Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Police officers perform their duty every day under a constant threat of violence. Every year, as many as 50 police officers in the U.S. lose their lives in the line of duty, and more than 50,000 officers suffer from assaults. An officer’s death is not only tragic on itself but also a tremendous loss to the public, since the community loses the skills, experience, and ties with the public that the officer has accumulated over the years. Therefore, while deterring crimes and keeping the community safe demand police officers’ willingness to assume risks on duty, it is also in the community’s interest to ensure the police officers’ safety.

This study examines how IT helps prevent violence against police officers. Specifically, we examine the relationship between IT use by the police and the number of police officers killed or assaulted in the line of duty. Marrying the literatures from the two disciplines (criminology and information systems), we theorize that police IT use helps develop two key law enforcement capabilities – intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing – which in turn reduce violence against police officers. We consider the use of three types of IT – analytics, in-field technologies, and Internet and argue that IT acts as an enabler for intelligence-led policing and helps the police forge a strong bond and a trust relationship with the community they serve.

We examine the relationship between police IT use and violence against police officers in U.S. local governments. We collected data from three sources –Uniform Crime Reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Law Enforcement Management and Administration Survey from the Department of Justice, and American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. We built a panel dataset from 3,921 police departments in 2003 and 2007 (N = 4,950). We estimate the empirical model with a random-effects estimation with state, metropolitan, and year fixed-effects.

We find that IT use for crime analysis, dispatch, and the Internet is significantly associated with a decrease in deaths of police officers. IT use for dispatch and in-field report writing is related to significantly fewer assaults to officers. In addition, we find that the same use of IT that influences officer deaths – crime analysis, dispatch, and the Internet – is also associated with a substantial decrease in the number of felons killed by police officers, providing credence to our central thesis that IT use affects violence between police officers and criminals. Surprisingly, we find that IT use for crime mapping and hotspot identification is associated with more deaths of both police officers and felons. We interpret that IT use for predictive policing may allow the police to discover a more number of violent crimes that otherwise would have not been reported, leading to more violence against police officers. It is also found that the effect of crime analysis, hotspot identification, and the Internet on deaths of police officers becomes stronger in municipalities with higher income inequality and with larger racial disparity between the police and general population.