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3 The State of the Empirical Evidence
Pages 27-40

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From page 27...
... In this instance, this police force should focus on integrating effective crime reduction strategies while maintaining procedural justice practices. Does a particular intervention reduce crime but fail to achieve distributive justice?
From page 28...
... CRIME REDUCTION Successfully meeting public expectations of police, notably effective attention to crime, is an important pillar of police legitimacy. A large body of research points to policing approaches and tactics known to reduce crime significantly.
From page 29...
... have determined that a targeted approach to crime control can be effective. 1 As noted in the National Academies' 2018 report Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities, actual policing practice often combines elements from two or more of the approaches.
From page 30...
... found that while not every hot-spots study has returned statistically significant findings, the majority of studies support the conclusion that police attention directed at crime hot spots produces a significant beneficial impact on short-term crime in these locations.3 This meta-analysis also concluded that there was little evidence to suggest that spatial displacement4 was a major concern; crime did not shift to other nearby locations, but instead reduced crime was observed in immediately adjacent areas (Braga, Papachristos, and Hureau, 2012; NASEM, 2018)
From page 31...
... Where community policing practices are community oriented and involve citizens in public safety ­efforts, they can help garner information that police can use to focus their crime reduction strategies such as problem-oriented policing, hot-spots ­policing, and focused-deterrence strategies (Braga, 2015; NASEM, 2021)
From page 32...
... … Community policing approaches have been criticized for the range of intended and implemented components, which makes it difficult to estab­lish which elements (if any) were the cause of success -- or failure -- in attaining hypothesized and measureable outcomes.
From page 33...
... Viewed this way, community policing provides law enforcement with the opportunity to better serve the needs of the public and operationalize the four pillars of legitimacy without undermining one pillar in pursuit of another. PROCEDURAL JUSTICE As discussed in previous chapters, procedural justice has long been recognized, operationalized, and studied as a pillar of police legitimacy.
From page 34...
... This 2013 meta-analysis and systemic review assessed published and unpublished empirical evidence on the impact of police-led interventions aimed at improving legitimacy, and the review shows that the dialogue component of police-citizen interactions is a meaningful mechanism for developing and fostering citizen satisfaction, confidence, compliance and cooperation with the police, and for enhancing perceptions of procedural justice (Mazerolle, Willis, and Kochel, 2013)
From page 35...
... , one possible explanation for this finding is that minority police officers feel pressure to conform to an existing discriminatory police subculture. Another possible explanation is that women and racial/ethnic minority officers in newly integrated police forces are pigeonholed into roles
From page 36...
... While some specialized assignments, like women's help desks, have shown improvements to reporting rates of gender-based violence and police responsiveness to these crimes (Sukhtankar, Kruks-Wisner, and Mangla, 2022) , these interventions also created physical segregation and occupational segregation (such as the assignment of tasks related to gendered crimes)
From page 37...
... Notably, community policing initiatives have shown limited success when relegated to a single program, a select group of officers, a short time period, or without adequate monitoring. The committee believes that police legitimacy stems from achieving four responsibilities (or "pillars")
From page 38...
... Emphasize the attainment of all four pillars of effectiveness, law fulness, distributive justice, and procedural justice needed to build legitimacy with their publics. To do this, agencies can use all four pillars to assess their strategies to address crime.
From page 39...
... Research indicates that this can affect officer treatment of citizens, and survey findings demonstrate that procedural justice practices improve citizen satisfaction with a police encounter.


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