Putting Hot Spots Policing in Context

Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968.1 By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology.2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate.3 The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of officers as “pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of policing, and allied himself with officers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had. In the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the police, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforcement officers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; they wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets.4 Americans on the right, meanwhile, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of what the country should be.5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, in 2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for off-year electoral losses to Republicans.6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and marginalized community against marginalized community.7 Once again, the police are in crisis, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.In other ways, as well, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. This is especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality. Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of force, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century, officers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American policing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. People of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suffer from both police nonfeasance and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-offs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tolerated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two different social divides. The first is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a century ago, has made policing a partisan flashpoint. The second divide is sociological: the gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who disproportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. Each of these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a premium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people of color, especially African Americans.8Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and 1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more effective, less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their very real shortcomings. Fortunately, moreover, the proposals most likely to work are supported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the groups most affected by crime and by abusive policing.How can American policing be transformed into a more effective and egalitarian system of public safety? We need to start with four key facts. First, crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. Second, police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize toll on poor people and people of color, and here, too, Black Americans are particularly likely to be victimized. Third, improved policing has helped make crime far less common today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years. Fourth, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police departments, but the victories have been partial and very often fleeting.Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime inflicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Criminal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide, aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, at greatly elevated rates.There are between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the United States—a rate of about five or six per one hundred thousand people in the country. Among Black Americans, though, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four; it is the leading cause of death among Black males under forty-five and the second-leading cause of death among Latino males under forty-five. Young Black men are fifteen times more likely than their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these attacks, too. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States.9The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of violent victimization.10Moreover, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighborhoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s lives, affecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns heat waves more deadly, for example, by making people afraid to leave their homes. Children living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty. This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just before. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the effects appear to accumulate with each additional killing. Crime, especially homicide and other serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping disparities between the household wealth of Americans of different races and robbing local governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for individuals, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious assault, is a pillar of American inequality.11Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimination perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential offenders more desperate and potential victims more vulnerable.12 But part of the explanation is inadequate policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white, wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by people of color.13If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suffered from inadequate protection against crime, they have also suffered from an excess of violence and abuse at the hands of the police. Police officers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. Somewhere between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustified.14 And the victims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a quarter of the people shot dead by the police.15 From 1980 through 2019, on an age-adjusted basis, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites; Latinos were close to twice as likely.16 Between 2015 and 2019, an unarmed Black man was four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man.17 For Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was five to one.18Deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers are the most extreme way, but far from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested.19The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police has ramifications far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inflicts. Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discriminatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their communities, with lasting effects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on broader ideas about law, government, and society.20 Unsurprisingly, African Americans consistently report less confidence in the police than whites.21 But mistreatment by the police often leads, also, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the mistreatment but in friends, family, and neighbors as well.22The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the explanation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; more aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life offenses; and the spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and increased use of SWAT teams.23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement and the advent of smartphones and social media.24 But some part of the reason that police violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, transformational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable.25As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes saw similar drops.26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homicide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack. Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, particularly by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.”27The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-first century. Homicide rates began to rise, though, around 2014, and then surged in cities across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021.28 Some major American cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year.29 And just as the crime decline in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black neighborhoods, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same neighborhoods.30 In Los Angeles, for example, Black Americans are nine percent of the population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York City, the figures are twenty-four percent and sixty-five percent, respectively.31 Rates of other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nationwide homicide rate in 2020 and 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. Still, a significant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. Just as there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guarantee those rates will not return.The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime drop, though, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely to both factors. The evidence is threefold. First, a growing body of research links increased police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research examines the effects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the effects of temporary surges in police presence because of, for example, terrorist alerts.32 Second, the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere in the country, and the most plausible explanation for the difference is the especially large changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period.33 Third, there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of particular police strategies that became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.”34American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, and too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, for example, police departments in the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many departments, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces were majority minority—this was true, for example, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and the percentage of female officers had grown as well. Smaller departments made less progress, though. Moreover, as court-ordered hiring plans have expired over the past twenty years, diversification has stalled even in larger departments, and some past gains have been undone.35Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female officers are less likely to use unjustified force, especially against people of color.36 White male officers partnered with minority or female officers also change their patterns of policing for the better. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt other reforms.37One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by countering the strident hostility of police unions toward efforts to reduce police violence, increase police and racial in law Police unions are not always of but even today they do more to than to for making law enforcement fairer, more effective, and less reason for that is that the of police unions and than police officers of Black and Latino officers have often championed reforms by police and the presence of officers of color may in some have police unions to moderate their most of those reforms over the past half century have been community policing and policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s, as and just as every police in the country to “community policing,” in part because it became a for At its though, community policing was more than a It was a of law enforcement from a and toward a that on and with the public and with other policing had major some of which will be And because community policing was with of it was hard to It though, because it often greatly increased public with the police and made people fear of crime to real reductions in when people felt they out and and to become with more people most community policing also police departments, and it focus beyond crime allowing them to a of other by the communities they It well with policing, which called on officers to work and on an basis, with other agencies and the public to of particular local but not policing to responsible for a disproportionate amount of but not the were officers. community policing, the focus on to and a body of evidence these with significant crime there are that and other forms of policing have helped some cities the national and reduce homicides in community policing and policing also increased attention to low-level, of such as and the Part of the idea was that when these of were left neighborhoods toward people on the and rates of serious this was the of Police on quality-of-life could be too, and the that these were in effective at reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as policing and only when the community and particular in particular crackdowns on quality-of-life as community policing and policing, did not reduce the other of the from quality-of-life policing, policing the of in which the police with community groups and other agencies to particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate of a first and most of which was in the 1980s and called because their most was often threats of consequences at the and groups violence in a particular But the also of social to the same people, and more recent of this more than policing. is growing that these when right, their moreover, community policing and policing their in poor were and not just because they were of from of officers in neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. policing and policing police to adopt what the had called the of law kind of policing in to from the of law enforcement in had called the which and the which when community policing and policing were to against life they on the In community policing and policing officers to for neighborhoods to a of other than law enforcement: and so that they had not up to be social but it out they often were at other agencies to more attention to marginalized several different community policing and policing have lost much of their over the past two The terrorist attacks of to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and and local in the early 2000s many departments to community policing and policing as forms of these the crackdowns on and in New York City, helped to community against them in many against the of police And it became increasingly that, even at their community policing and policing had some was that these attention to police This was not in the of either of could have with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police But they Police the of police violence, especially police because they did not the of the This was because the victims were of marginalized groups and or because did not still does on police killings or other forms of police violence, and the advent of body and of these were to It those and the Black Lives Matter movement to give the of police killings the attention it had long lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has over the past half century. for the of the victims, the of killed by a police in the United States during the 1980s, and the drop was particularly Black Americans and The decline in police killings over the course of that to have been to new the use of lethal against In the three decades, in the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant while the rate for white Americans as a the age-adjusted for Americans also In some though, rates to From through 2019, police killings in areas and but by thirty percent in the thirty largest American cities, because of new on use of violence in some cities has dropped especially In Los Angeles, for example, significant of by the police appear to have been in half between and 2019, and police shootings appear to have by forty by officers increased in 2021 but remained far than in past In on the other of by the police have dropped by percent over the past fifteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not a similar Police shootings in between and in and again in and and then dropped over the several years, by to roughly the Los and have been of efforts at police reform over the past two decades, so the of by police in these cities over the past are in some reductions in of in both cities and significant reductions in police shootings in Los but in others progress on police shootings in also the in patterns of police violence, as in crime across the United States. The Police by the and the number of of per thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from to the from fifteen to the United States as a had New York rate of police almost Americans have been killed by the police in had New York homicide people have violently that same Police can and have but the victories have been and often

