Here's a look at the products that caught our eye at this year's International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) show held at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Can you predict the future? Some agencies are finding that you can by using tools that enable them to perform predictive policing, which is defined as the use of mathematical, predictive, and analytical techniques in law enforcement to identify and disrupt criminal activity.
Predictive policing is the computerized analysis of historical crime data from databases, record management systems, and other digital sources. Agencies have achieved a lot of great results using this tool, but experts say law enforcement agencies have just begun to scratch the surface of what the technology can do.
There's the stuff that you would expect to see at any law enforcement exposition and there's the stuff that seems to have dropped out of a science fiction movie. And all of it has the potential to be important to what you do in contemporary policing.
By analyzing crime data, the PredPol tool maps “hot spots” identifying when and where crimes are most likely to occur.
Emergency response software has been created to help first responders use resources and tactics to handle a wide range of critical incidents. Although software itself is hardly a silver bullet that will crush a terrorist event, its capabilities are nevertheless reassuring.