In times of an alleged waning of political business cycles and partisan policy-making, vote-seeking policy-makers can be expected to shift the use of political manipulation mechanisms towards other policy domains in which the macro-institutional environment allows them greater leverage. Public employment generally, and police employment specifically, are a promising domain for such tactics. Timing the hiring of police officers during election periods may increase votes, as these are “street-visible” jobs dealing with politically salient issues. Law-and-order competence signalling makes police hiring especially attractive for conservative parties. Testing these electioneering and partisanship hypotheses in the German states between 1992 and 2010, we find that socio-economic variables such as population density strongly determine police employment. But incumbents also hire more police officers before elections, while conservative party power increases police numbers. Subjectively “immediate” forms of crime (issue salience) and perceived causes of crime such as immigration are also positively associated with police numbers.

This paper details the current status of the development of an ‘automatic’ low-cost system based on wireless communications technology to provide continuous tracking of the location of devices in all environments. This task requires a multi-disciplinary approach combining communications systems design, digital signal processing to extract ranges and, importantly, approaches from the field of geodesy to develop novel network positioning techniques for ad-hoc networks. Such a network will support a number of services relevant to crime management where seamless tracking is required. The paper discusses the process for developing the system, christened intelligent pervasive location tracking (iPLOT), with a particular reference to user and system requirements, and how these have been used to explore a network positioning strategy.