ABSTRACT
There are 2,600 sworn officers serving the 1.2 million people of Phoenix, Arizona. Personnel assigned to the Phoenix Police Department have developed several strategies to do their jobs better over the past twenty years. Many of these strategies are currently being used throughout the United States and are modeled after programs that began in Phoenix, Arizona. The PPD has also made use of programs created by other dedicated officers from other jurisdictions and continues to find and promote new ideas to combat old problems. Technological advances in the past twenty years have had a great impact on the way police departments do business. The Phoenix Police Department has a long history of being on the front line of technological advances in policing. PPD makes daily use of technologies such as the automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), police automated computer entry system (PACE), computer-aided dispatch (CAD), and other products designed to assist the police in capturing and identifying suspects involved in crime. One of the “new” technologies being widely used throughout the department is geographic crime fighting, or geographic information systems (GIS) technology.
