Getting deterrence right?

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have begun to argue that police interventions provide an effective approach for gaining both special and general deterrence against crime. A series of experimental and quasi-experimental studies has shown that the police can be effective in preventing crime (Braga, 2001, 2005; Skogan and Frydl, 2004; Weisburd and Eck, 2004), and that such crime prevention benefits are not offset by displacement of crime to areas near to police interventions (Braga, 2001; Weisburd et al., 2006). Durlauf and Nagin (2011: 14) drew from this literature to argue that, “Increasing the visibility of the police by hiring more officers and by allocating existing officers in ways that heighten the perceived risk of apprehension consistently seem to have substantial marginal deterrent effects.” Indeed, they concluded that crime prevention in the United States would be improved by shifting resources from imprisonment to policing. A recent innovation in policing that capitalizes on the growing evidence of the effectiveness of police deterrence strategies is the “focused deterrence” framework, which is often referred to as “pulling-levers policing” (Kennedy, 1998, 2008). Pioneered in Boston as a problem-oriented policing project to halt serious gang violence during the 1990s (Braga, Kennedy, Waring, and Piehl, 2001), the focused deterrence framework has been applied in many U.S. cities through federally sponsored violence-prevention programs such as the Strategic Alternatives to Community Safety Initiative and Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) (Dalton, 2002). Focused deterrence strategies honor core deterrence ideas, such as increasing risks faced by offenders, while finding new and creative ways of deploying