THE fight against crime is like a bottomless pit, one into which we could keep throwing resources without ever noticing much difference. That is an especially big problem now that police departments around the world are being forced to make cuts in the wake of the global recession. The squeeze on police budgets will worry many of us, yet there are those who see it as an opportunity.
“There’s nothing quite like 30 per cent less funding to drive innovation and a desire to do things differently,” says Peter Neyroud at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. A former chief constable of one of the UK’s regional police forces, Neyroud is an ardent advocate of evidence-based policing – the idea that policing strategies should be guided by research into which crime prevention and detection measures work best. Until now, few police forces have shared his enthusiasm. But as cuts in public spending force them to do more with less, business as usual is not an option. Evidence-based policing should now appear particularly attractive, because it makes good use of limited resources.
Traditionally, the police have preferred a common-sense approach over one that uses research to direct how they carry out their work. Unfortunately, says Neyroud, decades of research show that what makes for good policing is often counter-intuitive. A case in point is the random patrol, a touchstone of policing strategy ever since Robert Peel – from whose name the British get their informal term “bobby” for a police officer – came up with his concept of a modern police force in the 19th century. Random patrols are founded on the idea that a visible, evenly distributed police presence deters crime. That principle was central to an influential police manual published in the 1960s by the head of the Chicago Police Department, O. W. Wilson. It remains deeply embedded in the psyche of both the public and the police themselves.
Advertisement
The trouble is that random patrols don’t work. Dozens of studies have shown that neither removing them nor beefing them up has any impact on crime levels, and citizens often do not even notice that policing strategy has changed. What’s more, spreading patrols out in a random and therefore unfocused way is not cost-effective, because it wastes resources on policing areas of low crime. That’s the fundamental problem with random patrols, says Cynthia Lum: crime is not random. A former police officer in Baltimore – a US city whose drug-related crime gained notoriety in the TV drama series The Wire – she now works at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Fifty per cent of a city’s violent crime usually takes place in 2 to 3 per cent of its locations,” she says.
The solution, more than 30 studies suggest, is to target police resources on areas with a high rate of crime. So-called hotspot policing has had a bad name in the profession, because people thought it merely displaced crime to areas where the police were paying less attention. Research now refutes that. What makes a hotspot “hot” is the combination of offender, victim, opportunity and lack of law enforcement in that area. “If any one of those factors is absent, a crime won’t be committed,” says Neyroud. So a focused police presence can make all the difference.
The matrix
But police forces around the world have been slow to embrace hotspot policing. In an attempt to persuade them to adopt this and other evidence-based strategies, Lum, together with George Mason colleagues Christopher Koper and Cody Telep, has created an online tool called the . It plots, on a three-dimensional grid, the results of over 100 experimental or quasi-experimental studies conducted since the 1970s, categorised according to the type of policing strategy or target involved. Clusters of studies highlighting effective interventions stand out so practitioners can see at a glance which strategies work in reducing crime and disorder, and which do not.
Overall, the matrix suggests that an effective policing strategy combines the targeting of hotspots, high-risk or prolific offenders and vulnerable victims. It also makes clear the benefits of thoughtful problem-solving. “There could be a simple fix, like repairing a broken door lock in a high-rise that has been burgled repeatedly,” says Lum. Other solutions may require more ingenuity, such as that used in a 2011 study included in the matrix. It involved police in Cardiff, UK, asking hospital emergency rooms to feed them anonymised data on violence-related injuries, allowing them to identify hotspots and hot times for violence, and to step up their presence accordingly. The study, led by health economist Curtis Florence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, reported a significant drop in violent injury in Cardiff compared with 14 other British cities ().
Besides making the case for hotspot policing, the matrix highlights areas where a lighter touch would be more effective. As a police officer in Baltimore, Lum occasionally had to arrest minors, even though that could lead to prosecution and a criminal record, because no alternative ways of dealing with underage delinquency were available to her. However, and concluded that, for many types of crime, youngsters are less likely to reoffend if police use a less formal response, involving a face-to-face meeting with the victim or some other form of restorative justice. This approach not only costs less than criminal proceedings, but also gives victims a greater sense of satisfaction.
