Observations
A podcast of this article is available on YouTube.
This may be considered “the” definitive study of policing tactics as I update this article for a podcast in December of 2024.
The focus of this study is proactive policing (self-initiated efforts to reduce crime) versus traditional tactics such as responding to calls and routine patrol.
The report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides an extensive literature review of research as it pertains to proactive policing. Over 1,000 research projects were considered.
The data indicate that most proactive police efforts reduce crime in the short run.
Author
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.
Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention and Statistics for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of Criminology and Public Affairs-University of Maryland, University College. Former police officer. Retired federal senior spokesperson.
Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Produced successful state anti-crime media campaigns.
Thirty-five years of directing award-winning (50+) public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Interviewed thousands of times by every national news outlet, often with a focus on crime statistics and research. Created the first state and federal podcasting series. Produced a unique and emulated style of government proactive public relations.
Certificate of Advanced Study-The Johns Hopkins University.
Author of ”Success With The Media: Everything You Need To Survive Reporters and Your Organization” available at Amazon and additional booksellers.
Sign up for notice of new articles on the front page of this site.
Daily news summations on crime, violent crime, law enforcement, and the justice system are offered under “Google Crime News” in the banner of this website.
A comprehensive overview of crime for recent years is available at Violent and Property Crime Rates In The U.S.
Editor’s Note
This article was updated in December 2024. It was originally offered in 2017.
Methodology
The report reviewed over 1,000 studies in its analysis, though only a subset met the stringent criteria required to assess the causal effects of various proactive policing strategies.
Specifically, the report prioritized studies that provided strong evidence, such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or quasi-experimental designs, to draw its conclusions. These studies were used to evaluate the impact of proactive policing methods on crime rates, community perceptions, and legal and ethical considerations.
See the Appendix below for more.
Article
A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides an extensive literature review of research as it pertains to proactive policing. It may be one of the most significant studies of law enforcement tactics in America. It was financed by the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
The focus is proactive policing versus traditional law enforcement (i.e., responding to calls and routine patrol).
In the 1970s, we were promised a golden age of criminal justice research where we would find the right approach and ingredients to reduce crime. The resulting decades have posed more questions than answers.
The principal finding of the report is that research is not robust enough to draw firm, long-term conclusions for many efforts. The collective data indicate that most proactive police efforts work in the short run with larger and longer effects in question.
However, there is little research of sufficient quality for the great majority of crime control studies. The fact that proactive policing strategies did indicate reductions in crime is a remarkable achievement especially when readers consider the 1,000 reports considered and researchers only examined the ones with sufficient methodological structure.
As I write this in late 2024, I am unaware of anything close in terms of an updated literature review with the massive number of studies considered coupled with the prestige of the National Academy of Sciences.
Report Summation
The committee’s report finds evidence that a number of proactive policing practices are successful in reducing crime and disorder, at least in the short term, and that most of these strategies do not harm communities’ attitudes toward police. However, the effects of proactive policing on other important outcomes—such as on the legality of police behavior and on racially biased behavior—are unclear because of gaps in research.
These are critical issues that must be addressed in future studies. Moreover, evidence on many proactive strategies is limited to near-term, localized impacts. Little is known about the strategies’ long-term effects on crime or other outcomes, and about whether and to what extent they will offer crime control benefits at a larger jurisdictional level—for example, across an entire precinct or city. Research is needed to understand those impacts as well.
The report is simply stating that the existing research has its limitations. However, the short-term results of many proactive policing efforts are encouraging. Remember that there were a considerable number of criminologists suggesting (as late as the mid-1990s) that police tactics had little impact on crime.
Everyone (including this site) makes grand pronouncements about law enforcement strategies and their effect on the community, but the evidence is often limited when it comes to impact.
For example, we endlessly hear of support for community-oriented policing. But this and previous research suggest that COP models have little to no effect on crime.
All crime control strategies were not the emphasis of the report. For example, target hardening (i.e., good doors or locks, using security surveys) has consistently shown its value in reducing crime without displacement. Target-hardening tactics used by law enforcement may be one of the most effective strategies for reducing property crime.
