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Reports indicate that the application of information technology greatly assists police departments in taking proactive measures against future crimes and reducing crime rates

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Reports indicate that the application of information technology greatly assists police departments in taking proactive measures against future crimes and reducing crime rates. The recidivism rate for parolees, probationers, and sex offenders is on the rise in the United States, and this issue has generated intense public scrutiny. Currently, the US police departments widely use information technology advancements to optimize their performance and reduce crime rates. The application of a Global positioning system or GPS is presently used as an effective way to reduce recidivism rates. As Navarro (2007) points out, in Florida, micro global positioning chips are implanted in child sexual predators' body to monitor them continuously. Also, micro GPS chips are also used to accurately map parolees and probationers' location to prevent them from committing crimes in the future. A network of databases containing historical crime data has been established in the US for enabling police departments to get faster access to past crime information. This system improves communication between police departments across the country, and this strong policing network reduces crime rates to a great extent.

Similarly, information technology is of great help for police departments to reduce random patrol of the streets. As discussed earlier, the development of GPS greatly benefited the police to mitigate random patrolling. The satellite-based radar system and surveillance camera systems aid US police departments to monitor streets from control rooms. To illustrate, traffic rule violations, including over speed and signal jumping, are captured and recorded by radar and surveillance camera systems, and hence the law violators are identified using their vehicles’ registration numbers. The radar systems are also helpful to observe gangsters and other problem makers. In short, IT assists police departments in preventing crimes effectively without random patrol of the streets. &nbsp.