In the early 1970s, one of NIJ’s staff had a “eureka”
moment. He wondered if a new material called Kevlar, principally
used in car tires, might work as a type of armor to protect
police officers. Working with a colleague from the Defense
Department, they convinced NIJ and DoD to work together
to test out the idea.
By 1975, work on the project had progressed to the point
where the material worked in controlled tests. Now it was
time to field-test it. That summer, 5,000 prototype bullet-resistant
vests, relatively soft and lightweight, were distributed
to 15 urban police departments. But researchers knew what
the next logical step was—analyzing the performance
of a vest involved in an actual police shooting. And that
meant that someone had to get shot while wearing one.
The uneasy vigil ended on the evening of December 23, 1975,
when one of the vests stopped bullets fired at a Seattle
police officer—and saved his life. And with that event
NIJ claimed the first in a line of successes from its body
armor standards and testing program—more than 3,000
police officer lives saved.
This issue of the NIJ Journal features an article
describing NIJ’s body armor program on its 30th anniversary
and summarizing a critical review of the program currently
underway as part of the Attorney General’s Body Armor
Safety Initiative.
This issue also explores how recent advances in another
technology—biometrics—can protect people, in this
case schoolchildren. NIJ recently sponsored a program evaluating
iris-recognition technology in a New Jersey elementary school.
Researchers evaluated how effectively the technology could
identify the teachers, parents, and other adults who were
supposed to be there—and keep out those who were not.
But technology can cut both ways. Just as law enforcement
uses technology to prevent or investigate crime, perpetrators
use technology to commit crime. Often, State and local police
departments must scramble to keep up. To help them, NIJ
sponsors the Electronic Crimes Partnership Initiative (ECPI),
a group of law enforcement practitioners who train police
officers to investigate and solve computer crimes and to
search for and collect digital evidence in criminal investigations.
Their work is featured in “How
Law Enforcement Can Level the Playing Field With Criminals.”
In response to the global rise of suicide terrorism, NIJ
convened an international panel of specialists to discuss
how to use research to understand the dynamics of this troubling
phenomenon, to combat its use, and to mitigate its effects.
You can read a summary of that conference in this edition.
The articles in this issue of the NIJ Journal exemplify
the wide-ranging scope of NIJ’s research, development,
and evaluation activities—and the dedication and creativity
of its employees—in pursuit of an improved criminal
justice system. I hope you will find something of interest
in the pages that follow.
Glenn R. Schmitt
Acting Director, National Institute of Justice
