As they hunted gunman Carl Drega through the woods of Vermont and New Hampshire near the Canadian border, police from both states—hampered by radio problems—were forced to relay messages between departments by sending cars back and forth between their units.

New York City firefighters rushing up the smoking towers of the World Trade Center to help trapped workers were unable to communicate with their commanders.

LIn Littleton, Colo., police responding to shots inside Columbine High School flooded the parking lot, effectively blocking emergency rescue vehicles that were trying to care for wounded students.

It's hard to imagine that a bloody shootout deep in the northern Vermont woods has much in common with attempts to save people during the World Trade Center attacks, let alone the Columbine massacre. But all three cases have been studied by UNH's ATLAS Project (Advanced Technologies in Law and Society) to explain the way agencies need a centralized communications command structure during an emergency.

Justiceworks, a criminal justice think tank that was founded at UNH in 1999, functions as an applied research unit in law enforcement, studying crime scenes and strategies. The cross-disciplinary group is largely funded by grants from the New Hampshire Department of Justice, and it has spent the past five years providing information, evaluations and assessments of law enforcement programs and tools to law enforcement agencies, the media and the government.

"We sit at an interesting juncture," says John T. "Ted" Kirkpatrick, the associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, a Mike Ditka lookalike who also serves as co-director of Justiceworks. "It's an emerging field in criminology and criminal justice," he says.

Justiceworks has many projects underway, but the ATLAS Project is important not only because it straddles more than two academic disciplines but because it straddles two eras: before and after the application of high technology to hunt criminals. But while technology can create a number of effective policing tools, law enforcement is not a monolithic culture that immediately adopts new tools across its many levels.

"We have all these fabulous new technologies," Kirkpatrick says. "They help with eavesdropping, surveillance, tracing the flow of money. It's like no other time in history. But we really don't know how these technologies are shaping our understanding of justice or the rule of law in the 21st century."

ATLAS not only examines approaches to crime prevention that incorporate technology, it also tries to figure out which kinds of high-tech tools are actually deployed by police in an effective way, and why. As an illustration of the way police organizations utilize technology, Kirkpatrick points to New Hampshire's recent purchase of some 20 automated fingerprint identification machines, which are much more precise than the older finger-on-the-ink pad methods used for nearly a century.

"Many places, when they got that technology, immediately used it," he says. "But a lot of places viewed it as 'that machine that sits in the corner.' People get used to their own way of doing things, and the new machine was being used as a coffee cup holder."

That's where ATLAS comes in. The project's staff try to determine whether police officers ignore a new tool because of social and cultural reasons or because they don't understand the technology.

In the past few years, ATLAS researchers have also attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of non-lethal weapons when it comes to crowd control. They have developed tools for crime-mapping and are now moving into tracking crime through cyberspace.

With a new $400,000 grant from the New Hampshire Department of Justice and the attorney general's office, ATLAS has lured a three-person team from Dartmouth to work on new ways to assist law enforcement in computer forensics.

Headed by Andrew Macpherson, a 35-year-old London School of Economics graduate, the Technical Analysis Group at the Institute for Security Technology Studies has become the clearinghouse for problems all levels of law enforcement encounter when investigating cyber attacks.

Cyber attacks can take many forms, including "hacks," or intrusions intended to steal or destroy information; denial-of-service attacks, which can shut down computer networks; or viruses or worms, which can disable computer networks in a broad geographic range. "There is clear factual evidence that terrorist organizations are using cyber-technologies for propaganda, recruitment and training, communications, fundraising and targeting information packages," says Macpherson.

His group has also demonstrated a knack for pointing out the tools that law enforcement officials can employ to track criminals and terrorists.

Another recent Justiceworks grant will help different agencies across the country find a common denominator for emergency electronic communications. It fits in with Justiceworks' overall mandate to apply criminal justice research to all levels of law enforcement. This mandate is reinforced by the presence of Charles Putnam, a lawyer and co-director of Justiceworks who spent 16 years with the state attorney general's office.

"A lot of what we try to do is applied work," Putnam says. "We're trying to assist the men and women who do their jobs in the justice system. How people and institutions work together is as important as finding a technological fix for a problem."

Thus ATLAS Project researchers have become increasingly involved in helping the state employ—and assimilate— technology. They have begun working with a group appointed by the state's chief justice to create a computerized database of court records throughout the Granite State, calling the current pen-and-paper records "19th- century technology."

The study brings the issue of open records to the forefront. Kirkpatrick claims that the current lack of communication among clerks and courthouses in the state can only be eliminated by better coordination between agencies.

One thing that's clear to all three men is that the basics of policing aren't changing.

Macpherson points to a recent analysis he conducted of the ways police tracked down criminals through cyberspace: detective skills were as important as ever.

"Law enforcement is incredibly useful," he says. "Their ability to work around a lack of an established protocol and their interactions with the private sector are terrific."

And thanks to researchers at UNH, one of the resources they can call on is Justiceworks.