Impact of increased police presence in a non-criminogenic area
Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, Reno, Mail Stop 214, 1664 N. Virginia Street, Reno, NV 89557, USA
As we all know, the presence of law enforcement resources, police in particular, in high crime areas does reduce crime rate through the fear of apprehension, but what impact does an unexpected and extreme police presence have on non- criminogenic areas? The article that I am evaluating studies whether increasing in police attention in non-traditional high crime areas succeeds in its deterrent affects or instead creates more crime and disorder problems in these communities. In January 2008, an area that was close to a university campus and not commonly known for disorders witnessed a sever crime of abducting a young women whose dead body was found several months later. As a result, the police surrounded the area where the crime took place, and conducted many neighbor interviews. Due to the multi-jurisdictional nature of the case, the area was overwhelmed with the presence of state, county, local and university law enforcement which surprisingly had a negative Impact on the crime rate in the area.
Measuring the impact of the increased police presence was primarily based on the calls for service the police received from residents in two geographic areas. The two areas were the residential zone which was saturated with police and a comparison area that is also residential and close to the first area but did not experience an increase in police attention. To measure the effect in the study areas, all calls that were received by police one year prior to the incident until August 2008 were collected, and only those calls that dealt with crimes and d...
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...not associated with crimes. The experiment shows us that increased police presence even in no-criminogenic areas may reduce crime rate by making people aware of crimes and encouraging them to report crimes. The methodology followed in this experiments has its strengths and weaknesses. Selecting a good comparison area as a control was an excellent feature for this this experiment. However, there were many limitation to this experiment, such as the shortcoming in the analytic technique and failure in providing a definite measure of the increase in police presence. The article overall is interesting and I would recommend anyone to read it.
Work cited page:
Barthe, Emmanuel P., and B. Grant Stitt. "Impact Of Increased Police Presence In A Non-Criminogenic Area." Police Practice & Research 12.5 (2011): 383-396. Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.
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
Part One The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment: An Introduction According to Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown (1974), patrol is the “backbone” of police work. This belief is based around the premise that the mere presence of police officers on patrol prohibits criminal activity. Despite increasing budgets and the availability of more officers on the streets, crime rates still rose with the expanding metropolitan populations (Kelling et al., 1974).
In order for the police to successfully prevent crimes, public cooperation is needed. Various community policing programs have been implemented and it is important to discuss the benefits and limitations of these programs. Community policing allows the community to be actively involved and become a partner in promoting safety. This partnership increases trust of police officers and helps citizens understand that the police are on their side and want to improve their quality of life (Ferreira, 1996). The role of the police officers goes beyond that of a “crime fighter” and expands to multiple roles including that of a victim-centered
9. Sherman L., Gottfredson D., MacKenzie D., Eck J., Reuter P., Bushway S. Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. A Report to the United States Congress. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1997.
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).
The results of the study data found that the strategy of hot spot identification and targeting caused a lasting reduction of crime and disorder behaviors within the target areas. Vehicle patrols within the target areas were found to cause a residual deterrent effect but research data showed that the duration at which officers need to stay within the hot spot area in order to have a greater residual effect is approximately 10 minutes. Further, the optimal time frame for officers to stay within the target area is 10 to 14 minutes. Continued officer presence within the hot spot area after 14 minutes has a diminished effect (Koper, 1995). In addition, the strategy of intensified patrols was found to reduce total police calls for service within
There was a decline in crime during the 1990s. Our country enjoyed seven years of declining crime for the period 1991-98, the most recent data available. During this period crime declined by 22% and violent crime by 25%. These are welcome developments, particularly following the surge of crime and violence of the late 1980s. This decline occurred during a time when the national prison population has increased substantially, rising from 789,60 in 1991 to 1,252,830, a 59% rise in just seven years and a 47% increase in the rate of incarceration, taking into account changes in the national population (Mauer 21-24).
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.
Unfocused and indiscriminate enforcement actions will produce poor relationships between the police and community members residing in areas. Law enforcement should adopt alternative approaches to controlling problem areas, tracking hot persons, and preventing crime in problem regions. Arresting criminal offenders is the main police function and one of the most valuable tools in an array of responses to crime plagued areas, however hot spots policing programs infused with community and problem oriented policing procedures hold great promise in improving police and community relations in areas suffering from crime and disorder problems and developing a law enforcement service prepared to protect its nation from an act of
Walker, S., & Katz, C. (2012). Police in America: An Introduction (8th Edition ed.). New York:
A critical examination of police departments across the United States would show that while law enforcement agencies do common work, few agencies utilize the identical same strategy to tackle crime and disorder problems within their communities. Many agencies still deploy a traditional response model to address routine and emergency calls for service. The response model places a high emphasis on fast response times to calls for service and effective investigations which result in arrest and prosecution. However, more and more agencies are implementing variations of new strategies to deal with crime and disorder issues within their jurisdictions. Some of these newer strategies include community-policing, hot-spot policing and
Why are some neighborhoods more prone to experience violent episodes than others? What is the extent and in what sociologically measurable ways do communities contribute to the causation and prevention of crime in their neighborhoods? Are neighborhood-level predictors adequate to explain differences in violent crime rates in the respective communities? These are some of the questions addressed by this statistically intense paper published in Science 1997, by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls.
A decrease in public control has to happen in order to increase social organization within the community. According to Groves (1989), poorer communities have higher petty crime rates due to higher police concentration (p. 776). Groves (1989) also states that the community type changes the actions taken by police (p. 776). In poorer communities, police are more likely to make an arrest, no matter the type of crime committed (Groves, 1989, p. 776). It is easy to conclude that this change in policing causes distrust of the police across the community. The distrust then leads to more social
..., Larry J. (2006). Criminology: Theories, Patterns, & Typologies, 9th edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. ISBN 0-495-00572-X. Print. 25 Feb 2014.
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.