Coordinating, unifying, and surveying law enforcement organizations in the United States is an undertaking fraught with difficulties. There are roughly 18,000 state and local police departments (PDs) in the nation, in addition to dozens of federal law enforcement authorities, plus court systems and correctional facilities at the local, state, and federal level.¹ No one governance body sits at the top of them all, many have overlapping jurisdictions, and each is responsible to a different constituency. Indeed, it is worth remembering the original intent of the framers of the Constitution in granting state and local governments their own criminal justice organizations...

The results of this report are derived from a qualitative analysis of focus groups and interviews with the criminal justice community conducted by RAND’s liaison and outreach staff. As is typical for qualitative analysis studies (see, for example, Grudens-Shuck, Allen, and Larson, 2004), the results are intended to surface agencies’ information and analytic technology needs.¹ As will be seen, the results were consistent enough across agencies to make initial assessments of prevalence, as well.

Table 2.1 lists the organizations that participated in an interview, along with their respective state and the number of sworn officers employed. We interviewed representatives from...

Three main themes became apparent from the interview and focus group results:

The most-cited technology priorities were for basic IT knowledge management systems (notably records management systems [RMS]), basic communications infrastructure, and, to a lesser extent, camera systems.

There is a strong and consistent need to address procurement issues, especially reducing the end-to-end lifecycle costs of these major systems and improving the interoperability of IT systems. Further, respondents commonly stated that NIJ should play a leading role in improving interoperability.

Respondents consistently relied heavily on law enforcement associations (e.g., police chiefs’ associations) to gain information on new technologies and to...

The CoE liaison and outreach team’s results offer the following conclusions:

In making technology investment decisions, NIJ and federal, academic, and commercial technology providers should note that the most frequently reported priorities were to improve access to knowledge management capabilities, specifically RMS, and basic communications infrastructure. While some departments desired improved capabilities, the emphasis from interviewees was primarily on making these technologies more affordable over the lifetime of the equipment. Cameras and surveillance systems are a lower, but still important, priority.

Value criteria to help shape priority decisions include low direct cost, low lifecycle cost, and interoperability. Participants frequently stated...