Law Enforcement Forces Strive For Transparency

Law Enforcement Forces Strive For Transparency

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

The shaky relationship between citizens and law enforcement services, especially the police, is causing constant pressure between the need to win the public’s trust and the fact that often, arrests turn out to be false. Lately, there is a trend of opening more and more databases to the public in order to make the police department’s work more transparent to the citizens whom it serves. The concept of the citizens being clients is starting to become common among law enforcement agencies. Police forces in some cities in the U.K. as well as in the United States have begun to reveal information which, up until recently, was confidential.

The police force in the city of Oakland, California, has recently launched a unique application which allows the public to get information about crime across the city in real-time using an interactive map on the city’s internet website. A city official says that this internet application was developed as an answer to constant requests by residents to receive information about crime near their homes. This way, if case some incident has occured somewhere around the city, residents can check the city’s website and know why police cars and police officers are near their place of residence – all this in real-time. This special internet service includes all the cases once they have been declared closed, as well as the number of emergency calls made to the 911 dispatch.

On top of opening databases to the public online, the Oakland police force has developed an internal information sharing software to be used by officers of the city through which they can synchronize information gathered in all the shifts, to understand the situation better and respond more efficiently. The success of this new information sharing platform in the police force will perhaps get other emergency and rescue services to adopt this perceptual change, to achieve a win-win situation: emergency staff will deal with situations and go back to the station faster, and citizens will enjoy better personal security.

Subscribe to our newsletter.