New Police Technologies: An Exploration of the Social Implications and Unforeseen Impacts of Some Recent Developments*

Whilst developments in military hardware receive critical attention almost as a matter of course, innovations in police technology are only rarely focused upon. In this article an attempt is made to rectify this anomaly by providing a detailed survey of some recent devel-opments in police technologies, as well as directing concern towards the unanticipated consequences associated with their integration into systems of socio-political control. The technology of socio-political control is by definition more or less repressive. Since it appears to offer a flexible solution to many of the problems of internal control, there is a grave danger of its becoming a technological panacea substituted for real political authority when this is absent. Politicians are increasingly prone to hand over their most problematic difficulties to the police or military for solution, only to get them back later in a more intractable form. Consideration is given to the social implications of the vertical and horizontal proliferation of these technologies and their role in effecting the militarization of the society in which they are deployed. The article concludes that new police technologies facilitate the creation and maintenance of totalitarian societies. They pose a real threat to civil liberties and human rights, a threat likely to increase over time. The most repressive forms are currently being transferred to the Third World to service existing systems of cultural imperialism. By frustrating the struggles of the peoples in these countries to obtain a more just and equitable social order, the transfer of political control technology will escalate the processes leading to domestic arms races and thus increase the overall level of violence in the long term. 1