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The police have long hoped that technology would ease their most vexing problems. The most important recent innovations in technology involve computers and related software. The police are information dependent and rely on the public as a primary source of information; how the police obtain, process, encode, decode, and use information is critical to understanding their functions. There are at least three types of police information (primary, secondary, and tertiary), intelligence (prospective, retrospective, and applied), and operational strategies (preventive, prospective, and reactive), each of which interacts in a complex fashion with technology. These processes are importantly patterned by police work, especially the role of the patrol officer, and the occupational cultures of policing. Technology is embedded in social organization; it shapes organizations and is shaped by them.
Peter K. Manning (Wed,) studied this question.