The police-industrial complex: police vendors at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Annual Conference, 2012–2018

Apace with contemporary critiques of police funding and the allocation of their budgets, debates about policing technologies focus on ‘coercive’ technology that officers use to deploy force and prevent injury, and ‘surveillant’ technology that passively gathers massive amounts of data about the public. At present, however, research does not recognize the broader marketplace for police products and services that fall outside these categories. This limits consideration of the full scale of police expenditures on private-sector technology and mitigates police agencies’ implementation of transparent and efficient budgeting processes, including acquisitions and reporting. Using a novel dataset of booths at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Annual Conference and Exposition from 2012 to 2018, we empirically advance the concept of the ‘police-industrial complex’ and describe the landscape of for-profit companies that produce technologies and services for police. We find the coercive and surveillant technologies emphasized in prior literature account for 19.8% and 13.1% of vendor booths, respectively, at IACP during the study period. By comparison, software makes up 25.5% of total IACP vendor booths. We conclude with discussion of these findings’ implications for assisting police administrators in ensuring efficient and transparent budgetary practices.