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Crime control by police
Can the police reduce crime essay
Crime control by police
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Sir Robert Peel created the first organized police department in London U.K. in 1829. His central idea for this creation was to provide “unremitting through visible patrol” (Ratcliffe et al. 2011). He believed that local citizens be deterred from his aggressive police presence in the area and knowing their chance of being apprehended and punished would be high. The debate in these modern times seems to hinge on the idea of whether police patrol deters crime in hot spots.
This essay is significant because by using foot patrol as a unit of analysis, it will be easier to control the perspective of the task at hand while keeping the information processing at a simplified level. It is the hope of this essay to accomplish the main goal of proving that police foot patrol in hot spots is an effective deterrent.
The National Research Council summarized that police foot patrol was an unfocused community policing strategy that provided only weak-moderate evidence of reducing fear of crime (Ratcliffe et al. 2011). In a study done in 2005, (Braga 2005) concluded that there was a significant difference in residence opinion of police foot patrol in the targeted area. He found that because of the focused aggressive police presence residents submitted complaints about the enforcement strategies. The residents feared police misconduct and abuse of force, in a minority dominated area residents will feel that bored officers racially targeted them.
Ratcliffe et al (2011) suggest that previous research on foot patrol suffered from statistical and measurement issues that did not fully explore the potential dynamics of deterrence within microspatical settings. The Operation Impact program in Newark, New Jersey, was a foot patrol exper...
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...in a hot spot, will promote positive results.
Bibliography
Braga, A. (2005). “Hot spots policing and crime prevention: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials”. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 1(3), 317-342.
Braga, Anthony A., and Brenda J. Bond. 2008. “Policing Crime and Disorder Hot Spots: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Criminology 46(3):577–607.
Piza, Eric L., and Brian A. O’Hara. 2012. “Saturation Foot-Patrol in a High-Violence Area: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation.” Justice Quarterly 1–26.
Ratcliffe, J H, Taniguchi, T, Groff, E R, et al. (2011). “The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots.” Criminology, 49(3), 795-831
Thale, C. 2007. The Informal World of Police Patrol: New York City in the Early Twentieth Century. Journal of Urban History 33: 183-216
Because of budget constraints, the study only used one beat to collect data on the effects of increasing police patrol. Even though money was an issue, the experiment could have yielded better data by repeating the experiment multiple times to see if the data they collected would be reliable. The experiment also took place during the winter. The report of the study even noted that there was some evidence that crime activity levels declined, just as street activity does, because of colder weather. Although the design of the study contained weaknesses, some of the methods used by the researchers worked well for this type of study. One of the strengths of this experiment was the different methods used to acquire illegal guns in the beat. By using a variation of ways to seize illegal weapons in the “hot spot,” it allowed officers to increase their chances of finding more illegal guns. Using different methods of search also could have led to greater number of potential offenders to know that officers were looking for illegal weapons and refrained from offending. Another strength of the study includes the relatively inexpensive method to try to answer their hypothesis. Increasing police patrol is one of the more inexpensive methods and it did manage to decrease the number of gun crimes and homicide in the
Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.
With reference to the orthodox and revisionist perspectives, assess the statement that ‘the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 was a rational solution to changes in society and the associated challenges of crime and disorder’. Use a contemporary example to demonstrate how these perspectives can be useful in interpreting modern policing activities.
During the seventies in New Jersey created a program that could change life in society. This program occurred only in twenty-eight cities. Government and public officials were excited about this concept. Police officials were not so much. Foot patrol made officers walk in sleet and snow. Assigned foot patrol was a way of punishment for officers. State funding of foot patrol shut the mouths of some people. Silence stopped after the “Police Foundation”(Kelling) put foot patrol to the actual test. To contrary belief this rattled some arguments in the community an...
