(C) Common Dreams
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A policing strategy abandoned after Breonna Taylor’s death spreads to other cities [1]
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Date: 2023-02
Police chiefs under pressure to quickly reduce crime have long turned to plans prioritizing small areas of a city that account for outsize rates of violence.
One of the earliest uses of hot spots was in Minneapolis in the late 1980s during an experiment co-led by the criminologist David Weisburd. That work identified 110 clusters of addresses with the highest number of calls to police. Officials analyzed the calls to determine the “hottest” times and assigned officers to patrol half of the areas for at least three hours a day. In the end, hot spots with increased patrols reported reductions of between 6 and 13 percent in the number of calls about crime.
“As opposed to having to just ride around in incoherent ways, have them go to the hot spots,” said Weisburd, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Let’s use police patrol in a more rational way.”
The success of such early experiments gained notice. The strategy soon took hold in police departments across the country as officials routinely found that a small percentage of city blocks accounted for significant portions of citywide crime numbers.
As the use of hot spots spread, Anthony Braga, now the director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab in the department of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, reviewed 78 tests of hot-spot-policing interventions conducted in more than two dozen U.S. cities and in eight countries from 1989 to 2017. He found that nearly 80 percent of the tests reported “noteworthy crime and disorder reductions.”
In his review, he noted that just 10 percent of hot-spot studies measured the effects of such policing on community residents. Those that did found little detriment to community and police relations, but Braga noted that some initiatives could lead to more men of color being swept into the criminal justice system — a point also made by critics of such programs.
“Flooding the zone isn’t going to solve the problem of poverty or economic stagnation in certain communities,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at American University in Washington and author of the book “The Rise of Big Data Policing.”
Ferguson suggested that greater funding of schools and jobs programs would have longer-lasting positive results. “But they’re police chiefs,” he said. “They don’t actually have the tools to do these things, so all they can come up with is an answer that sounds good, which is: ‘Don’t worry. We have a new policing strategy’ — which is really just the old policing strategy with a new name.”
Before taking over the Dallas department last year, Garcia consulted with criminologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to draft a crime-reduction plan and to oversee an effort to evaluate its results.
The first step would be to divide the city into tens of thousands of grids, about the size of football fields, and to flag roughly the top 50 grids for violent crime. Officers would patrol those areas with greater visibility and, in some grids, use investigative tactics to gather intelligence.
Also within the 29-page plan was the place network investigations model that promised to “identify and disrupt networks of criminogenic places.”
“It’s a relatively new theoretical advance in our understanding of crime and place,” said Michael Smith, a professor in the department of criminology at UTSA. “It’s certainly not been around as long as hot spots policing has been around. But I think it has shown great promise.”
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[1] Url:
http://washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/place-network-policing-strategy/
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