A software application to improve human rights watching activities and to prepare police stations to face the ISO 9001:2008 certification procedure

Abstract

This paper is about the conceptual design of the IT support for human rights watching, police transparency and police performance evaluation. Firstly we understand that human rights are rights that humans have by the fact of being human, and which are neither created nor can be abrogated by any governmental institution. These include cultural, economic, and political rights, such as right to life, liberty, education and equality before law, and right of association, belief, free speech, information, religion, movement, and nationality. Secondly, of course, we know that transparency means that something can be seen through. When we talk about transparency in police stations, we mean that citizens must be able to "see through" its workings. A police that is not transparent is more prone to corruption and undue influence because there is no public oversight of decision making. Thirdly we mention that individual performance evaluation is generally not well developed in police departments. The most common practice consists of an annual or semiannual subjective rating form filled out by police supervisors, where persons are rated with respect to global categories such as initiative and appearance. Many departments make no effort to assess performance at all. The self-protectiveness of the police subculture and the fact that little concrete depends on the evaluations mean that many departments have abandoned them, or they have become empty rituals, where almost everyone's performance is rated as satisfactory. This paper presents an environment that facilities police performance evaluation. From a Software Engineering point of view, this paper reports a very specific and innovative software development project oriented both to support human right watching activities, to improve police transparency, to evaluate police performance and to prepare police stations for ISO 9001:2008 certification.