Since the 1980s, the nature of policing has expanded beyond a person-focused approach to include a location-based approach. Recently developed proactive policing strategies that are concerned with the geographic distribution and explanation of crime include hot spots policing and community policing, and oftentimes problem-oriented policing, broken windows policing, third-party policing, and focused deterrence strategies. Hot spots policing entails focusing police efforts at crime prevention in a very small geographic area where crime concentrates. This strategy is one of only a few policing strategies grounded in both theory and research. Crime concentrates at places even more than it concentrates in people. Research in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the 1980s demonstrated that 60 percent of the crime occurs at 6 percent of places (see Sherman, et al. 1989, cited under Theory and Basis of Hot Spots Policing). Place-based theories about routine activities and rational choice have led to deterrence-based strategies such as directed patrol, crackdowns, and other traditional approaches to hot spots policing, as well as more community-oriented, problem-solving, and situational crime prevention approaches at crime hot spots. Hot spots policing is one of few areas in criminal justice research that has been tested using randomized controlled trials, a gold standard for research. Several systematic reviews suggest that focusing police efforts in a small geographic area reduces crime. Furthermore, research on displacement and diffusion of benefits suggests that hot spots policing does not merely geographically displace crime. In fact, nearby places may experience a diffusion of crime benefits. Only a few studies have examined the noncrime impacts of hot spots policing, but these suggest that it does not harm public perceptions of police and may even promote informal social control. Cost-effectiveness analyses have been partially used to assess the relative costs and outcomes of hot spot policing interventions. Additionally, existing research has suggested the crime harm index (CHI) for assessing the crime impact of hot spot policing interventions. Several data sources are available from past National Institute of Justice–funded studies on hot spots of crime and hot spots policing.

