Organizational Correlates of Technology Adoption in Municipal U.S. Police Departments

Abstract

This paper examines the organizational and environmental correlates of the adoption of various technologies among 951 municipal police departments in the United States. Using data from the 2016 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, multiple regression models are used to predict measures of police organization, structure, context, and culture on police technology adoption. Several different models, derived from factor analyses, are used to inspect the different kinds of technologies used in law enforcement. The results show that show that while technology has become increasingly widespread in law enforcement, there are still areas for improvement. In particular, there are important differences in the adoption of certain technologies based on the differences in the technologies themselves, as well as the differences in the implementing police departments. Evidence of a resource gap between large and small police agencies is also observed. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.