The Failure to Innovate: A Study of Non Adoption of Computerized Crime Mapping in American Police

Thesis Title: THE FAILURE TO INNOVATE: A STUDY OF NON ADOPTION OF COMPUTERIZED CRIME MAPPING IN AMERICAN POLICE David Michael Mazeika, Master of Arts, 2008 Thesis Directed by: Professor David Weisburd Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice Scholars have noted a recent accumulation of innovations in policing (Bayley, 1994; Weisburd & Braga, 2006; Weisburd & Eck, 2004). Due to the increase and scope of these innovations, some scholars have called this the most dramatic period of innovation in policing (Bayley, 1994). Studies have tried to explain why this dramatic period of innovation occurred, but while in general the study of the diffusion of innovations is widespread (Rogers, 2003), there have been relatively few in policing (Klinger, 2003; Weisburd & Braga, 2008). Particularly, little is known about the relationship between resources and innovation. The current work attempts to better explain this relationship by increasing the scope of resources measured and by disentangling the effects of measures employed in the extant literature. In contrast to previous studies (Chamard, 2004; King, 1998; Mastrofski et al., 2003; Mastrofski et al., 2007; Skogan & Hartnett, 2005; Weisburd et al., 2003), findings from the current work indicate that various measures of resources are not related to innovation and those who fail to innovate. THE FAILURE TO INNOVATE: A STUDY OF NON ADOPTION OF COMPUTERIZED CRIME MAPPING IN AMERICAN POLICE by David Michael Mazeika Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2008 Advisory Committee: Professor David Weisburd, Chair Professor Jean McGloin Professor Charles Wellford © Copyright by David Michael Mazeika 2008