Academic and policy research tends to suggest that science and technology are important components of contemporary policing but that they play only a partial role in most criminal investigations.

In addition to enhancing the investigation of crime, technology has transformed the nature of police communication and information management. This has not been a wholly recent phenomenon, however, and, again, it has been limited by ‘real world’ considerations relating to funding, training and police sub-culture.

In Britain, CCTV has been at the forefront of new technologies that monitor a host of human interactions in residential, education, retail, business and leisure environ­ments. In 2006, the Information Commissioner warned that Britain was ‘sleepwalk­ing into a surveillance society’, and it is estimated that the country is monitored by 20 per cent of the world’s cameras.

The research evidence on the impact of CCTV on crime rates is not extensive, but tends to suggest that it can reduce rates of crime, without significant problems of displacement, but that this is only the case when it is applied in certain environments and in respect of certain types of crime. Although CCTV-generated images have proved very useful in the investigation of some high-profile criminal cases, as with other forms of technology, there is little definitive evidence of the impact it has on detection more generally.

ANPR technology was developed in response to threats of terrorism, and provides the police with the capacity to identify large numbers of vehicles and to retrieve informa­tion about those that might be stolen, uninsured, or associated with known offenders.

Arguments that the police criminalise law-abiding motorists have appeared periodically since the expansion of car ownership in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s.

Although not used routinely, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – drones – offer financial savings to police and the capacity to operate in circumstances that otherwise would be inaccessible. As with other aspects of police surveillance, concerns have arisen about the privacy and civil liberties implications of the use of drones, as well as their impact on communities already over-policed.

Technological change has transformed the ways in which police work is conducted. That crime is not evenly distributed, either in terms of offenders or patterns of victimisation, has led to the development of crime mapping techniques that promise to identify the locales, times and circumstances in which criminal acts occur.

While there is some evidence that crime mapping has enabled the effective target­ing of specific crime problems, concerns have also identified the impact of aggres­sive police tactics on police–community relations.

Technology has been used to develop ‘hot spots’ policing, whereby information about criminal incidents is used to provide maps of local crime problems. These can then underpin operational policing strategy. In some cases such maps are made available directly to the public via the web.

Beyond the identification and investigation of crime, technology has an impact upon the routines of police work, particularly in terms of communication and information management. CAD systems play a central role in shaping the work that officers do, and limit the exercise of officer discretion.

Social media and web technology offer the potential to integrate intelligence-led strategies with community policing. Officers can access and analyse information and data within routine police work through the use of apps, for example, which can enhance public consultation and the delivery of police services.

These developments have a range of implications for society. Many have argued that the expansion of surveillance technology pushes society into the realms of the panopticon, whereby individual behaviour is disciplined by the anticipated processes of regulation. This has various implications for the police, not least that an increas­ing range of agencies and individuals comes to be engaged in processes of social control. It also extends the surveillance of police behaviour itself, and conditions the nature in which officers exercise their discretion.

There is a strong imperative to avoid technological determinism in considering the influence that these developments will have on crime, policing and social relations more widely. Technology is deployed into particular institutional and cultural contexts, which mean that its capacity and possibilities can be resisted, deflected or transformed in practice.