The Third Wave of Policing: A New Era

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is sprawled across the booking desk at a police station as his stunned wife, Coretta, looks on. Photo by Charles Moore, 1958

244 years ago we created a document asserting our own right to choose our own government. 231 years ago that government was established, on paper, under the pretense that justice was superior to all else. Unfortunately, “we” is a misnomer and the government that was established fell short, on justice.

At the conclusion of this introduction is a three-part series of writings suggesting what the Third Wave of Policing should look like to ensure the three most important aspects of modern day policing: police effectiveness, police accountability, and public trust.

A couple years ago I had the good fortune to be invited to lunch with Steve Case, founder of AOL and author of The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future. During lunch Steve spoke at length about him and his peers building the foundation of the internet — getting folks online as the first wave of technology. The second wave, Steve explained, saw companies like Google and Amazon build on top of the Internet to create search, social, and shopping capabilities, while apps like Snapchat and Instagram leveraged the smartphone revolution. Finally, Steve explains the third wave noting that it would be entirely up to us to decide but that we should expect it to be the “internet of everything.”