Proactive Policing Effects on Crime and Communities (2018) / Chapter Skim
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4 Impacts of Proactive Policing on Crime and Disorder
4 Impacts of Proactive Policing on Crime and Disorder
Pages 119-176
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From page 119... ...
Finally, the chapter lays out the committee's key conclusions about these findings and the strength of the evidence for crime prevention outcomes. MECHANISMS FOR PREVENTION The diverse array of programs that are included under the "proactive policing" rubric all seek to harness one or more crime-prevention mecha 119
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From page 120... ...
For example, police agencies may choose to proactively increase foot patrol in a crime hot spot in an effort to reduce the rate of vandalism, car theft or break-ins, burglaries, robberies, assaults, or other crimes. The heightened police presence and visibility aims to increase an offender's perception that he may be apprehended if he takes advantage of crime opportunities at that hot spot.
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From page 121... ...
But in terms of aggregate criminal behavior, deterrence is hypothesized to occur when offenders perceive their risk of apprehension to be high and the perceived benefits do not outweigh those risks. Deterrence is the primary prevention mechanism in the logic models underlying the place-based and person-focused approaches to proactive policing.1 In hot spots policing, for example, deterrence is created by increasing police presence in places with high levels of concentrated opportunities or routines for criminal offending, thus conveying an increased sense of apprehension and discouraging offenders from taking advantage of those opportunities.
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From page 122... ...
. PLACE-BASED STRATEGIES Hot Spots Policing Emerging theoretical paradigms and empirical findings on the concentration of crime and disorder at small "hot spot" locations (see Brantingham and Brantingham, 1982, 1984; Sherman, Buerger, and Gartin, 1989)
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From page 123... ...
. The Minneapolis Hot Spots Patrol Experiment established the potential importance of crime hot spots for policing (see below for confirmatory evidence in later studies)
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From page 124... ...
They estimated that drug market activity was half as likely to occur in areas surrounding treatmentcondition hot spots as in areas surrounding the control condition hot spots. The Police Foundation and the Jersey City Police Department subsequently collaborated on a controlled study to determine whether proactive policing targeted at two high-activity crime hot spots would result in immediate spatial displacement of crime incidents to areas surrounding the targeted location or would instead lead to diffusion of crime-control benefits into surrounding areas (Weisburd et al., 2006b)
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From page 125... ...
Pre-test versus post-test changes in the hot spots and catchment areas were evaluated using difference-of-means tests, after the trends in observed events had been adjusted for the citywide trend in the relevant call category. For the prostitution hot spot, the analysis found a statistically significant 45 percent reduction in observed prostitution events at the location targeted for proactive policing, a statistically significant 61 percent reduction in such events in catchment area 1 (the one-block buffer zone)
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From page 126... ...
(Only the Jersey City Drug Market Analysis Experiment examined whether offenders displaced to distal locations beyond areas immediately surrounding the study hot spots.) An important point about hot spots policing programs that have been evaluated is that the policing practices used in the targeted crime hot spots can vary considerably.
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From page 127... ...
Of the 20 tests for main effects size, the review's authors characterized 10 as evaluating problem-oriented practices applied to hot spots policing and 10 as evaluating intensified traditional policing tactics in the targeted hot spots. Their analysis found that the programs applying problem-oriented policing practices had an overall mean effect size (average effect size across all 10 studies)
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From page 128... ...
Randomly allocating hot spots within jurisdictions necessarily makes it very difficult to gain estimates of an overall program effect across the jurisdictions. Hot spots policing programs have generally compared gains in crime hot spots in treatment and control conditions; they have not estimated the potential large-area impacts of this approach.
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From page 129... ...
Summary. A large number of rigorous evaluations, including a series of randomized controlled trials, of hot spots policing programs have been conducted.
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From page 130... ...
Rather than comparing fixed experimental and control crime hot spots, they compared days in which directed patrol was deployed using predictive policing algorithms to days in which conventional forms of crime mapping and analysis were used, randomly allocating days to either predictive policing or conventional mapping and analysis. Contrary to the findings of Hunt, Saunders, and Hollywood (2014)
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From page 131... ...
In other words, was the crime reduction caused by standard police patrols that were no different than a traditional hot spots policing approach, or was value added by the software over and above what could be normally achieved by a combination of existing analytical and operational approaches? In short, whether risk terrain modeling either predicts crime or facilitates proactive policing better than other predictive policing models remains to be tested.
