How the use of computerized crime mapping was affected by characteristics of law enforcement agencies in 2007

With the development of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), law enforcement agencies, especially police departments, use computers and information systems to assist them in doing crime analysis and criminal justice research. Previous studies about factors affecting adoption and early usage of several HCI technologies have helped criminal justice researchers to understand how and why certain law enforcement agencies use those technologies while others do not. The goal of this study is to investigate factors that affect the usage of computerized crime technology. It relies on statistics of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The BJS conducts surveys every three or four years to obtain a national representative sample of state and local law enforcement agencies. In this research, I examined the surveys, which had been distributed in 2007. The data were analyzed to identify a relationship between different variables of law enforcement agencies that address the usage factors of computerized crime mapping. Based on the existing literature and research, this paper builds a theoretical model that relies on the path analysis method to describe the dependencies among the endogenous variables and exogenous variables. This model is the foundation of the proposed hypotheses. The correlation analysis, path analysis, and regression analysis were used to test the independent variables\u27 predictive powers. The results of this research underpin a suggestion to utilize computerized crime mapping; law enforcement agencies should focus on increasing number of full-time paid employees, providing academy training, assigning patrol officers to specific areas/beats, and updating technology frequently to support the analysis of community problems