Proactive Policing Effects on Crime and Communities (2018) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
8 Conclusions and Implications for Policy and Research
8 Conclusions and Implications for Policy and Research
Pages 303-334
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From page 303... ...
Proactive policing in this report is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. This report has documented that proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States.
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From page 304... ...
Community approaches look to strengthen collective efficacy in the community or to strengthen the bonds between the police and the community, as a way of enhancing informal social controls and increasing cooperation with the police, with the goal of preventing crime. In this concluding chapter, the committee summarizes the main findings for each of the four areas on which the report has focused: law and legality, crime control, community impacts, and racial disparities and racially biased behavior.
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From page 305... ...
; broken windows policing; and hot spots policing interventions if they use an aggressive practice of searches and seizures to deter criminal activity. In addition, in conjunction with existing Fourth Amendment doctrine, proactive policing strategies may limit the effective strength or scope of constitutional protection or reduce the availability of constitutional remedies.
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From page 306... ...
Since most policing policies today do not expressly target racial or ethnic groups, most Equal Protection challenges require proving discriminatory purpose in addition to discriminatory effect in order to establish a constitutional violation. Specific proactive policing strategies such as SQF and "zero tolerance" versions of broken windows policing have been linked to violations of both the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause by courts in private litigation and by the U.S.
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From page 307... ...
Place-Based Strategies CONCLUSION 4-1 The available research evidence strongly suggests that hot spots policing strategies produce short-term crime-reduction effects without simply displacing crime into areas immediately sur rounding targeted locations. Hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion of crime-control benefits into immediately adjacent areas.
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From page 308... ...
In contrast to the focus of the standard model of policing, proactive place-based policing calls for a refocusing of policing on very small, "microgeographic" units of analysis, often termed "crime hot spots." A number of rigorous evaluations of hot spots policing programs, including a series of randomized controlled trials, have been conducted. The available research evidence suggests that hot spots policing interventions generate statistically significant short-term crime-reduction impacts without simply displacing crime into areas immediately surrounding the targeted locations.
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From page 309... ...
Nevertheless, even these limited applications of problem-oriented policing have been shown by rigorous evaluations to generate statistically significant short-term crime prevention impacts. Third party policing draws upon the insights of problem solving, but also leverages "third parties" who are believed to offer significant new resources for preventing crime and disorder.
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From page 310... ...
Related programs that employ Business Improvement Districts also show crime-prevention outcomes with long-term impacts, though research designs have been less rigorous in establishing causality. Person-Focused Strategies CONCLUSION 4-7 Evaluations of focused deterrence programs show consistent crime control impacts in reducing gang violence, street crime driven by disorderly drug markets, and repeat individual offending.
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From page 311... ...
These strategies seek to change offender behavior by understanding the underlying crime-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring crime problems and by implementing a blended strategy of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions. A growing number of quasi-experimental evaluations suggest that focused deterrence programs generate statistically significant crime-reduction impacts.
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From page 312... ...
CONCLUSION 4-11 At present, there are an insufficient number of rigorous empirical studies on procedural justice policing to draw a firm conclusion about its effectiveness in reducing crime and disorder. CONCLUSION 4-12 Broken windows policing interventions that use aggressive tactics for increasing misdemeanor arrests to control disor der generate small to null impacts on crime.
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From page 313... ...
There is currently only a very small evidence base from which to support conclusions about the impact of procedural justice policing on crime prevention. Existing research does not support a conclusion that procedural justice policing impacts crime or disorder outcomes.
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From page 314... ...
Given this premise and the recent conflicts between the police and the public, the committee thought it very important to assess the impacts of proactive policing on issues, such as fear of crime, collective efficacy, and community evaluation of police legitimacy. Place-Based, Problem-Solving, and Person-Focused Interventions CONCLUSION 5-1 Existing research suggests that place-based polic ing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community outcomes.
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From page 315... ...
At the same time, the evidence suggests that such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures. Moreover, existing studies have generally examined the broader community and not specific individuals who are the focus of place-based interventions at crime hot spots.
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From page 316... ...
As with place-based approaches, community outcomes generally do not examine people who have direct contact with the police, and measurement of impacts is local as opposed to jurisdictional. The body of research evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes is relatively small, even in comparison with the evidence base on problem-solving and place-based strategies; the longterm community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies also remain untested.
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From page 317... ...
CONCLUSION 6-3 The committee is not able to draw a conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime or collective efficacy. This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed.
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From page 318... ...