The report addresses an array of issues. Race and policing is an immensely important topic but, once again, the evidence is limited. The authors state that there simply isn’t enough data to come to a firm conclusion.
They do suggest that if you are going to target a community because of high crime, people who live in that community are going to be disproportionately affected. That doesn’t make proactive policing a defacto racist endeavor, it’s more of a mathematical equation. Regardless of a troubled history or community perceptions, residents of high-crime communities have an enhanced risk of interacting with policing strategies.
I use the summation (Summary) rather than the full report (Full Report) to provide an overview of the findings. We encourage readers to review the full report to grasp the context offered.
We do not offer everything provided by the report; the focus of this article is on police-initiated crime reduction programs. For example, we exclude observations on legal arguments, fear of crime, or CCTV cameras for the sake of brevity.
Finally, a major issue with the report is that it doesn’t offer a percentage assessment of crime reductions for each strategy, thus we don’t know “how” strong a reduction was.
For example, you can state that offender rehabilitation efforts reduce recidivism, but a more detailed review reveals that some programs work, most don’t, but most of the recidivism reductions were small. Yes, there are decreases, but if more than 80-90 percent of offenders fail (arrested-prosecuted-incarcerated) is it truly a success? See Advocates Insist That Offender Rehabilitation Programs Work-Are They Right? for additional data on the effectiveness of programs.
Evidence Summation
Proactive policing refers to policing strategies with the intent to prevent and reduce crime. They differ from traditional reactive approaches in policing, which focus primarily on responding to crime once it has occurred and answering citizen requests for police service. The shift toward proactive policing began in the 1980s and 1990s, and today these strategies are used widely in the United States.
The report reviews evidence on specific proactive policing strategies’ impacts on crime and disorder, including the strategies below. Evidence suggests that a number of these methods can be successful in reducing crime and disorder. However, evidence in many cases is restricted to localized crime prevention impacts, such as specific places, or to specific individuals or groups of individuals; relatively little is known about whether and to what extent they will have benefits at the larger jurisdictional level or across all offenders.
The evidence is generally on short-term crime-prevention effects and is seldom able to speak about long-term ones.
Hot Spots policing focuses resources on locations where crime is concentrated—for example, by proactively increasing police patrols (by car or by foot), or through police crackdowns in order to deter and respond more effectively to vandalism, break-ins, robberies, drug dealing, prostitution, and other crimes. The available research suggests that hot spot policing interventions produce short-term crime-reduction effects without simply displacing crime into surrounding areas. Instead, studies tend to find that areas nearby improve as well.
Predictive Policing uses sophisticated computer algorithms to predict changing patterns of future crime, often promising to be able to identify the exact locations where specific types of crimes are likely to occur next. There are currently insufficient rigorous empirical studies to support a firm conclusion for or against the efficacy of crime-prediction software or associated police response tactics.
Problem-Oriented Policing seeks to identify and analyze the underlying causes of crime problems and to respond using a wide variety of methods and tactics, from improving lighting and repairing fences to cling lighting and repairing fences to cleaning up parks and improving recreational opportunities for youth. Although this strategy has been popular, there are surprisingly few rigorous program evaluations of it. Overall, the small group of rigorous studies shows that problem-oriented policing programs lead to short-term reductions in crime. The studies generally do not assess long-term impacts or possible jurisdictional impacts.
In Third-Party Policing, police seek to persuade or coerce property owners, business owners, public housing agencies, and other organizations to take some responsibility for preventing crime or reducing crime problems. While there are only a small number of evaluations of these programs, the available evidence supports a conclusion that third-party policing generates short-term reductions in crime and disorder; evidence of long-term impacts is more limited.
Focused Deterrence Strategies attempt to deter crime among repeat offenders by understanding underlying crime-producing dynamics and implementing a blended strategy of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions in response. These strategies also allow police to increase the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment. Evaluations of focused deterrence programs show consistent crime-control impacts in reducing gang violence, street crime driven by drug markets, and repeat individual offending. The available literature suggests that these programs have both short-term and long-term areawide impacts on crime.