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From page 132... ...
At present, there are insufficient robust empirical studies to draw any firm conclusion about either the efficacy of crime-prediction software or the effectiveness of any associated police operational tactics. Furthermore, it is as yet unclear whether predictive policing is substantively different from hot spots policing.
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From page 133... ...
found that, in the downtown Baltimore area, both property and violent crimes declined by large percentages (between 23% and 35%) in the months following camera implementation.
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From page 134... ...
Piza and colleagues (2015) used a randomized controlled trial to explicitly test the use of CCTV to support proactive policing in Newark, New Jersey.
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From page 135... ...
The results from studies examining the introduction of CCTV camera schemes into relatively passive monitoring systems are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime locations. The evidence suggests that the use of CCTV systems without a dedicated police operational response may be effective at reducing vehicle crime and less effective at combating violence, although the way the system is implemented and used appears to be important in achieving any crime reduction.
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From page 136... ...
However, there have also been more rigorous tests of the crimecontrol efficacy of problem-oriented policing. Researchers from the Center for Crime Prevention Studies at Rutgers University teamed with the Jersey City Police Department to evaluate a problem-oriented policing intervention targeting locations with high rates of violent crimes (Braga et al., 1999)
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From page 137... ...
A mediation analysis of the core treatment elements suggested that the crime and disorder gains were driven by situational responses, such as razing abandoned buildings and securing vacant lots, rather than increased misdemeanor arrests or police-led social service actions. Both the Jersey City and Lowell experiments documented proactive policing interventions similar to the usual practices in the field for a problemoriented policing strategy; that is, the problem-solving component involved only weak or "shallow" problem analysis, with only limited development of responses to address the problems after analysis.
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From page 138... ...
implemented a randomized controlled trial comparing the effectiveness of both directed patrol and problemoriented policing interventions at hot spots of violent crime in Jacksonville, Florida. The authors identified 83 hot spots of nondomestic violence and randomly assigned them into three conditions: directed patrol, problemoriented policing, and the control condition.
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From page 139... ...
The far fewer randomized experimental evaluations generally show smaller, but statistically significant, crime reductions generated by problem-oriented policing interventions relative to the control condition. Program evaluations largely examine the short-term impacts of problem-oriented policing on crime and disorder outcomes, and there is little evidence regarding displacement or possible jurisdictional impacts of this approach.
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From page 140... ...
. This randomized controlled trial compared the Beat Health intervention (the treatment condition)
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From page 141... ...
There are only a small number of evaluations of third party policing programs, but these evaluations have assessed the impact of third party policing interventions on crime and disorder using randomized controlled trials and rigorous quasi-experimental designs. The available evidence supports a conclusion that third party policing generates statistically significant short-term reductions in crime and disorder; there is morelimited evidence of long-term impacts in evaluations of BIDs.
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From page 142... ...
PERSON-FOCUSED STRATEGIES Focused Deterrence Focused deterrence strategies have been implemented to halt ongoing violence by gangs and other criminally active groups, disrupt disorderly and violent drug markets (known as Drug Market Intervention or DMI) , and prevent continued criminal behavior by individual repeat offenders.3 The 2004 NRC policing report described the then-available scientific evidence on the crime reduction value of focused deterrence practices as "promising" but "descriptive rather than evaluative" (National Research Council, 2004, p.
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From page 143... ...
The analyses in this first Operation Ceasefire evaluation found that the program was associated with statistically significant reductions not only in the youth homicide rate but also in the other indicators of serious gun violence. The regression models estimated, after controlling for the potential covariates, that a 63 percent reduction in the monthly count of youth homicides could be attributed to the program.
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From page 144... ...
This first evaluation of Operation Ceasefire has been reviewed by a number of researchers who have made their own assessments of the relationship between the implementation of the intervention and the trend in the youth homicide rate in Boston during the 1990s. One reviewer suggested that some of the decrease in youth homicides may have occurred without the intervention because violence in general was decreasing in most major U.S.
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From page 145... ...
Other versions of the focused deterrence strategy have also employed rigorous quasi-experimental approaches. For instance, the seminal focused deterrence strategy, the Drug Market Intervention, was implemented to control disorderly and violent drug markets operating in High Point, North Carolina.
