Week 9 – Pang and Pavlou 2017 – Joe

Pang, M.-S. and Pavlou, P.A. (2017) “Armed with Technology – Preventing Fatal Shootings by the Police,” A Working Paper.

The trust between the police and the public in many U.S. cities is more acrimonious than ever before since the Chicago shooting of Laquan McDonald. While technology, especial IT, has enhanced human’s decision-making process in many fields, we do not have sufficient knowledge of the effectiveness of these technologies, particularly in terms of their role in affecting the use of lethal force on civilians by the police. This study theorizes how technology use for intelligence analyses and access influences a police officer’s decision to use lethal force.

With a panel data merged of fatal shootings from The Washington Post and killedbypolice.net in 2013-2016, the empirical analyses show that both the use of smartphones and the statistical analyses of crime data by U.S. local police departments are associated with a significant decrease in fatal shootings by the police. The authors then explore the moderating effects and find that the positive effect of technology use is more pronounced for armed suspects and among males, the youth, and minorities.

Specifically, the authors use signal detection theory to construct a decision optimization under uncertain, which can be moderated by the use of technology. To address the unobserved heterogeneity caused by the spatial contagion of crimes and violence. The authors utilize a spatial panel autoregressive GLS Model, which allow the residual of a random effects model spatially correlated, to validate the main hypothesis that the technology can lead to a decrease in fatal shootings by the police. To test the moderating effects in hypothesis 2, the authors conduct subsample analysis with a SUR random effects model.

This study contributes to the Information Systems (IS) literature by 1) demonstrating the significant role of technology use in highly uncertain and violent environments, 2) uncovering the nuanced effects of technology use that vary by gender, age, and ethnicity, and 3) enhancing our understanding of how IT creates value for an organization in uncertain and life-threatening environments.