three breakout groups independently developed sets of scenarios, these shared many common aspects. In the following, we have integrated the work of the three groups into a single set of workshop scenarios. An important caveat accompanying these scenarios is that they are at a generic level, whereas law enforcement agencies differ greatly in size, location, capabilities, resources, and political realities. The scenarios we present below are by necessity drawn at a high level that averages over all of these factors. Individual agencies might well be in...

After developing the scenarios described in the previous chapter, workshop breakout groups considered the pathways described there and how technology, or law enforcement practice, training, education, or policy related to technology, might enable or hinder those paths. They then identified technology needs based on the roles of technology described in Chapter Three that, if addressed, could enable movement toward the desirable scenarios described there, and/or prevent movement toward the undesirable ones or mitigate their effects. For example, the branching scenario shown in Figure 3.7 would be enabled by (1) effective communication among law enforcement and between law enforcement and the...

During this workshop, after considering a broad range of societal and technology trends (as discussed in Chapter One), the participants conceived, discussed, and debated the characteristics and desirability of many different possible futures for law enforcement. Again, the first two research questions that participants considered were

1. How might technology and society evolve in the future?

2. How might the evolution of technology and society affect the use of technology by law enforcement?

For these questions, participants envisioned continued technology development and societal adoption and adaptation, and agreed that law enforcement agencies need substantial improvement in their ability to use...