Thin Blue Lie: The Failure of High-Tech Policing

Investigative reporter Stroud delivers a rousing condemnation of “technological solutionism” in police departments. “Adherents of the philosophy,” he writes, “have looked to electroshock weapons, statistical analysis, CCTV, facial recognition, body cameras, and a host of other technologies to supposedly make policing more efficient and humane” but often backfire, instead of undertaking “substantial institutional reform—which can be messy and requires a tough accounting of what’s working and what isn’t in a police department.” He identifies the start of this trend in the changing demographics in cities, where white flight in the 1950s increased segregation and intensified policing. According to Stroud, technology became the typical police response to crime and to increased racial tensions. Stroud reviews policing technology from early-20th-century police captain August Vollmer’s use of the lie detector test in 1921 up to the present trend of police body cameras; in between, he discusses the emergence of COMPSTAT, a policing and crime tracking system that fed into the broken-windows model of policing, and the rise of the Taser, intended to be a nonlethal weapon but nevertheless an instrument of death in many cases. Stroud opines that technological solutions in policing, while perhaps useful, will not address the underlying cultural deficit in empathy and compassion among police. This is a meticulous and fascinating study. [em](Mar.) [/em]