Technology advancement in policing have gone through many stages. The first stage (1881-1945) can be attributed to the work of August Vollmer, who increased motor vehicle patrol, established the forensic laboratory and his crime laboratory pioneered the use of polygraphs, this also includes fingerprints and handwriting classification systems. Other technological advancements during this stage are radio and telephone communications. In the second stage (1946-1959), traffic police got a boost with the first piece of technology to measure both speeding violations and the condition of the driver. The third stage (1960-1979) is the stage where police technology truly emerged. Police agencies in this stage had call distribution centers, computerized …show more content…
There are three essential criteria for crime analysis that should be used in police departments. One is timeliness, to understand whether the pattern or trend presented reflects a current problem or issue, or whether it is more representative of a previous situation. There's also relevancy, to understand whether or not the data used in the analysis accurately reflect what is intended. Lastly, there's reliability which is to understand whether the same data, interpreted by different people at different times, would lead to the same conclusions. There's also different types of crime analysis like strategic crime analysis, tactical crime analysis, linkage analysis and target profiling. A major application of crime analysis to policing is the geographic information system (GIS), a software designed for the presentation of geographic data as maps to facilitate analysis possibilities. GIS has revolutionized the practice of electronic crime mapping, a visual display of crime data with a known geographic origin to facilitate pattern recognition and operational decisions. For GIS analysis, any data can be geocoded which is the use of data with a geographic locator as a reference for the purpose of mapping relationships across indicators. There is also CompStat, the strategic and organizational innovation first implemented by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) that includes the regular reporting of precinct commanders to agency top brass, the holding of commanders responsible for the crime in their precincts through timely and accurate information, and the use of GIS mapping to engage in problem-solving efforts for strategic planning. GIS crime mapping became an important tool to both tracking and responding to crime on a neighborhood level. Geographic profiling is the combined