Hot spots are small geographic areas, often a single street block, that are among the highest crime locations in a particular jurisdiction. Because crime is highly concentrated, hot spots typically are responsible for a significant proportion of a city’s crime problem. Hot spot policing involves police dedicating extra attention and resources to hot spots. Hot spot policing is guided both by basic research suggesting that crime is concentrated and that it remains generally stable in concentrated areas over time and by theoretical perspectives that police can deter crime more effectively when they credibly increase the certainty of detection. Police can also block opportunities for crime to occur by providing capable guardianship at high-risk locations. Hot spot policing can take many forms that all share in common an increased emphasis on crime hot spots. Tactics can be as simple as adding extra patrol time to hot spot locations. Unpredictable visits of approximately 15 minutes have been found to be especially effective. Police can also integrate problem-oriented policing into a hot spots framework, carefully analyzing the dynamics leading to crime concentration and then developing a tailored response to address these crime contributors. Problem-oriented hot spot tactics are generally somewhat more effective and long-lasting than approaches focused on increasing presence, although both kinds of hot spot policing have been associated with significant declines in crime and disorder relative to locations receiving standard policing. There is also little evidence that hot spot policing approaches displace crime to areas nearby or that hot spot policing necessarily damages police legitimacy, although intensive policing strategies face a greater risk of reducing trust in police. There is evidence that hot spot policing has diffused widely, particularly to large agencies, although it is difficult to track to what extent hot spot policing is occurring in the field. Although future research is needed to provide police more specific guidance on how to best address hot spots depending on crime type and context, there is overall strong evidence of effectiveness for hot spot policing, and it is likely the policing crime control strategy with the largest evidence base.

Hot spots of crime, and the criminology of place more generally, deviate from the traditional paradigm of criminology, in which the primary assumption and goal is to explain who is likely to commit crime and their motivations, and to explore interventions aimed at reducing individual criminality. Alternatively, crime hot spots account for the “where” of crime, specifically referring to the concentration of crime in small geographic areas. The criminology of place demands a rethinking in regard to how we understand the crime problem and offers alternate ways to predict, explain, and prevent crime. While place, as large geographic units, has been important since the inception of criminology as a discipline, research examining crime concentrations at a micro-geographic level has only recently begun to be developed. This approach has been facilitated by improvements to data availability, technology, and the understanding of crime as a function of the environment. The new crime and place paradigm is rooted in the past three decades of criminological research centered on routine activity theory, crime concentrations, and hot spots policing. The focus on crime hot spots has led to several core empirical findings. First, crime is meaningfully concentrated, such that a large proportion of crime events occur at relatively few places within larger geographies like cities. This may be termed the law of crime concentration at places (see Weisburd, 2015). Additionally, most hot spots of crime are stable over time, and thus present promising opportunities for crime prevention. Crime hot spots vary within higher geographic units, suggesting both that there is a loss of information at higher levels of aggregation and that there are clear “micro communities” within the larger conceptualization of a neighborhood. Finally, crime at place is predictable, which is important for being able to understand why crime is concentrated in one place and not another, as well as to develop crime prevention strategies. These empirical characteristics of crime hot spots have led to the development of successful police interventions to reduce crime. These interventions are generally termed hot spots policing.

