Crime Control Strategies Research Articles

Police performance regimes and police activity: Compstat in Paris and London compared

This paper analyses the implementation of Compstat-like processes in two large European police organizations: the Metropolitan Police Service in London and the Préfecture de police in Paris. Compstat-like processes are characterized by processes framed by performance indicators and targets, performance assessment sessions, units dedicated to the collection and analysis of performance data, and information processing requiring the use of crime data. Such processes raise two broad sets of questions. First, do these innovations lead to tighter or more encompassing crime control strategies? Second, does the old command-and-control organizational model of police departments emerge reinforced, or does innovation foster the emergence of a new, more deliberative, problem-solving style of management? The paper analyses the mix of common features (limited geographical decentralization, increasing internal accountability based on the centrality of quantitative data, the prioritizing of crime reduction, and the influence of new technologies on how data is used) and differences (the range of indicators used, broader in London, and the management styles, more in line with a neo-managerial impetus in London). Interpreting these contrasts requires an analytical framework combining both the administrative, political and cultural traditions in the two police forces and the intentional projects carried out by political and professional actors.

Can community policing increase residents’ informal social control? Testing the impact of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy

This study examines whether community policing can build informal social control. Specifically, this paper assesses the impact of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) in Chicago neighborhoods. The data for this research are drawn from both the Community Survey of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) and the CAPS Prototype Panel Survey. Bivariate and multivariate methods are used to analyze data gathered from 8782 residents nested within 343 neighborhood clusters. Initially, community policing was found to increase informal social control, but this effect was rendered non-significant after controlling for theoretically and empirically relevant variables. Several social (dis)organization variables, as well as satisfaction with policing services, yielded significant effects in a multilevel regression model. Further analysis found that the community policing effect on informal social control was mediated through satisfaction with the police. These findings indicate indirect support for the ability of community policing to build informal social control and suggest that general satisfaction with the police is important to neighborhood crime control strategies.

Strict Liability’s Criminogenic Effect

It is easy to understand the apparent appeal of strict liability to policymakers and legal reformers seeking to reduce crime: if the criminal law can do away with its traditional culpability requirement, it can increase the likelihood of conviction and punishment of those who engage in prohibited conduct or bring about prohibited harm or evil. And such an increase in punishment rate can enhance the crime-control effectiveness of a system built upon general deterrence or incapacitation of the dangerous. Similar arguments support the use of criminal liability for regulatory offenses. Greater punishment rates suggest greater compliance. But this analysis fails to appreciate the crime-control costs of strict liability. By explicitly providing for punishment in the absence of moral blameworthiness, the law undermines its moral credibility with the community and thereby provokes subversion and resistance instead of the cooperation and acquiescence it needs for effective crime control. More importantly, the system’s lost moral credibility undermines the law’s ability to harness the powerful forces of stigmatization, social influence, and internalized norms. Given the serious limitations inherent in the real-world application of general deterrence and preventive detention programs, the most effective crime-control strategy is to build the criminal law’s reputation for being just, which means avoiding the use of strict liability.

Neighborhood Crime Control in a Changing China

Objectives: This research assesses the impacts of three distinctive crime control activities organized and directed by the neighborhood committees with the assistance of local police in contemporary urban China—Tiao-jie, Bang-jiao, and neighborhood watches. Tiao-jie deals with disputes and minor criminal cases. Bang-jiao provides guidance to residents who have committed minor offenses or have been released from correctional institutions to facilitate reintegration. Neighborhood watches engage local residents in crime prevention under the direction of neighborhood committees. Method: Using survey data recently collected in Tianjin, we examine the effects of indicators of the implementation of these neighborhood-based crime control strategies on residents’ reports of household property victimizations that occurred within the neighborhoods with multilevel logistic regressions. Results: Net of a range of individual-level and neighborhood-level control variables, the indicators of the level of activity of Tiao-jie, Bang-jiao, and neighborhood watches exhibit negative effects on reported household property victimization. Conclusions: Our findings provide suggestive evidence that the traditional strategies of neighborhood-level crime control continue to be relevant in the China of today and that the role of collective efficacy appears to differ from that observed in Western cities.

