From Response to Foresight: Managing Knolwedge and Integrated Criminal Justice (original) (raw)

From Response to Foresight: Managing Knowledge and Integrated Criminal Justice

In this paper,we report on our ongoing,study of integrated criminal justice systems. Our focus here is on theorizing the nature ofand arrangements among the policy issues, operational activities, and technical architectures to support knowledge sharing among personnel,and across geographic,and organizational boundaries. Here we draw on data from a comparative case study across three sites to report three findings. First, the aged computing,infrastructures and dated technologies,severely constrain the ability of criminal justice organizations,to leverage information,and communications,technologies to support information sharing. Second, in contrast, criminal justice organizations have developed,sophisticated,work practices tosupport,officer’s data collection and information sharing. Third, we note the central role that dispatch plays in information sharing and knowledge,transfer among,criminal justice personnel. Keywords:integrated criminal justice, knowledge sharing, knowledge-based...

Interorganizational Information Integration in the Criminal Justice Enterprise: Preliminary Lessons from State and County Initiatives

2005

Traditional governmental structures have organized the capture, use, and management of information along agency lines. These "information silos" are not very useful in a dynamic environment. Information integration is considered one of the most significant ways to change the structure and function of public organizations. It has the potential to support the transformation of organizational structures and communication channels between and among multiple agencies working in different locations. This article contributes to this knowledge-building effort by examining the factors that influenced the success of selected criminal justice integration initiatives. Useful integration strategies are also identified.

Law Enforcement’s Information Sharing Infrastructure

Police Quarterly, 2013

The September 11 attacks impacted society generally, and law enforcement specifically, in dramatic ways. One of the major trends has been changing expectations regarding criminal intelligence practices among state, local, and tribal (SLT) law enforcement agencies and the need to coordinate intelligence efforts and share information at all levels of government. In fact, enhancing intelligence efforts has emerged as a critical issue for the prevention of all threats and crimes. To date, an increasing number of SLT law enforcement agencies have expanded their intelligence capacity, and there have been fundamental changes in the national, state, and local information sharing infrastructure. Moreover, critical to these expanding information sharing expectations is the institutionalization of fusion centers (FCs). Despite these dramatic changes, an expanding role, and the acknowledgement that local law enforcement intelligence is critical to the prevention and deterrence of threats and cr...

E PLURIBUS UNUM: DATA AND OPERATIONS INTEGRATION IN THE CALIFORNIA CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

The Stanford Criminal Justice Center (SCJC) recently completed a series of Executive Sessions with state and local officials about integrated criminal justice in California, exploring the ways in which the hundreds of disparate criminal justice agencies across the state might share information and coordinate activity, cooperating across jurisdictional and agency lines to promote common public safety goals. An integrated criminal justice system, one where information is readily available to agencies when they need it, has several potential advantages: it can promote more efficient use of resources by avoiding duplication of effort; provide greater transparency to policymakers, regulatory agencies, and the public; and produce the evidence necessary to illustrate ways in which existing policies can be improved. While integration is a crucial part of the future of criminal justice, integration itself is an increasingly important issue in its own right, particularly as governments tackle complex problems that do not confine themselves to particular geographic or jurisdictional areas (e.g. environmental pollution). As with criminal justice, tackling these problems also requires massive amounts of information and inter-agency and inter-jurisdictional coordination. Some lessons from the integrated criminal justice context might be relevant here: the importance of agreeing on common metrics, the challenge of getting individual agencies to think about how their information and interventions might be reused, and the importance of ensuring that any proposed changes take ordinary business practices into account. Integrated criminal justice can, at a minimum, illustrate the issues that are likely to arise.

Coordinating criminal justice : A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of inter-organisational information sharing across four EU Member States

2015

Qualitative-comparative analysis of four cases of inter-organisational information sharing in criminal justice chains demonstrates the causal asymmetry between successful and unsuccessful inter-organisational information sharing. While unsuccessful information sharing requires poor project management, successful information sharing also requires compatible technologies which are implemented either by means of a small-scale, bottom-up approach to standardization or a top-down, centralised architecture. By triggering the radical restructuring of information-sharing workflows, good project management and compatible technologies set in motion underlying mechanisms that generate successful inter-organisational information sharing. Implications are discussed by highlighting the role of coordination by technological feedback in a context of increasing digitization.

Organising Data Exchange in the Dutch Criminal Justice Chain

Transylvanian review of administrative sciences, 2009

Effective exchange of information in the criminal justice chain is crucial for effective law enforcement, but difficult to achieve. This article describes the case of the development and introduction of electronic data exchange in the Dutch Criminal Justice chain. Basic theories on the introduction of IT in justice organizations are tested by means of qualitative empirical research. Case flow management automation is technically feasible in the criminal justice chain but presupposes willingness of different organizations attached to that chain to adapt working processes for that purpose. The Dutch case shows a relative failure of the development and implementation of an integrated case flow management system for the entire chain (from the police via the public prosecutions office and the courts up to the prison service). It also shows a relative success of connecting xml-based data files to different reference indexes using intelligent agent software. Compared to the intended integr...

Investigating the Determinants of Inter-Organizational Information Sharing Within Criminal Justice: A Context-Mechanism-Outcome Approach

Journal of Information Technology

Focusing on inter-organizational information sharing in criminal justice, it is found that, while poor project management leads to unsuccessful inter-organizational information sharing, a recipe for success is more demanding as it requires both compatible technologies and good project management implemented either by means of a top-down approach of strategic alignment or an emergent approach of bottom-up alignment. Though unplanned, the latter approach may lead to mistakes that are more correctable than the large mistakes stemming from top-down, deliberate planning. The study is an analysis of context-mechanism-outcome configurations of inter-organizational information sharing activities within criminal justice systems and demonstrates the causal asymmetry between positive and negative cases. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed by highlighting the causal role of different types of governance structure in a crisp-set configurational fashion.

Coordinating criminal justice: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of inter-organisational information sharing of four EU Member States

Qualitative-comparative analysis of four cases of inter-organisational information sharing in criminal justice chains demonstrates the causal asymmetry between successful and unsuccessful inter-organisational information sharing. While unsuccessful information sharing requires poor project management, successful information sharing also requires compatible technologies which are implemented either by means of a small-scale, bottom-up approach to standardization or a top-down, centralised architecture. By triggering the radical restructuring of information-sharing workflows, good project management and compatible technologies set in motion underlying mechanisms that generate successful inter-organisational information sharing. Implications are discussed by highlighting the role of coordination by technological feedback in a context of increasing digitization.