A recently published UC Berkeley study identifies the key factors that lead cities to adopt controversial new police technologies. In an era of rapid technological change and growing concerns over surveillance, these findings help clarify what drives these policy choices.
The study finds that agency size, rather than partisan leaning or local crime conditions, is the strongest predictor of technology adoption. It was conducted by recent UC Berkeley Sociology Ph.D alum Ángel Ross, now a Provostial Fellow at Stanford, alongside UC Berkeley Political Science Professor Alison Post and University of Mississippi Political Science Professor Ishana Ratan.
The paper, titled “The Politics of Police Technology Adoption: Agency Size and Uptake Among California Police Departments,” was published in the Journal of Urban Affairs. It examines the uptake of technologies such as license plate readers, body cameras, camera registries, Ring (camera) partnerships, drones, crime mapping software and security alerts in police departments around California.
“For the seven different technologies we examine, the only consistent predictor is the number of sworn officers. It was not partisanship, crime, or demographic composition that was most consistently associated with adoption, but agency size,” said Ross. “Larger departments, all else equal, were more likely to adopt these technologies.”
When beginning the study, Ross expected public opinion, partisanship, demographic composition and crime rates to shape cities’ decisions to adopt new police technologies. To an extent, these factors do matter, particularly in determining which tools are adopted, Ross said. For example, Democratic cities were more likely to adopt body-worn cameras.
However, the study finds that, for the most part, overall adoption is driven less by local politics and more by department size. Agencies with more sworn officers are significantly more likely to adopt new technologies. This pattern likely reflects the leverage they wield in the policymaking process.
Given that police department size is the strongest predictor of technological adoption, Ross’s findings suggest that the spread of policing tools may be driven more by institutional power than by community needs. This raises important questions about the broader social impact of these technologies.
“Crime rates had little to do with whether cities adopted new police technologies,” said Ross. “This is notable given that the police often justify these technologies as tools for fighting crime. However, even this claim is tenuous. Most of the private companies that sell these technologies to police departments do not have peer-reviewed studies to support their crime-reduction claims.”
Ross also examined the data for spatial clustering, or the idea that cities adopt certain technologies because nearby cities have done so. They found that for all tools except drones, cities were more likely to adopt a technology if their neighbors had already adopted it, showing that adoption often spreads regionally.
In the study, Ross focused on California’s large and small police departments. They gathered data on technology adoption, partisanship, department size, spending, crime and demographics from public sources. They then analyzed the data to see which factors influenced adoption the most.
“Our findings underscore the fact that even in a context of increasing partisan divisions around policing, police departments themselves wield substantial influence over which technologies get adopted,” said Ross.