Criminal Justice’s Ailing Role

The general philosophy of social contract is premised on the notion that the state assumes the role of maintaining social relation through diverse political ideas and strategies. Within the context of this historical arrangement, the institution of criminal justice has been foremost in shaping the relationship between members of the community by defining rights and sanctions. These socio-legal trajectories that developed through theories and policies have continued to define the various strategies of crime control as well as the jurisprudence of punishment. It has also been the key measure for the legitimacy of crime control and other dispute resolution techniques (Davies et al. 2009). Being a significant component in the formation of political systems, the institution of criminal justice has also developed to encapsulate the values of democracy, constitutionalism and human rights. It is from these ideas that criminal justice institutions mainly the police, the prosecutors, the courts and prisons derived their legitimacy, that are today seen by many as the ideal mechanism for maintaining social order. These agencies have, over time, gained prominence within the framework of a larger political order, engaging themselves as some “product of incremental enlightenment, benevolence, and a consensual society” (Burke 2012: 194). Despite these lofty assumptions about the role of criminal justice in the society, this paper argues that the policies and practices in criminal justice are far from benign. By bringing to discourse the contemporary realities of penal justice, this paper argues that many of the traditional values of criminal justice have been tremendously altered; conventional narratives are replaced by a new kind of penology. This includes the way in which the role and rights of various parties and participants in the system have been reconfigured as well as the economic way of thinking that is steadily disrupting the balance and objectives of the entire institution of criminal justice.

Contemporary police strategies of crime control in U.S. and China: a comparative study

This study takes a comparative approach to examining the contemporary police change in controlling crime in American and China. We attempt to achieve two primary objectives. First, we critically evaluate American and Chinese police innovations including the theoretical framework, police operations, and associated effectiveness. Second, we attempt to identify the utility of innovative strategies that can be shared by both sides. Five innovative strategies adopted by American police agencies in the past 25 years are summarized and reviewed. On the other side, the primary strategy utilized in crime control is Chinese style of community policing. After comparison of the policing strategies in the two countries, it is self evident that the implementation of community policing in China is broader and more in-depth than American police. Chinese police organizations can benefit from the implementation of problem-oriented policing accumulated from their American counterpart. Finally, we argue that hot spots policing and predictive policing do not have significant utility in the Chinese setting.

American crime drops: Investigating the breaks, dips and drops in temporal homicide

ObjectivesWhile a great deal of attention has been given to the 1990s crime drop, less is known about the more recent decline in homicide rates that occurred in several large U.S. cities. This paper aims to explore whether these represent two distinct drops via statistical evidence of structural breaks in longitudinal homicide trends and explore potentially differing explanations for the two declines. Methods: Using homicide data on a large sample of U.S. cities from 1990 to 2011, we test for structural breaks in temporal homicide rates. Combining census data and a time series approach, we also examine the role structural features, demographic shifts, and crime control strategies played in the changes in homicide rates over time. Results: Statistical evidence demonstrates two structural breaks in homicide trends, with one trend reflecting the 1990s crime drop (1994–2002) and another trend capturing a second decline (2007–2011). Time series analysis confirms previous research findings about the contributions of structural conditions (e.g., disadvantage) and crime control strategies (e.g., police force size) to the crime drop of the 1990s, but these factors cannot account for the more recent drop with the exception of police presence. Conclusions: Although both structural conditions and crime control strategies are critical to the longitudinal trends in homicide rates over the entire span from 1990 to 2011, different factors account for these two distinct temporal trends.

A Multilevel Examination of the Relationship Between Racial Tension and Attitudes Toward the Police

Prior research has established the effect of race and ethnicity on citizens’ perceptions of the police. This paper serves to build on this body of literature by examining the effect of racial tension on attitudes toward the police. Specifically, we conduct multilevel analyses using survey data from Seattle, Washington to explore whether individual perceptions of racial tension and/or community-level racial tension are related to residents’ attitudes toward the police. The results show that attitudes toward the police were generally less favorable among respondents who perceived racial tension or mistrust in their communities. Additionally, community racial tension had significant contextual effects on residents’ perceived racial profiling by the police. This study has implications for future police policy: understanding how racial tension shapes perceptions of the police will assist in selecting and adapting crime control strategies.