The Kansas City Preventative Patrol Experiment started in October 1972 and lasted for an entire year. This study was administered by the Kansas Police Department of Kansas, City, Missouri but the police foundation evaluated each day of the study. There were 15 beats (foot patrol) where police patrols varied. This is where officers entered these areas only to answer calls for service from residents which were labeled “reactive beats.” There were five “proactive beats” where the patrol units were more visible which was increased by three times its usual level, the administration assigned additional patrol cars adjacent to the area of the reactive beats. There were also five “control beats” which the patrol officer maintained one marked patrol
Siegel, L. J., & Worrall, J. L. (2012). Issues in Policing. Introduction to Criminal Justice (13th ed., pp. 252-258). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Hot spot policing is based on the idea that some criminal activities occur in particular areas of a city. According to researchers crime is not spread around the city instead is concentrated in small places where half of the criminal activities occur (Braga chapter 12). Also, many studies has demonstrated that hot spots do show significant positive results suggesting that when police officers put their attention on small high crime geographic areas they can reduce criminal activities ( Braga, papachristo & hureau I press). According to researchers 50% of calls that 911 center received are usually concentrated in less than 5% of places in a city (Sherman, Gartin, & Buerger, 1989; Weisburd, Bushway, Lum, &Yang, 2004). That is the action of crime is often at the street and not neighborhood level. Thus police can target sizable proportion of citywide crime by focusing in on small number of high crime places (see Weisburd & Telep, 2010). In a meta-analysis of experimental studies, authors found significant benefits of the hot spots approach in treatment compared to control areas. They concluded that fairly strong evidence shows hot spots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy (Braga (007) .Importantly, there was little evidence to suggest that spatial displacement was a major concern in hot spots interventions. Crime did not simply shift from hot spots to nearby areas (see also Weisburd et al., 2006).
It is a myth to believe that an officers job is spend fighting dangerous crimes, in reality officers spend more time handing smaller cases. For example, police officers spend a lot of time doing daily tasks such as giving speeding tickets and being mediators in disputes (Kappeler & Potter, 2005). Handing out speeding tickers and handling minor disputes are far from fighting crime. Police officers spend more time doing preventive measures (Kappeler & Potter, 2005). Preventive measures involve officers intervening to prevent further altercations. Victor Kappeler and Gary Potter discussed the myth of crime fighting as invalid and misleading notions of an officer’s employment.
A, Braga & D, Weisburd. 'Police Innovation and Crime Prevention: Lessons Learned from Police Research over the Past 20 Years'. Paper presented at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Policing Research Workshop: Planning for the future, Washington, DC. 2006. p. 22.
http://www.ojip.usdoj.gov/nij. [Internet Website]. "Crime and Place: Plenary Papers of the 1997 Conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation."
Rutkin, Aviva. "Policing The Police." New Scientist 226.3023 (2015): 20-21. Academic Search Premier. Web. 17 Oct. 2016.
...T., Reiner, R. (2012) ‘Policing the Police’ in The Official Handbook of Criminology. Ed. By Maguire, M., Morgan, R., Reiner, R. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 806- 838
Crime Analysis has many benefits to the community. Community engagement, targeted initiatives, strategic use of resources, and data-driven decision-making contribute to decreasing crime. Crime prevention and community satisfaction with police services, while linked to the number of officers on the streets, does not depend entirely on the visibility of patrol officers. Community engagement, targeted initiatives, strategic use of resources, and data-driven decision-making contribute to decreasing crime. So in closing I believe that departments that take the positive elements of foot patrols and combine their efforts with crime analysis that focuses on the time, location, and type of crime, may use the findings to develop strategies to decrease crime and enhance the quality of life in their communities.
They pointed out that hot spot policing can sometimes be referred to as place-based policing. It represented a range of police responses that focus police resources on the small geographical areas where crime was highly concentrated. Then the confirmation of the effectiveness of hot spot policing was given. According to the authors, this is “an established fact based on strong experimental and quasi-experimental evidence (p. 202).”
Cordner, G. W., & Scarborough, K. E. (2010). Police administration (7th ed.). Albany, N.Y.: LexisNexis/Anderson Pub.