Crime Prevention Initiative: Hot Spots Policing
Each student will produce a written project on a topic relevant to crime prevention. Most of these projects will involve researching a current topic on some prevention initiative. It is also possible that the project can involve gathering data on a prevention topic or applying something that has been learned in class. The three pages do NOT include the title page or references.
Crime Prevention Initiative: Hot Spots Policing
Police departments are ever looking at the most appropriate strategies to reduce the opportunity for crimes to occur within their jurisdiction. It is highly recommended for law enforcement to look at the community from the offenders’ point of view. Such an approach improves police officers’ decision-making capabilities as they understand the crime issues their community faces. Different crimes occur across states, counties, or streets at different frequencies and degrees. One approach cannot serve all these locations hence the need for police discretion to choose an appropriate initiative. Hot Spots policing is considered as an initiative that takes up precise patrols in areas concentrated with criminal activities. Unfortunately, most high-crime areas are concentrated with low-income Americans who constitute of minority communities. Recently, concerns for racial profiling have emerged from suspicions that hot spotting is the reason for the current increase in police brutality towards African-Americans. According to Braga (2006), police departments need to evaluate the effectiveness of hot spot policing to reduce crime and disorder while ensuring it does not result in racial discrimination.
Crime hot-spotting is a technology that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s after empirical, theoretical and technological innovations. The perspective of the initiative believed that police could prevent crime if they focus their limited resources on the areas that generated the most crimes (Braga, 2006). Due to crime mapping technologies, empirical studies were able to discover that crimes were highly concentrated along specific streets. Most of these streets belonging to communities that were subject to underlying economic disadvantages. However, the initial agenda was to combat crime and not profile suspects by their race. In 1989, Minneapolis conducted a crime mapping project that showed 5% of locations to generate 50% of distress calls from citizens (Braga, 2006). Theoretical studies then went ahead to conclude that crime occurred in hot spots locations due to place use, features, and characteristics. These studies were comprised of environmental criminology, situational crime prevention, problem-oriented policing, routine activity theory, and rational choice perspective. Studies done within the 21st century show that 7 out of 10 police departments with more than 100 officers use crime mapping techniques to discover hotspots.
According to Witzell (2017), hot spot policing has gained much popularity across police departments due to the benefits it offers to lower crimes. Police services have become more transparent as they can use the technology to inform the public on their strategies and notify the community of high crime-rate neighborhoods. Some communities have become more comfortable with this approach, as they can give the police the support they need to conduct crack-downs (Witzell, 2017). The public is more informed by receiving first-hand data instead of relying on the media depictions, personal experiences and demographic qualities. Some communities, especially those labeled as hot spots, are against this practice as they feel that patrols, search and seizures violate their rights. Police benefit more from this strategy as it allows them to understand why and where crimes occur within a certain radius. They are also able to determine the areas inhabited by past offenders and locations likely to attract offenders. Advancements in technology have enabled police to use hot spot policing to visualize data and forecast crimes (Hunt, 2019). Through the use of geographical and social dimensions, police are able to explore analytical techniques.
Recent events have, however, challenged the hot spot policing strategy, claiming that it inevitably leads to racism and discrimination. Since the initiative focuses more on very small geographic areas, chances of unfair and abusive police strategies may arise (Weisburd, 2016). Police stops, questions and frisks have been used as a reference for police officers to target and oppress minorities. Some studies have shown that such aggressive tactics often drive a wedge between the police and the community as the individuals feel more of targets than partners. Criminologists Anthony Braga and David Weisburd have evaluated the technique and found that it was highly practiced in areas inhabited by lower-class minorities. Such are areas are mostly plagued by crime due to underlying issues such as poverty, unemployment, gangs and drug dealers. Adding on that, the police had no clear directives and eventually used their authority without boundaries. However, the evidence is very little and can be overcome with simple strategies such as involving the community.
Overall, Braga et al. (2019), claim that hot spot policing is an effective technique for crime prevention as it gives the police the tools they need to fight criminal activity. A study conducted by Braga et al. showed that police intervention with this strategy does not lead to spatial displacement of crime into neighboring areas (2019). The only recent concern is mainly centered on police brutality as police have killed most black individuals. This has caused an uproar within the nation and globally as most people air their grievances on police brutality. However, police departments are busy working to ensure hot spot policing does not concentrate too much on racial profiling. Hot spot policing is a reliable and effective technique that most police stations can rely on to cut down on resource budgets and practice crime analytics.
References
Braga, A. A. (2006). The crime prevention value of hot spots policing. Psicothema, 18(3), 630-637.
Braga, A. A., Turchan, B. S., Papachristos, A. V., & Hureau, D. M. (2019). Hot spots policing and crime reduction: an update of an ongoing systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of experimental criminology, 15(3), 289-311.
Hunt, J. (2019). From Crime Mapping to Crime Forecasting: The Evolution of Place-Based Policing. Retrieved from https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/crime-mapping-crime-forecasting-evolution-place-based-policing
Weisburd, D. (2016). Does hot spots policing inevitably lead to unfair and abusive police practices, or can we maximize both fairness and effectiveness in the new proactive policing. U. Chi. Legal F., 661.
Witzell, K. (2017). How Crime Mapping is making Communities Safer. Retrieved from https://www.madhattertech.ca/chatter/how-crime-mapping-making-communities-safer
