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High-Priority Technology Needs: Enabling Informed Decision-Making

Through collaboration and consultation with practitioners, NIJ has identified high-priority technology needs for the criminal justice field, including the following aimed at enabling informed decisionmaking:

• Effective and instantaneous, user-transparent, operable and interoperable voice, data and multimedia communications under all circumstances, including:
  • Wired or wireless networks.
  • Vehicular (including aerial) or foot-mobile.
  • In areas with limited or no terrestrial communications infrastructure.
  • At the dynamic data rates needed for effective law enforcement operations, including video transfer.
  • Mobile hybrid technology for wireless broadband data that seamlessly locates the best route and operational band under any circumstances, across multiple networks with varying attributes.
  • Advanced in-building communications that do not rely on pre-existing systems.
• Improved spatial analysis tools and technologies, including:
  • Improved data management and analytical tools compatible with the mobile and handheld computing devices used by criminal justice agencies.
  • Tools to analyze the geographical linkages of relationships among people, groups and organizations of interest to criminal justice agencies.
  • Exploratory spatial and temporal data analysis visualization tools that examine data in new and unique ways or that extend current capabilities of exploiting crime-related databases.
  • Mapping tools that make geo-coded data available and compatible with the mobile and handheld computing devices used by law enforcement.
  • Tools that provide 3-D geo-coding and mapping for large buildings, including those with no electronic computer-aided design files.
  • Tools that identify and extract relationships hidden in large, complex, law enforcement agency datasets and implement crime theories in a geographic information system environment.
• Affordable and open-source tools that can analyze data across databases and domains received through federated queries to create informed information-led intelligence.
• “Intelligent” automated solutions that can predict and deter potential criminal activity by correlating patterns of behavior and anomalies in that behavior from multiple data sources, including:
  • Databases.
  • Real-time video and audio surveillance.
  • Real-time geospatial tracking data.
  • Social networking.
• Better solutions to the effective integration and management of sensor systems in law enforcement command and control systems.
• Automated case management and communications systems that can be used by officers and offenders to track compliance with conditions of release and prompt necessary action.
• Proactive, targeted, location-based notification and distribution of alerts to officers.