Real-Time Policing: How Technology Is Transforming Law Enforcement

By Dalton Webb

Real-Time Policing: How Technology Is Transforming Law Enforcement

Someone was robbing people walking their dogs in a city park, and the only thing any of the victims could offer was a red pickup that dropped the man near the entrance and disappeared afterward. It happened two or three times. No plate and no way to build a case out of a truck color. Then a solar-powered license plate reader went up at the park entrance, and when he hit again the next day investigators had what they needed, a license plate. One red pickup had entered the park in the window before the robbery. He was in custody a few hours later.

Nothing about that case had been unsolvable. The information had simply always arrived too late to be worth anything.

American policing has been fundamentally reinvented twice, first in the mid-1800s when cities replaced night watches and constables with formal departments, and again in the early twentieth century when reformers professionalized what had become a patronage-driven institution. Cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detection, drones, and artificial intelligence are driving the third transformation, and most of it has happened in under fifteen years.

Real-Time Policing is the first book to examine that shift from inside the room where it happens. Dalton Webb spent eighteen years in law enforcement, founded one of the nation's earliest Real-Time Crime Centers, helped establish the National Real-Time Crime Center Association, and now works at the front edge of public safety technology. The park robbery was one of his cases.

The book treats these tools as a single system rather than a catalog of hardware. It lays out a five-level framework for measuring what a crime center is actually capable of, argues that capability lives in people rather than equipment or square footage, and explains why agencies keep getting the sequence backwards by trying to build a facility before they deploy the technology that would justify one. It also takes the objections seriously, including privacy, accountability, and what it means to concentrate surveillance in communities that are already policed heavily.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HF1CQ8B5
• ISBN13: 9798248404520
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 177 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"