Professor Eric Piza received a more than $800,000 grant from the NIJ to study officer patrol behaviors using automated vehicle locator (AVL) and body-worn camera (BWC) data in Kansas City, Missouri. Policing is often categorized by low levels of supervision in the field and high levels of officer autonomy, which often present significant challenges to the accurate reporting of officer activity in the field. While AVLs and BWC’s have the potential to shed more light on officer behavior in the field, the data collected by these technologies is often used to measure different officer behaviors and looked at in isolation of other data sources.
Professor Piza’s study will leverage these two technologies by triangulating their data with additional data sources in order to create a more holistic understanding of officer activity. This mixed-methods research project will capitalize on AVL and BWC data to analyze police patrol activity and police-citizen interactions in Kansas City, MO over a one-year period.