In the UK, police in Birmingham are testing restorative justice in a landmark experiment called Operation Turning Point. But the idea has so far had a cool reception in the US, where boot camps for young offenders and other short-sharp-shock approaches have long been popular, despite growing evidence that they can be counterproductive. As for hotspot policing, it is now catching on: in recent years police departments all over the US, UK and elsewhere have adopted it, aided in part by the availability of crime-mapping algorithms that allow them to identify areas to target.
However, some people think these strategies are being adopted too fast. Seasoned police observer Peter Manning, a sociologist at Northeastern University in Boston, questions the validity of research into policing. He says that randomised controlled trials of different strategies are vulnerable to bias because policing is highly visible, so participating officers inevitably know who has been assigned to do what. What’s more, success is measured in terms of a fall in crime rates. These are recorded by the police themselves who have been known to manipulate crime data to improve their performance indicators (The Crime Numbers Game, CRC Press, 2012).
“The science is useful, but it’s being taken too much at face value at the moment,” says Manning. To put evidence-based policing on a firmer footing, randomised studies should be complemented by surveys and observational research, he says. But he also thinks much of the research ignores an elephant in the room. “The causes of crime have nothing to do with policing,” he says. “They have to do with the economy, with education, with the size of the younger generation and of the prison population.” As a result, it is hard to say how much of the rise or fall in crime figures is down to changes in policing and how much to broader socioeconomic factors.
People power
Even supporters of evidence-based policing acknowledge that assessing the effectiveness of different strategies is complicated by the fact that policing does not happen in a vacuum. “The police need the public to report crimes and emergencies of all kinds,” says Wesley Skogan at Northwestern University in Chicago. “They need them to cooperate as victims and witnesses, and as voters and taxpayers. Without the public, policing would come to a standstill.” This helps explain why there is no clear correlation between the number of police officers and crime levels (see interactive diagram). What does help police forces to be more effective is the ability to get the public onside.
Conversely, policing strategies that are perceived as unpopular with the public may face opposition, even if there is compelling evidence that they work. For instance, Lum suspects that some politicians are reluctant to support hotspot policing for fear of losing the backing of voters in more secure areas that end up with a reduced police presence. This sort of public reaction could partly stem from a misperception that more “bobbies on the beat” equals safer neighbourhoods.
However, random patrols per se may not make people feel secure, a recent study suggests. Evelien van de Veer of the Amsterdam-Amstelland police department in the Netherlands and colleagues found that although volunteers shown pictures of graffiti-daubed alleyways were reassured if the images included a policeman, they rated leafy residential streets as less safe when a policeman was visible in the photos ().
Because public perception is so important, if evidence-based policing is to catch on, the public will need to be persuaded that what looks like common sense may not be best practice. But the police themselves have to embrace that notion first. Although things have improved, Lum says they still have a long way to go. “The reality is that evidence-based policing represents a deeper, structural challenge that requires a completely different mindset,” she says. “It requires changes in how police collect evidence, how they are trained and how they are supervised.”
“Evidence-based policing requires changes in how police collect evidence, how they are trained and how they are supervised”
Others are more upbeat about how amenable to change the police may be. “When I started out in this business, you couldn’t get past the front desk [of the police station],” says Skogan. “Researchers were left-wing hippies and not to be trusted.” Now, police are far more open to collaboration.
Neyroud also thinks the tide has turned. He points out that among a slew of recent reforms to policing, the UK government last December announced the establishment of a College of Policing, the first in the world with explicit aims of providing a conduit for translating research into police practice and sharing information with the public. “I predict that we will look back on 2012 as the year policing became evidence-based,” he says.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Heed the evidence”
