Summary
With declining revenues over the past five years, cities and states in the United States have sought to limit the growth, and
in many cases reduce the budgets, of their police forces. This budget tightening has presented police chiefs and city administrators
with challenging questions about how to deliver public safety more efficiently. In many jurisdictions, chiefs have
adopted new technologies intended to reduce manpower costs as one strategy for meeting this challenge. To examine the
cost-effectiveness of some of these strategies, RAND researchers developed a model describing how information technology
and policing activities work together to produce key policing outcomes. They then conducted some exploratory analyses
of this model and described what would be needed to test relationships between information technology investments and
outcomes formally.