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From page 146... ...
, and (d) offender notification meetings -- a practice associated with the procedural justice strategy -- to communicate messages about deterrence and social norms to the potential offender population.
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From page 147... ...
Summary. A growing number of quasi-experimental evaluations have found that focused deterrence programs generate statistically significant crime reduction impacts in areas under the treatment condition.
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From page 148... ...
This approach is one of the two analyses used by Weisburd and colleagues (2016) , who drew from an earlier study showing that SQFs in New York were used as a hot spots policing strategy (Weisburd, Telep, and Lawton, 2014)
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Louis. Thirty-two violent crime hot spots were randomly allocated to two different treatment conditions (directed patrol only, directed patrol with enforcement activities)
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. In contrast, during the Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment, foot patrol officers in violent crime hot spots were unable to replicate the gains demonstrated in the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment.
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From page 151... ...
However, many other community-oriented policing approaches did not appear to be effective, such as monthly newsletters, education programs, or community meetings. The strongest research, which used randomized controlled trials to examine monthly community newsletters, education efforts, and home visits after domestic violence, found no statistically significant effects on crime reduction in the treatment condition compared with the control condition (Sherman and Eck, 2002)
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From page 152... ...
That NRC study also included foot patrol as a community-based policing tactic. A Campbell systematic review sponsored by the UK National Policing Improvement Agency identified 25 eligible studies, which evaluated 65 controlled tests of community-oriented policing programs (Gill et al., 2014)
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From page 153... ...
examined two randomized controlled experiments, one in Newark, New Jersey, and one in Houston, Texas, on the impact of community newsletters on fear of crime and residents' perceptions. Although this may not necessarily be a "community-involved" interaction, it does involve the police increasing communication with citizens, which is one of the foundations of community-oriented policing.
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From page 154... ...
Second, because community-oriented policing is both a general philosophy (logic model) of proactive policing and a strategy that is decentralized and locally shaped, it has resulted in a variety of activi
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From page 155... ...
Procedural Justice Policing The manner in which police interact with citizens may have important consequences for citizen evaluations of whether they were treated fairly and with dignity and, more generally, for their trust in the police. These perceptions may in turn have behavioral consequences.
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From page 156... ...
Nagin and Telep (2017) point to four important shortcomings in the surveybased studies and the procedural justice literature more generally that stand in the way not only of credible inferences about causal connections down this envisioned chain of consequences but also the effectiveness of policies to promote procedural justice.
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From page 157... ...
Concerning causal inference, a key requirement for making credible causal inferences about the effect of procedurally just treatment on legal compliance is that treatment including policy manipulation can credibly be assumed to be exogenous: for example, a policy change as a treatment condition within a randomized experiment or a policy change that is not a direct response to a spike in citizen dissatisfaction with the police or an uptick in crime. Without such exogenous change, the statistical associations observed among perceptions of procedurally just treatment, legitimacy, and legal compliance may reflect third common causes and/or reverse causality, rather than the causal effect of procedurally just treatment on legal compliance that is assumed by the logic model for the procedural justice policing strategy.
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From page 158... ...
In each study, the experimental script/protocol was infused with concepts from procedural justice theory, whereas the control script/protocol was "business as usual." These studies reached conflicting conclusions. Mazerolle and colleagues (2012b, 2013b)
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From page 159... ...
examined the effects of the Chicago Police Department's day-long training program on procedural justice. The program, distinct from the QIP but based on similar principles, included five modules that focused on legitimacy, procedural justice, cynicism, and race.
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From page 160... ...
examined the impact of randomly assigned procedural justice–infused training on officer behavior. Officers assigned the treatment were less likely to resolve incidents with an arrest and were less likely to be involved in incidents where force was used.
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From page 161... ...
is important because it analyzed the impact of an actual policy intervention that addressed a serious crime problem and that was directed at individuals with extensive criminal histories. The difficulty of interpretation involves extracting the contribution of procedural justice to a multipronged intervention involving focused deterrence and access to social service components as other prominent features of the intervention package.
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From page 162... ...
There is a lack of rigorous program evaluations that directly test whether procedural justice policing can reduce crime and disorder. Prior reviews of impact evaluations have included multifaceted programs comprising a broad range of other crime prevention activities that go well beyond procedural justice policing.
