Centenial Celebration

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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri

Time: 12:14 pm

Results for policing innovations

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Author: Ratcliffe, Jerry H.

Title: Smart Policing Initiative: Final Report

Summary: This report documents the experimental results from the Temple University sub-contractual part of the Smart Policing Initiative funding awarded the City of Philadelphia. This project was supported by Grant No. 2009-DG-BX-K021 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The project centered on a randomized field experiment. The study was designed and conducted as part of a continuing research-practitioner partnership with the Philadelphia Police Department. The Police Commissioner and management team were actively involved in the planning of the experiment so that the experimental design would more closely approximate how hot spots policing would occur naturally in a large urban police department. As the Commissioner wrote in the city's crime fighting strategy; In today's economy, we must be smart and judicious about allocating police resources. Saturation patrol is not an informed solution to preventing or reducing a rising crime problem. We must understand what works, how it works, when it works, and where it works. The answers to these questions provide the foundation for "evidence-based" policing strategies. First, violent crime hotspots were delineated using spatial statistics. Violent crime point data were accessed from the city's 2009 incident database. Violent crime was defined as homicide, robbery, aggravated assault and misdemeanor assault. Two different local measures for detecting spatial association and concentration were applied: Local Indicator of Spatial Association (LISA) and Hierarchical Nearest Neighbor Clustering (HNN). Full details of the analysis strategy are found in the chapters that follow. A total of 81 mutually-exclusive target areas were identified, allowing 21 of these to be used as controls. Senior police commanders (District Captains) were asked to use their operational knowledge to delineate the final boundaries of deployment areas and to identify which type of intervention should be applied in each. They were asked to identify 27 areas suitable for foot patrol, 27 areas that would benefit from problem-solving and 27 areas where police would focus enforcement on violent repeat offenders. Police commanders drew deployment areas around the hot spots identified by the LISA and HNN analyses taking into consideration the street network and environmental features. The 81 deployment areas were then displayed on a new map. In subsequent meetings with the Regional Operations Commanders, the deployment areas' boundaries were revised to balance police operations with research priorities (e.g., achieving geographic separation of the target areas to allow for examination of displacement/diffusion effects). The final 81 hot spots were small, containing an average of 3 miles of streets and 23.5 intersections. The 81 hot spot deployment areas were stratified into three groups prior to randomization based on their pretest score on treatment suitability as qualitatively evaluated by police department commanders. Random assignment using a random number generator was performed separately for each stratum of 27 areas resulting in 20 areas being assigned to treatment and 7 to control. The three experimental areas were targeted for at least three months with, problem-oriented policing, offender-focused activity, or foot patrol. The report that follows documents the experimental results of the study, a pre-post survey of officers involved in the experiment, and a pre-post survey of residents in the experimental areas.

Details: Philadelphia: Temple University, Center for Security and Crime Science, 2013. 92p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 11, 2014 at: http://webcastium.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Smart-1-final-report-Temple-University.pdf

Year: 2013

Country: United States

URL: http://webcastium.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Smart-1-final-report-Temple-University.pdf

Shelf Number: 132973

Keywords:
Crime Analysis
Crime Hotspots
Foot Patrol
Police Patrol
Policing Innovations
Problem-Oriented Policing
Violent Crime