Week 9_IT and officer safety _Aaron

Policy officers safeguard the public, but who protects our guardian? A working paper coauthored by Dr. Pang and Dr. Pavlou gives an interesting answer, information technology. This research investigated how IT could prevent violence against police officers. Specifically, the authors examined the relationship between IT use by the police and the number of police officers killed or assaulted in the line of duty.

Integrating the literature on IT-enabled organizational capabilities with the criminology, they theorized two mechanisms through which police IT use reduce violence against police officers by developing two key law enforcement capabilities, intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing. The usage of three kinds of IT, analytics technologies, real-time response technologies and the internet, which facilitate such capability building, was hypothesized to make police officers safer.

To test the hypotheses, the authors utilized a large-scale dataset with 3921 police departments in 2 years combining police IT use, other operational information and annual crime statistics and public safety data. Random-effects models, along with negative binomial regressions and spatial auto-correlation models for validity check, provide a consistent and robust results that IT use for crime analysis, dispatch, and the internet is significantly associated with a decreased in the deaths of police officers. This effect is shown to be more pronounced in communities with a higher economic divide.

The paper initiatively builds a link between IT capabilities in organizations with criminology, contributing to the nascent literature on business value of IT in the public sector and broader societal impact of IT. Most importantly, the finding of this paper could be arguably generalized to the significant role of IT in safety of other occupations under unpredictable dangers.