Preventive Patrol

If I were the Police Chief in Kansas City at the time of this experiment I would not make major changes. However I would examine our policies and practices concerning how we deployed our uniform patrol personnel. I would likely contact the community through some form of social forum to bring them together to discuss why we did this experiment and how it will help us to better serve them. I would lay out what the experiment involved and some, not all of the findings. I say not all findings because while the experiment did show that crime was not affected by random proactive patrol I do not want criminals to know this or believe that crime is not able to be stopped. I would want all citizens including the criminals to know we will be out there

Instead I suggest we become more focused in our deployment efforts to ensure that the officers are patrolling specific areas at specific times, later known as data driven preventive patrols. While more “random” patrol may not clearly change crime numbers, specific focus areas and a robust complement of officers in those areas will surely alter crime statistics. Sir Robert Peel thought of the patrol officer as the primary mechanism in the overall machine that is law enforcement to deter and or prevent crime (Cordner, 2016). In the end I think I would take the experiment under advisement and simply move forward with attempting to develop better tactics for putting my officers in the right place at the right time. I had an Field Training Officer (FTO) ask me once on probation, “what do you think we do as patrol officers?”. I responded as I had been trained and as I believed, “to prevent crime and help our community”. The FTO laughed and said, No, our job is mostly to take reports. He explained how unlikely it is to simply stumble onto crime in progress and how much more likely it would be that the crime has already occurred by the time we