This Campbell systematic review examines the effects of focusing police crime prevention efforts on crime ‘hot spots’, and whether focused police actions at specific locations result in crime displacement (i.e. crime moving around the corner) or diffusion (i.e. crime reduction in surrounding areas) of crime control benefits. The review includes 19 studies covering 25 cases. Seventeen of the studies were conducted in the USA.Investing police agencies' limited resources on hot spot policing in a small number of high‐activity crime places will prevent crime in these and surrounding areas, reducing total crime. Problem oriented policing approach allows for developing tailored responses to specific recurring problems in high activity crime spots. Implementing situational prevention strategies that reduce police reliance on aggressive enforcement strategies may also have positive benefits for police‐community relations. The reactions of local communities to hot spot policing must be considered. Residents may welcome efforts to reduce crime. But if policing programmes are seen as heavy‐handed, or focus too much on particular population groups, they may end up driving a wedge between the police and those they are trying to help.AbstractBACKGROUNDIn recent years, crime scholars and practitioners have pointed to the potential benefits of focusing crime prevention efforts on crime places. A number of studies suggest that there is significant clustering of crime in small places, or “hot spots,” that generate half of all criminal events. A number of researchers have argued that many crime problems can be reduced more efficiently if police officers focused their attention to these deviant places. The appeal of focusing limited resources on a small number of high‐activity crime places is straightforward. If we can prevent crime at these hot spots, then we might be able to reduce total crime.OBJECTIVESTo assess the effects of focused police crime prevention interventions at crime hot spots. The review also examined whether focused police actions at specific locations result in crime displacement (i.e., crime moving around the corner) or diffusion (i.e., crime reduction in surrounding areas) of crime control benefits.SEARCH STRATEGYA keyword search was performed on 15 online abstract databases. Bibliographies of past narrative and empirical reviews of literature that examined the effectiveness of police crime control programs were reviewed and forward searches for works that cited seminal hot spots policing studies were performed. Bibliographies of past completed Campbell systematic reviews of police crime prevention efforts and hand searches of leading journals in the field were performed. Experts in the field were consulted and relevant citations were obtained.SELECTION CRITERIATo be eligible for this review, interventions used to control crime hot spots were limited to police enforcement efforts. Suitable police enforcement efforts included traditional tactics such as directed patrol and heightened levels of traffic enforcement as well as alternative strategies such as aggressive disorder enforcement and problem‐oriented policing. Studies that used randomized controlled experimental or quasi‐experimental designs were selected. The units of analysis were limited to crime hot spots or high‐activity crime “places” rather than larger areas such as neighborhoods. The control group in each study received routine levels of traditional police enforcement tactics.DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS19 studies containing 25 tests of hot spots policing interventions were identified and full narratives of these studies were reported. Ten of the selected studies used randomized experimental designs and nine used quasi‐experimental designs. A formal meta‐analysis was conducted to determine the crime prevention effects in the eligible studies. Random effects models were used to calculate mean effect sizes.RESULTS20 of 25 tests of hot spots policing interventions reported noteworthy crime and disorder reductions. The meta‐analysis of key reported outcome measures revealed a small statistically significant mean effect size favoring the effects of hot spots policing in reducing citizen calls for service in treatment places relative to control places. The effect was smaller for randomized designs but still statistically significant and positive. When displacement and diffusion effects were measured, unintended crime prevention benefits were associated with the hot spotsAUTHORS' CONCLUSIONSThe extant evaluation research provides fairly robust evidence that hot spots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy. The research also suggests that focusing police efforts on high‐activity crime places does not inevitably lead to crime displacement and crime control benefits may diffuse into the areas immediately surrounding the targeted locations.

