Proactive Policing Effects on Crime and Communities (2018) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 15-40
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From page 15... ...
. Such headlines were common at the beginning of the new millennium, and they continue to be common as police agencies take credit for controlling crime in American cities (see, e.g., Youmans, 2000; Wood, 2001; Allen, 2002; Rashbaum, 2003; Williams, 2003; Cella, 2004; Dowdy, 2004)
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From page 16... ...
That report noted that research on the standard models of policing common in the United States at the time did not support claims for crime control. However, the report argued that evidence was beginning to emerge that promising new proactive policing strategies could prevent crime.
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From page 17... ...
It is not enough simply to identify "what works" for reducing crime and disorder; it is also critical to consider how proactive policing affects the legality of policing, the evaluations of the police in communities, the potential abuses of police authority, and the equitable application of police services and police interference in the everyday lives of citizens. Are the new proactive policing strategies the source of the growing challenge to the legitimacy of police in the United States?
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From page 18... ...
Do they lead to inequitable policing practices that target specific ethnic or racial groups? These are key questions that have not been reviewed systematically across the range of proactive policing strategies.
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From page 19... ...
The com mittee's review of the literature and the subsequent report will include a thorough discussion of data and methodological gaps in the research. THE ORIGINS OF PROACTIVE POLICING Attention to proactive policing as a broad-based police organization approach to reduce crime in communities is a relatively recent phenomenon in American policing.
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From page 20... ...
. However, because police practices that involved proactivity were initiated without a specific request for police involvement, they demanded a more professional and regulated style of police organization, since they involved a wider array of activities involving greater autonomy of police officers.
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From page 21... ...
police organizations in this period as dominated by politics, corrupt, inefficient in terms of crime control, and marked by uncontrolled abusive practices against people on the street (Miller, 1977; Fogelson, 1977; Walker, 1977)
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From page 22... ...
Other examples of proactivity in early American police departments include the corrupt methods of the police in organizing and regulating thieves and pickpockets. Indeed, public negativity about proactive crime detection by private entrepreneurs motivated the emergence of the modern police detective as an agent who is mobilized only in reaction to the reporting of a crime and who is controlled by the creation of the "case" as a structure of accountability (Klockars, 1985, Ch.
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From page 23... ...
While these methods were undeniably proactive, they can hardly be characterized as justified as primarily crime preventive, and they do not constitute a model or positive precursor to the sorts of contemporary proactive innovations the committee has targeted for evaluation. Professional Reform in the 20th Century The police professionalization movement that emerged in the early 20th century had a powerful and long-lasting impact in transforming local police departments and routine policing.
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From page 24... ...
. A few other innovative, proactive reform programs paralleled the new juvenile units.9 Some of the most notable efforts to promote innovative proactive approaches to crime came from the highly visible and influential progressive police leader, August Vollmer.
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. Vollmer also devoted a chapter in his book to crime prevention, offering recommendations that presaged key features of the contemporary proactive strategies of community policing and problem-oriented policing.
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The standard model of policing has as sumed that generic strategies for crime prevention can be applied through out a jurisdiction, regardless of the level of crime, the nature of crime, or other possible variations. (National Research Council, 2004, p.
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From page 27... ...
The prevailing attitude was that post–World War II policing practices incorporated major improvements over policing strategies of prior decades and that these practices were effective not only in responding to specific crime events but also in having overall impacts on crime in the jurisdictions that police served. The crime control benefits were seen as resulting from the deterrence gained by police effectively identifying and investigating offenders, responding quickly to the scene of crimes, and being visible agents of control as they organized themselves for the new rapid response systems that radios and police cars enabled.
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From page 28... ...
Conducted in Kansas City, Missouri, preventive patrol was manipulated in large beat areas, with areas having higher, lower, or standard levels of police patrol vehicles. The study concluded that merely increasing or decreasing the intensity of routine preventive patrol by police officers in cars had no effect on crime, on delivery of police services to citizens, or on how community members felt about security in their communities.
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From page 29... ...
. However, the conclusion that these studies reflect the impact of the standard model of policing has been criticized because they often examine the boost in police resources that comes from support for community policing or other proactive policing strategies (Lee, Eck, and Corsaro, 2016)
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From page 30... ...
3) Official crime statistics, widely available to the public, seemed to reinforce this view of the ineffectiveness of policing strategies, as well as the general perception that the police were losing the "War on Crime." Even the established, professional police organizations in America's largest cities seemed unable to curtail the alarming rise in crime rates -- especially violent crime rates, which doubled between 1973 and 1990 (Weisburd and Braga, 2006b, p.
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From page 31... ...
As we noted above, the 2004 NRC report on police practices and policies proposed what it termed the "standard model of policing" to describe the common ways in which policing was organized before the 1980s. The study committee for that report drew from Herman Goldstein's classic critique of American policing in his article on problem-oriented policing published in 1979 (see also Goldstein, 1990)
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From page 32... ...
The new proactive strategies went beyond the obligations of the police to respond to the occurrence of crime and to investigate and bring offenders to justice and focused instead on policing practices that could be successful in preventing crime irrespective of whether they had been seen in the past as traditional components of police practice. Because of this, the 2004 NRC report also identified an expansion of the tools of policing as an important innovation in police practices over the standard model (National Research Council, 2004, pp.
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From page 33... ...
Finally, policing is in a period of tremendous community concern. Some of that concern is focused on proactive policing strategies that are seen as unfairly targeting some Americans over others and as leading to abusive policing practices.
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From page 34... ...
In other cases, such as for hot spots policing studies, we note the large number of studies conducted in different contexts. A large group of experiments conducted in different places, in different types of police agencies, for example, provides a more convincing argument for the external validity of study findings than one or a small group of studies that have been conducted in one city.
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From page 35... ...
The challenge for this task is that while the new interventions are "similar" in some sense to those that were evaluated, they and the context in which they are implemented will not be identical to the evaluated cases. For example, if a hot spots policing intervention is effective
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From page 36... ...
. That is, a series of empirical evaluations, perhaps taken together with other sorts of evidence, can allow evaluators to look inside the "black box" of a policing approach (e.g., hot spots policing)
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From page 37... ...
As will become apparent, the real world is much messier than an academic effort to define and categorize proactive policing strategies. Nonetheless, the committee thought it important at the outset to try to identify strategies in terms of the broad mechanisms that are seen as contributing to crime prevention outcomes.
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From page 38... ...
Chapter 5 examines how proactive policing strategies that focus on places, people, or problemsolving impact the communities in which they are carried out. Chapter 6 examines proactive policing strategies, such as community policing and procedural justice policing, that seek not only to reduce crime but also to alter the fundamental relationships between the police and the communities they serve.
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From page 39... ...
CONCLUSION Proactive policing, as the committee defines it, is a relatively new phenomenon in American cities. Although there were historical precedents for police proactivity in 19th and 20th century America, its current form developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that emerged because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the standard model of policing that had been dominant in the latter half of the 20th century.
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