This guide by the Institute for Law and Justice provides information that will help police departments measure the effects of information technologies to support community policing activities. The guide is based on the results of an assessment of the COPS Office’s 2002 Making Officer Redeployment Effective (MORE) grantees; however, the results apply to any agency that is considering or has recently made a technology purchase.
The guide is relevant to departments of all sizes and covers a variety of applications—automated field reporting systems, computer aided dispatch, records management systems, and others. The guide focuses on the three E’s–efficiency, effectiveness, and enabling–which identify the different ways the technology may affect agencies. The intent is to provide practical measures based on these three E’s for how information technologies contribute to achieving department goals and can be used to examine the merits of such expenditures.