BackgroundIn recent years, crime scholars and practitioners have pointed to the potential benefits of focusing crime prevention efforts on crime places. A number of studies suggest that there is significant clustering of crime in small places, or “hot spots,” that generate half of all criminal events. Researchers have argued that many crime problems can be reduced more efficiently if police officers focused their attention to these deviant places. The appeal of focusing limited resources on a small number of high‐activity crime places is straightforward. If crime can be prevented at these hot spots, then citywide crime totals could be reduced.ObjectivesTo assess the effects of focused police crime prevention interventions at crime hot spots. The review also examined whether focused police actions at specific locations result in crime displacement (i.e., crime moving around the corner) or diffusion (i.e., crime reduction in surrounding areas) of crime control benefits.Search MethodsA keyword search was performed on 15 abstract databases. Bibliographies of past narrative and empirical reviews of literature that examined the effectiveness of police crime control programs were reviewed and forward searches for works that cited seminal hot spots policing studies were performed. Bibliographies of past completed Campbell systematic reviews of police crime prevention efforts were reviewed and hand searches of leading journals in the field were completed. Experts in the field were consulted and relevant citations were obtained.Selection CriteriaTo be eligible for this review, interventions used to control crime hot spots were limited to police‐led prevention efforts. Suitable police‐led crime prevention efforts included traditional tactics such as directed patrol and heightened levels of traffic enforcement as well as alternative strategies such as aggressive disorder enforcement and problem‐oriented policing. Studies that used randomized controlled experimental or quasiexperimental designs were selected. The units of analysis were limited to crime hot spots or high‐activity crime “places” rather than larger areas such as neighborhoods. The control group in each study received routine levels of traditional police crime prevention tactics.Data Collection and AnalysisSixty‐five studies containing 78 tests of hot spots policing interventions were identified and full narratives of these studies were reported. Twenty‐seven of the selected studies used randomized experimental designs and 38 used quasiexperimental designs. A formal meta‐analysis was conducted to determine the crime prevention effects in the eligible studies. Random effects models were used to calculate mean effect sizes.ResultsSixty‐two of 78 tests of hot spots policing interventions reported noteworthy crime and disorder reductions. The meta‐analysis of key reported outcome measures revealed a small statistically significant mean effect size favoring the effects of hot spots policing in reducing crime outcomes at treatment places relative to control places. The effect was smaller for randomized designs but still statistically significant and positive. When displacement and diffusion effects were measured, a diffusion of crime prevention benefits was associated with hot spots policing.Authors' ConclusionsThe extant evaluation research suggests that hot spots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy. The research also suggests that focusing police efforts on high‐activity crime places does not inevitably lead to crime displacement; rather, crime control benefits may diffuse into the areas immediately surrounding the targeted locations.

A key objective for police is to develop innovative and adaptive methods to efficiently maintain public safety and foster strong police–community relations. The Queensland Police Service (QPS) designed the Mobile Police Community Office (MPCO), a purpose-built van with many of the same facilities of a police station, and trained MPCO officers to engage with members of the public using principles of procedural justice. This paper reports on whether the MPCO can be a “vehicle” to reduce crime, crime impact and enhance police legitimacy in crime hot spots in Brisbane, Australia. We matched 24 hot spots based on crime and location characteristics. Within pairs, hot spots were randomly assigned to either the existing police response or the existing response plus the MPCO for two days at prevalent crime times/days. A public survey assessing perceptions of police legitimacy was administered during deployment. Our study compared official crime counts for a period of two months pre-/post-deployment date for experimental and control hot spots. We developed a crime impact score using QPS offense level descriptions and corresponding Queensland legislation penalties as an additional efficacy measure. We found a modest yet insignificant decrease in crime between the pre- and post-intervention period and no significant difference in crime impact scores. While some argue that hot spot policing can reduce legitimacy, we found no evidence to support this claim. The MPCO is well received by the community and further research is needed to better understand its potential deterrent effect on crime.

In recent years, crime scholars and practitioners have pointed to the potential benefits of focusing police crime prevention efforts on crime places. Research suggests that there is significant clustering of crime in small places or “hot spots.” A number of researchers have argued that crime problems can be reduced more efficiently if police officers focused their attention to these deviant places. General deterrence and criminal opportunities theories are often applied to understand the crime control effectiveness of hot spots policing. The available evaluation evidence suggests that hot spots policing generates noteworthy crime reductions and these crime control benefits diffuse into areas immediately surrounding targeted crime hot spots. Moreover, problem-oriented policing interventions seem to generate larger crime control impacts when compared to interventions that simply increase levels of traditional police actions in crime hot spots. To improve their legitimacy in disadvantaged minority neighborhoods, police departments should engage collaborative, community problem-solving approaches to address crime hot spots.

