Policing, Technology, and Public Values: A Public Administration Research Agenda

ABSTRACT There is a great deal of research investigating how technologies produce efficiencies for police departments. Criminal justice research often focuses on a single technology and from a single perspective—the police—noting how technologies increase efficiency and efficacy for police departments. Researchers in science and technology studies also investigate how police departments adopt and use technology, but typically focus on the tensions between technologies and society, including potential threats to individual and community privacy and rights. Public administration scholars tend to center their policing research on the tensions between police missions and behavior and the advancement of citizen rights, including privacy, social equity, and fairness, with little to no focus on theories of technology adoption and use. We bring together these three literatures on technology, policing, and public values to investigate how three key stakeholders—the administrative state, the police, and citizens—use technology in the context of policing to achieve public values. We argue public values shape technology adoption and use, and stakeholders use technologies to achieve specific public values. This interactive process is key to understanding technology in policing and variation in the achievement of public value outcomes. We develop a framework for assessing how technology is used in policing to advance public values from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, applying it to the cases of body-worn cameras and predictive policing.