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From page 163... ...
examined the association of neighborhood disorder with robbery victimization and concluded there was a causal relationship, but Harcourt's (2001) reexamination of 6 This issue is thus another instance of the "third common cause" or confounder problem that we discussed with respect to the evidence base for the causal linkage presumed in the logic model for procedural justice policing (see previous subsection)
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From page 164... ...
They found that improving the quality of housing in low-income places can cause reductions in violent crime (homicide, rape, robbery, and assault) at the county level, although they found no substantive impact on property offenses (burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson)
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From page 165... ...
have been the use of aggressive policing that uses misdemeanor arrests to disrupt disorderly social behavior and the use of problem-oriented or community-oriented policing practices to address disorderly conditions that are hypothesized to contribute to crime. With regard to the effect of increased misdemeanor arrests in reducing violent crimes, Kelling and Sousa (2001)
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From page 166... ...
Harcourt and Ludwig concluded that the substantial crime prevention effect identified by Kelling and Sousa (2001) may be no more than regression to the mean.7 Specifically, they found that the largest increases in misdemeanor arrest rates occurred in those precincts with the largest increase in violent crime in the 1980s and that subsequently these same precincts experienced the largest decrease in crime for reasons unrelated to intensive misdemeanor policing.
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From page 167... ...
[2006b] is discussed under hot spots policing)
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From page 168... ...
In practice, the broad approaches and the strategies for them, as delineated here and in Chapter 2, are not mutually exclusive, and each of them has fuzzy boundaries when it comes to classifying specific actual programs and interventions used by police organizations. For example, a project to clean up vacant lots that facilitate drug dealing may originate from an intervention plan that could reasonably be said to involve community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, or broken windows policing -- three proactive policing strategies with separate sections in this chapter.
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From page 169... ...
However, very little is known about distal displacement of crime across a jurisdiction. Nor are there estimates of j urisdictional impacts for key strategies such as hot spots policing, problemoriented policing, third party policing, and procedural justice policing.
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From page 170... ...
Concerns PLACE-BASED STRATEGIES Hot Spots Policing Deterrence Strong Yes Example: Concentrated patrol of microgeographic high-crime places Predictive Policing Deterrence Weak Mixed Not yet well defined Example: Data-intensive algorithm for predicting near-term crime in hot spots CCTV (type I) Deterrence (general)
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From page 171... ...
Deterrence Strong Yes Studies are confounded Example: High-volume Terry stops in with hot spots policing violent-crime hot spots practices, one RCT COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES Community-Oriented Policing Collective efficacy Weak No Broad category, not well Example: Neighborhood watch, defined newsletters, and community meetings Continued 171
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From page 172... ...
Concerns Procedural Justice Policing Legitimacy Weak Mixed Evaluated interventions Example: Train police to improve typically include tactics interactions with public from other strategies, so effect of procedural justice component is not determinable Broken Windows Policing (type I) Deterrence Medium Mixed No RCTs Example: High-volume arrests for certain misdemeanors Broken Windows Policing II (type II)
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From page 173... ...
Place-Based Proactive Strategies The committee found particularly strong evidence for proactive policing programs that take advantage of the strong concentration of crime at crime hot spots. A number of rigorous evaluations, including a series of randomized controlled trials, of hot spots policing programs have been conducted.
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From page 174... ...
These studies do not address possible jurisdictional impacts of prob lem-oriented policing and generally do not assess the long-term impacts of these strategies on crime and disorder. While there are only a small number of program evaluations of third party policing, the impact of third party policing interventions on crime and disorder has been assessed using randomized controlled trials and rigorous quasi-experimental designs.
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From page 175... ...
CONCLUSION 4-7 Evaluations of focused deterrence programs show consistent crime-control impacts in reducing gang violence, street crime driven by disorderly drug markets, and repeat individual offending. The available evaluation literature suggests both short-term and long term areawide impacts of focused deterrence programs on crime.
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From page 176... ...
There are even fewer rigorous program evaluations that directly test whether procedural justice policing is associated with crime and disorder reductions. Prior reviews of impact evaluations have included multifaceted programs comprising a broad range of tactics typical of other crime prevention strategies; such programs go well beyond just procedural justice policing.
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