The problem-oriented policing (POP) and hot spots literatures have more recently noted the need for implementation studies to understand what and how implementation could be improved to ensure the greatest impact of these policing approaches. However, there are limited empirical studies on implementation of POP and/or hot spots policing, and there appears to be limited empirical evidence of factors that facilitate or hinder implementation of such policing approaches. Therefore, this study is timely for contributing to the understanding of implementation drivers that help ensure proper installment of policing approaches for desired impact, sustainability, and spread. Our analysis of qualitative data resulted in an empirically derived model that identifies multiple factors within five levels: society, system, community, organization and individual. Each level contains a set of factors that either facilitated or hindered implementation of the interventions that we tested. These factors include but are not limited to society’s perceptions of police officers (police legitimacy), justice systems’ diversion policies, community support of police agencies, leadership/supervisor support of POP and hot spots policing, organizational resources, and individual characteristics of police officers. Our model describes that these factors interact to ultimately influence patrol officers’ motivation to implement POP in crime hot spots, and that their motivation leads to varying degrees of implementation. As a result of this study, we offer implementation science-informed practical actions for police agencies to achieve stronger implementation of nontraditional policing practices. These actions can be tested to understand if they have significant and positive impact on crime and other outcomes.

This updated systematic review assesses the effects of focused police crime prevention interventions at crime hot spots. The review also examined whether focused police actions at specific locations result in crime displacement or diffusion of crime control benefits. Systematic review protocols and conventions of the Campbell Collaboration were followed to identify eligible hot spots policing studies, and meta-analytic techniques were used to assess the impact of hot spots policing on crime and investigate the influence of moderating variables. The search strategies identified 65 studies containing 78 tests of hot spots policing interventions. Meta-analyses revealed a small statistically significant mean effect size favoring the effects of hot spots policing in reducing crime outcomes at treatment places relative to control places. Crime displacement and diffusion effects were measured in 40 tests. Meta-analyses favored a small statistically significant diffusion of crime control benefits over displacement. The extant evaluation research provides fairly robust evidence that hot spots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy. Focused police intervention at hot spot locations does not seem to result in the spatial displacement of crime into areas immediately surrounding targeted locations. Rather, crime control benefits seem to diffuse into proximate areas.

''Hot-spot policing'' has proven to be an effective modern crime reduction strategy. Crime mapping technologies and other forms of data analyses now enable police forces to identify crime hot spots and then invest in focused interventions to improve public safety. Given the success of hot—spot policing, other criminal justice actors should consider and explore how sophisticated data analyses might be used to identify and respond to ''hot-spot'' problem areas within their spheres of activity. Unfortunately, as the materials in this Issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter suggest, adopting a ''hot-spot'' approach to modern federal sentencing reform may be challenging. Sentencing data can often prove harder to collect and interpret than crime data, which creates difficulties in identifying accurately what are (and are not) critical sentencing ''hot spots'' in modern federal law and practice. Moreover, even when a consensus develops concerning what constitutes a federal sentencing ''hot spot,'' different criminal justice stakeholders will often have very different views concerning what focused interventions are needed to improve the federal sentencing system. This FSR Issue prompts consideration of these matters through its focus on the findings and recom- mendations in two massive new research reports that the U.S. Sentencing Commission published in early 2013. These two reports—one concerning the post-Booker federal sentencing system in general, the other concerning the operation and application of the child pornography guidelines—identify what the Com- mission considers problem areas in the operation of the federal sentencing system and suggest means to address them. But other materials in this Issue concerning these reports—including a set of original commentary from researchers and practitioners, as well as a lengthy letter from the Department of Justice to the Commission—highlight challenges posed by efforts to respond effectively to data-driven assess- ments of the functioning (and perceived dsyfunctioning) of the post-Booker federal sentencing system. The primary goal of this FSR Issue is to facilitate a better understanding of the nature and limitations of the new data and recommendations appearing in the USSC's two new reports. The Editors hope this FSR Issue enables participants and observers of the federal sentencing system to assess effectively what these reports tell us—and fail to tell us—about modern federal sentencing policies and practices. The U.S. Sentencing Commission's ''Hot Spot'' Mandate and Limitations The Sentencing Reform Act expressly gives the U.S. Sentencing Commission a duty to periodically ''review and revise, in consideration of comments and data coming to its attention, the (federal sen- tencing) guidelines.'' 1 The SRA further instructs that, in ''fulfilling its duties and in exercising its powers, the Commission shall consult with authorities on, and individual and institutional representatives of, various aspects of the Federal criminal justice system;'' 2 it even calls upon certain authorities to ''at least annually, submit to the Commission a written report commenting on the operation of the Commission's guidelines, suggesting changes in the guidelines that appear to be warranted, and otherwise assessing the Commission's work.'' 3 Through these statutory instructions, Congress has essentially mandated that the Commission, aided by key federal criminal justice stakeholders, adopt a kind of ''hot spot'' approach to reviewing and revising the federal sentencing guidelines.