Stop-Question-Frisk (SQF) programs rely upon the legal authority granted by court decisions to engage in frequent stops in which suspects are questioned about their activities, frisked, and often searched. Evaluations of focused uses of SQF targeting places with violence or serious gun crimes and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders consistently report short-term crime-reduction effects; evidence is absent on long-term impacts. Evidence on the crime-reduction impact of SQF when implemented as a general, citywide crime control strategy is mixed.
Broken Windows Policing intends to disrupt the forces of disorder before they overwhelm a neighborhood or to restore afflicted neighborhoods to a point where community sources of order can maintain it. Implementations vary from informal enforcement tactics (warnings, rousting disorderly people) to formal or more intrusive ones (arrests, citations). Broken windows policing interventions that use broadly applied aggressive tactics for increasing misdemeanor arrests to control disorder generate little or no impact on crime. On the other hand, interventions that use neighborhood-based problem-oriented practices to reduce social and physical disorder have reported consistent short-term crime-reduction impacts; evidence is absent on long-term impacts.
Community-Oriented Policing involves citizens in identifying and addressing public safety concerns, decentralizes decision-making to develop responses to those concerns, and works to solve them. Existing studies do not identify consistent crime-prevention benefits for community-oriented policing programs, though many of the studies have weak evaluation designs.
Procedural Justice Policing seeks to impress upon citizens and the wider community that the police exercise their authority in legitimate ways, with the expectation that if citizens accord legitimacy to police activity, they are more inclined to collaborate with police and abide by laws. While there is only a very small evidence base from which to draw conclusions, existing research does not support a conclusion that procedural justice policing impacts crime or disorder.
Conclusions
To my knowledge, there are two massive literature reviews (or meta-analyses) recently funded by the US Department of Justice, proactive policing and offender rehabilitation programs (discussed above). What that means is that the vast majority of crime control initiatives do not have a research base supporting their contentions that they reduce crime.
To be considered a successful crime control initiative, you must have an extensive literature review of methodologically sound initiatives and once key variables have been established, then you have to replicate the program in other jurisdictions.
This is science. Anything (or any program) that does not meet the conditions above lacks consideration to be called evidence-based.
The police strategies articulated above meet those standards. Nothing else does. That’s not to suggest that we should not try different strategies but they must be evaluated by outside, independent researchers using established methods and replicated in other jurisdictions.
Appendix
This Consensus Study Report on the evidence regarding the consequences of different forms of proactive policing for crime and disorder, discriminatory application, legality, and community reaction and receptiveness was prepared at the request of the National Institute of Justice and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. In response to that request, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine appointed the Committee on Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime, Communities, and Civil Liberties (under the standing Committee on Law and Justice [CLAJ]) to carry out the task. Fifteen prominent scholars representing a broad array of disciplines—including criminology, law, psychology, statistics, political science, and economics—as well as two noted police practitioners were included on the committee, which met six times over a 2-year period.
In 2004 the NRC published a report, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence, which reviewed the existing evidence on police effectiveness and rebutted what had been a longstanding belief that the police had only a limited capacity to prevent crime. However, only a small number of proactive policing strategies were reviewed in that report, and since 2004 a substantial number of studies have assessed the effectiveness of proactive policing strategies. The time is right for a more comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.
See More
See more articles on crime and justice at Crime in America.
Most Dangerous Cities/States/Countries at Most Dangerous Cities.
US Crime Rates at Nationwide Crime Rates.
National Offender Recidivism Rates at Offender Recidivism.
The Crime in America.Net RSS feed (https://crimeinamerica.net/?feed=rss2) provides subscribers with a means to stay informed about the latest news, publications and other announcements from the site.
My book: “Amazon Hot New Release”- “A Must Have Book,” Success With The Media: Everything You Need To Survive Reporters and Your Organization available at Amazon
One Reply to “Police Strategies Reduce Crime-New Study”
Comments are closed.