Increasing Collective Efficacy and Social Capital at Crime Hot Spots: New Crime Control Tools for Police

There is strong evidence that focussing police resources at ‘crime hot spots’—small geographic places at which crime is concentrated—is an effective crime control strategy. Generally, hot spots policing strategies focus on formal social controls such as police crackdowns and often ignore the social context of the places that are targeted. Our article describes an approach that recognizes the importance of police community collaboration to improve public safety and reinforce informal social controls, and the emerging empirical evidence that social disorganization and collective efficacy may influence crime patterns at the micro-geographic level. We argue for the relevance of informal social controls in place-based policing and describe an innovative Smart Policing collaboration between the Brooklyn Park (Minnesota) Police Department and the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University that implements a department-wide programme in which police lead interventions to increase collective efficacy in hot spots.

Exploring police-resident racial equality and violent crime

Purpose – Residential segregation based on race/ethnicity is associated with higher crime rates. However, when there is greater diversity within a neighbourhood, there may be less clustering of crime. One sign of such diversity beyond direct measures of racial similarity may be the proportion of minority officers employed by municipal police departments. As such, the purpose of this paper is to test the effect of the proportion of minority police officers on violent crime within minority communities, controlling for residential segregation. Design/methodology/approach – Multi-level modelling of 91 American cities from the 2000 National Neighbourhood Crime Study was used. Findings – It was found that as minority populations within census tracts increase, violent crime also increases; and crime is associated with an increase in segregation. However, racial composition of police departments can moderate the impact that community racial composition has on violent crime. Originality/value – The current findings point to crime control strategies relevant to municipalities which focus on creating neighbourhoods of racial heterogeneity and more diverse police agencies.

Stemming the Tide of Aboriginal Incarceration

Western Australia’s prison population has the highest rate of Aboriginal over-representation in Australia. Research on the criminogenic effect of imprisonment suggests that the use of imprisonment as a deterrent to future offending is not empirically supported and that imprisonment may in fact contribute to further offending. Consequently, this article explores theoretical debates surrounding penality as a way to inform alternative crime control strategies to imprisonment. It will be argued that any strategy to reduce Aboriginal imprisonment rates could benefit from a perspective that views Aboriginal imprisonment as a manifestation of Aboriginal resistance to settler colonial dominance.

The power of policing partnerships: sustaining the gains

Third Party Policing (TPP) involves partnerships between police and third parties where the legal powers of third parties are harnessed to prevent or control crime problems. This paper explores the characteristics and mechanisms of TPP as a crime control strategy, focusing on how the partnership approach in policing can help sustain crime control gains over the long run. Using the ABILITY Truancy Trial as an example, I examine how policing can contribute to long-term social change for high-risk young people living in poor-performing school districts and high-risk communities. The ABILITY Trial includes 102 young truants randomly allocated to a control (business-as-usual) or an experimental condition. The experimental condition activates the key theoretical components of Third Party Policing (TPP): a partnership between police and participating schools that activates and escalates (where needed) jurisdictional truanting laws (the legal lever). The paper presents a theoretical discussion of TPP and uses the ABILITY Trial to highlight the way TPP works in practice. Baseline data are presented for the ABILITY Trial. Outcome results are not presented. Third Party Policing partnerships rest on the capacity of police to build relationships with third parties who have a stake in the crime problem, who possess responsive regulation legal levers, and who have a clear mandate to offer long-term solutions and help sustain the crime control gains. Partnerships, I argue, offer long-term solutions for police because they activate latent mechanisms, building the capacity for third parties to both maintain short-term gains and sustain the crime control gains beyond the lifespan of the initial police intervention.