In recent years, crime scholars and practitioners have pointed to the potential benefits of focusing crime prevention efforts on crime places. A number of studies suggest that crime is not spread evenly across city landscapes. Rather, there is significant clustering of a crime in small places, or ‘‘hot spots,’’ that generate half of all criminal events (Pierce et al., 1988; Sherman et al., 1989a; Weisburd et al., 1992). Even within the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, crime clusters at a few discrete locations and other areas are relatively crime free (Sherman et al., 1989a). A number of researchers have argued that many crime problems can be reduced more efficiently if police officers focused their attention to these deviant places (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995; Weisburd and Green, 1995). The appeal of focusing limited resources on a small number of high-activity crime places is straightforward. If we can prevent crime at these hot spots, then we might be able to reduce total crime. Hot spots policing has become a very popular way for police departments to prevent crime. A recent Police Foundation report found that 7 in 10 departments with more than 100 sworn officers reported using crime mapping to identify crime hot spots (Weisburd et al., 2001). A growing body of research evidence suggests that focused police interventions, such as directed patrols, proactive arrests, and problem-oriented policing, can produce significant crime prevention gains at high-crime ‘hot spots’ (see e.g. Eck, 1997; 2002). Given the growing popularity of hot spots policing, a systematic review of the empirical evidence on the effects of focused police interventions on crime hot spots is necessary to assess the value of this approach to crime prevention.

Over the last three decades American policing has gone through a period of significant change and innovation. In what is a relatively short historical time frame the police began to reconsider their fundamental mission, the nature of the core strategies of policing, and the character of their relationships with the communities that they serve. This volume brings together leading police scholars to examine eight major innovations which emerged during this period: community policing, broken windows policing, problem oriented policing, pulling levers policing, third party policing, hot spots policing, Compstat and evidence-based policing. Including advocates and critics of each of the eight police innovations, this comprehensive book assesses the evidence on impacts of police innovation on crime and public safety, the extent of the implementation of these new approaches in police departments, and the dilemmas these approaches have created for police management. This book will appeal to students, scholars and researchers.

To examine whether information on where the police patrol drawn from automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems can be used to increase the amount of directed patrol time at high-crime police beats and crime hot spots, and whether such increases would lead to reductions in crime. In an experimental study with a block-randomized design, 232 police beats were randomly allocated to an experimental or control condition. In the experimental condition, the police commanders knew the amount of time that police spent in beats and crime hot spots. This information was not provided to commanders in the control condition. Over a 13-week period, assigned patrol time, unallocated patrol time, total patrol time, and crime were tracked at both police beats and crime hot spots (N = 1006). Knowledge of where police officers patrolled did not affect directed patrol at the beat level. At the hot spots level, the treatment group experienced meaningful increases in unallocated patrol time and total patrol time, and a decrease in crime. A key finding of the study is that information generated from AVL can be used to increase directed patrol time at crime hot spots, and that these increased levels of patrol will lead to reductions in crime. At the same time, our study points to the fact that only a small proportion of unallocated time in Dallas is actually focused on hot spots policing. We suggest that this is the reason why crime went down significantly at the hot spots but not in beats overall in Dallas.

Scholars and practitioners around the world have adopted the term community policing to describe a wide variety of policing strategies during the past 30 years. Most discussions of the history of police in the United States refer to the latest chapter in U.S. police history as the Community Era of policing, as the era was identified in Kelling and Moore's (1988) now classic work. Departing from Kelling and Moore, we have identified the past three decades of policing in the United States as "postmodern policing" (Barlow & Barlow, 1999, 2000). In this chapter, we discuss how characterizing the contemporary era in policing as postmodern not only captures the various initiatives that have been implemented in policing during the time period, but also has explanatory power, connecting developments in policing to developments in the political economy. We demonstrate that the changes that have occurred in policing in the past three decade and the ways in which policing has failed to change in the United States have resulted from the nearly universal adoption of community policing.