Personas in Uniform: Police Officers as Users of Information Technology

Abstract

This paper discusses information technology in the contemporary policing context and presents a research approach that aims to capture and describe a multifaceted account of police work. There is a need to further analyze the constitution of the uniformed user and the use environment in this domain. Data from extensive ethnographic fieldwork are analyzed. Personas and scenarios are used in this paper to illustrate the properties and conditions of police work. Evidence from the study suggests that personas and scenarios can make the daily work visible and support the emergent design of information systems in the dialogue between designers and users. The paper concludes that personas and their scenarios provide a richer description of the specifics of a context and a design space. A scenario is used to show characteristic properties and the emergence of work practice in relation to the design of information systems.

Hysteresis in Mental Workload and Task Performance

“…For example, rushing to catch a thief likely imposes a greater driving task demand than transporting said thief to the police station, because the former activity requires driving at a higher speed while avoiding other traffic. Police work is also characterized by a perpetual switching between activities (Borglund & Nuldén, 2012; Jansen et al, 2014; Sørensen & Pica, 2005), leading to frequent and sudden transitions between high and low task demands.…”

Recalling the performativity of the body in frontline command

“…The research in this article is therefore based on video from action cameras mounted on frontline commanders’ helmets for the purpose of capturing this performativity. Video recordings are well‐known research tools used in studies regarding high‐reliability organizations (Bigley & Roberts, ), in research related to medical education and simulation (Lahlou, ; Lahlou, Le Bellu, & Boesen‐Mariani, ; Martin & Martin, ), for decision‐making done in natural settings (Boehm, ; Boehm et al., ; Borglund & Nulden, ; Groenendaal & Helsloot, , ) and for sports analysis (Omodei & McLennan, ).…”

Re-collision

“…Zhao et al propose the integration of collaboration tools to a system they call COPLINK [4] -an IT system for crime investigation -focusing on both intra-agency [16] and interagency [15] cooperation. Studies have also been conducted for further understanding of the work and technology of police investigation from a user's perspective [3,6,9,16]. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to understand the forensics domain of collision reconstruction from a user perspective and focus on co-located collaborative analysis for the field.…”