Studies of the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime do not support the model's claim that such programs will reduce levels of fear in the community, at least in the short run. While there is a rapidly growing body of research on the community impacts of procedural justice policing, it is difficult to draw causal inferences from these studies.
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From page 319... ...
A series of studies suggest that negative racial attitudes may influence police behavior -- although there is no direct research on proactive policing. There is a further growing body of research identifying how these psychological mechanisms may affect behavior and what types of situations, policies, or practices may exacerbate or ameliorate racially biased behaviors.
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From page 320... ...
Because of these gaps, the committee was unable to draw any concrete conclusions about the role of biased behavior in proactive policing. Consequently, research on these topics is urgently needed both so that the field may better understand potential negative consequences of proactive policing and so that communities and police departments may be better equipped to align police behaviors with values of equity and justice.
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From page 321... ...
POLICY IMPLICATIONS In its review of the evidence, the committee tried to identify the most credible evidence on whether particular types of proactive policing strategies have been shown to affect legality, crime, communities, racial disparities, and racially biased behavior. A strategy is said to have "impact" if it affects outcomes compared with what they would have been at that same time and place in the absence of the implementation of a specific strategy.
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From page 322... ...
Second, and closely related, is that the evaluation evidence, because it typically does not account for cost, may actually provide a misleading impression of whether a program "worked" -- whether in reducing crime or improving community attitudes for the entire jurisdiction -- as opposed to having an effect only for the segment of the city represented by the treatment group. As we have noted throughout the report, most evaluations provide a local estimate of program impacts.
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From page 323... ...
A number of identifiable policing strategies provide evidence of consistent short-term crime-prevention benefits at the local level. These in 1 For a discussion of HOPE, see the special issue of Criminology & Public Policy (November 2016)
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From page 324... ...
The committee's findings regarding community-based strategies raise important questions about whether such approaches will yield crime- prevention benefits. Many scholars and policy makers have sought to argue that community-oriented policing and procedural justice policing will yield not only better relations with the public but also greater crime control.
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At the same time, studies reviewed by the committee did not find that procedural justice policing has the expected positive community outcomes. Does this mean that police should not encourage procedural justice policing programs?
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From page 326... ...
For the police to take advantage of the revolution in police practices that proactive policing represents, they will need the help of the federal government and private foundations in answering a host of questions regarding effectiveness, community outcomes, legality, and racially biased behavior. The committee also noted an imbalance in the evidence base across the areas of the committee's charge.
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From page 327... ...
While we recognize that the police and program developers are focused on crime prevention and not on identifying the specific components of a program that have impact, the mixing of elements from different approaches makes it extremely difficult to draw strong conclusions about which element(s) in a program had a crime-prevention impact.
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From page 328... ...
Broken windows policing, for example, was conceived as a method for increasing community social controls in the long run. However, very few studies of broken windows policing actually examine how police activities in reducing disorder will impact such long-term attitudes.
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From page 329... ...
Proactive Policing and the Law There is less research on how proactive policies influence the legality of officer behavior than on how those policies affect crime or community perceptions of crime. One of the hurdles is the absence of a clear measure of what, exactly, constitutes legal behavior on an officer's part.
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From page 330... ...
More research is also needed on how technology contributes to the crime prevention effects of proactive policing strategies. There has been relatively little research on the impacts of technology in policing beyond technical, efficiency, or process evaluations.
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From page 331... ...
Moreover, although a variety of logic models propose to account for the role that various community outcomes play in the process of affecting crime and disorder levels and community perceptions and behaviors, these logic models have not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. A gap noted throughout the research on community impacts is the lack of studies of the long-term effects of proactive strategies.
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From page 332... ...
First, a focus is needed on the psychological mechanisms of racially biased police behavior in actual field contexts, not only in laboratory simulations. As we reviewed in Chapter 7, research in social psychology has identified a number of risk and protective factors that in laboratory settings are associated with either an increase or decrease in racially biased behaviors, even in subjects who do not appear to harbor racial animus.
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From page 333... ...
Assessing disparate impacts in policing in an informative way will require spatially detailed demographic information about the population at risk of encountering the police when the policy is in place, in order to identify an appropriate benchmark and identify the marginal person affected by the policy. Until standardized metrics for measuring racially biased behavior are available, along with measures of the populations exposed to proactive policing policies, thorough assessments of proactive policing efforts will likely require formal empirical analysis, as well as qualitative and ethnographic analysis, of proactive strategies, their implementation, and their impacts.
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From page 334... ...
For example, existing research provides little guidance as to whether police programs to enhance procedural justice will improve community perceptions of police legitimacy or community cooperation with the police. Much has been learned over the past two decades about proactive policing programs.
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