Thin Blue Lie by Matt Stroud

Author:Matt Stroud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER 5

A DIFFERENT WORLD

The beginning of the twenty-first century was a time of swift change in the way everyone—including law enforcement—related to computers and technology. Commerce on the Internet was booming and Silicon Valley’s wave of dot-com companies increasingly played a role in ordinary people’s everyday lives, as a generation of entrepreneurs set about devising technological solutions to problems large and small.

Expanding the role of technology in the law enforcement market, however, would be far more difficult than in the consumer market. Even though plenty of cops were intrigued by the potential applications for technology in their work, the layers of bureaucracy within police departments made it time consuming and labor intensive to adopt new tools on any significant level. Some police chiefs undertook experiments, but generally speaking, if they wanted to try out new tools, they would have to either arrange for trial runs in which the companies would provide the technology for free, or obtain federal grants, which involved an arduous process. Smaller and midsize regional departments were hesitant to invest their cities’ money in new technology on any consequential scale unless the tech had already been endorsed by the country’s most prominent police leaders—the ones overseeing big budgets and big departments.

The development of technology in police work, therefore, would be largely determined by a partnership of business leaders and prominent police officials in large, influential jurisdictions. Ultimately, despite the best efforts of companies including Tasertron and Taser International to market their products in innovative new ways to law enforcement, it would be the decisions of two men in two of the country’s biggest departments that would blaze the path for the era of high-tech policing.

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