Group co-offending networks in Italy’s illegal drug trade

Interdependent relations and cooperation between criminal groups are found to be recurrent when studying illegal market activities specifically and organized crime generally. However, there is little systematic research into the level and characterization of how criminal groups co-offend with one another. Based on a case-study approach, this article examines structural co-offending patterns between differently ethnic-based criminal groups involved in an illegal drug distribution network targeted during a law-enforcement operation in Italy. Data was extracted from electronic and surveillance transcripts obtained from court documents, and analyzed using social network analysis (SNA) techniques. The results provide an insight into the structure and organizational features of group co-offending networks. They also offer an investigation into ethnicity within between-group criminal activity in Italy’s illegal drug trade. Implications for crime control strategies are discussed.

Policy spillover and the policing of protest in New York City, 1960–2006

Scholars have suggested that the policing of protest have become more permissive in Western democracies since the 1960s. While widely accepted, studies affirming a softening of police conduct have focused on national trends despite awareness that police tactics have unevenly diffused across the USA. This study examines the temporal trends in protest policing in New York City to evaluate how and why the dominant strategies of protest control have changed over time. Drawing on the widespread privatisation of public space in New York during the 1980s coupled with the adoption of Broken Windows crime control strategies, I develop an alternative explanation of the temporal dynamics of protest policing that is based on policy spillover, or the unintentional spillover effects that policy decisions unrelated to protest policing may nonetheless have on police conduct. Using a sample of 6147 protest events occurring in New York between 1960 and 2006, I confirm that the prevalence of arrests and other forms of police force have increased over time even though illegal or other contentious tactics have declined. The results additionally do not suggest that there is a direct relationship between crime rates and either arrests or the use of force. In regards to protest policing, the political construction and control of crime and disorder are more important than the absolute amount of crime, which is consistent with the proposed policy spillover explanation.

Penal reform ‘Canadian style’: Fiscal responsibility and decarceration in Alberta, Canada

To fulfil a political promise to eliminate the provincial fiscal deficit, the (conservative) Premier of Alberta cut all budgets by roughly 20 per cent in 1993–1994. As an unanticipated by-product, this political solution to a political problem resulted in a 32 per cent decrease in provincial imprisonment between 1993 and 1997. Economic imperatives created the catalyst for changes in imprisonment policies. However, the types of change and the mechanisms for achieving them reflected Canada’s specific history, culture and politico-legal structures. Decarceration was consistent with core Canadian values rooted in the long-standing belief in the need for restraint in the use of imprisonment and a lack of faith in its effectiveness as a crime control strategy. On the surface, this case study is yet another example of decarceration. However, the interactive and multi-factorial explanatory model underlying Alberta’s reduction in its prison population raises questions about not only single factors or simple additive models as explanations for changes in penal policies but also uni-dimensional solutions to jurisdictions in need of fiscal restraint. The historical and cultural embeddedness of Alberta’s decarceration alerts us to its country-specific nature and the need to situate imprisonment in a broader set of concerns.

The Contours of Disorder: Crime Maps and Territorial Policing in South Africa

Organised violence strongly shapes political boundaries. The modern state's monopoly on legitimate violence has made national borders the primary dividing line between peaceful and violent places. However, governments that are unable to achieve such a monopoly may opt for the more modest goal of moderating the distribution of violent behaviour across their jurisdiction. This paper explores how this latter approach redefines the contours of political space through a grounded ethnography of crime control strategies in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the postapartheid era, South African police and vigilantes have synthesised statistically oriented policing logics with the racial policing tactics of the past to anticipate, locate, isolate, and redistribute patterns of violent crime. In so doing, they have created forms of territorial power and violence that are neither new nor old, but undeniably postsovereign.

Researcher–practitioner partnerships and crime analysis: a case study in action research

This paper describes a recent researcher–practitioner partnership designed to address the challenges faced by law enforcement agencies when implementing crime control and prevention strategies. Using an action research methodology, the project embedded a group of trained students within the law enforcement community to assist with local crime problems and supplement existing crime analysis and research capabilities in six agency units. Results of this case study offer several implications for future researcher–practitioner partnerships focused on crime analysis and present an enhanced set of metrics for evaluating success.

STOP in the Name of Who’s Law? Driving and the Regulation of Contested Space in Central Australia

This article emerges from a study of the incidence of Indigenous driving offending conducted by the authors in the Northern Territory (NT) from 2006 to 2010 on two central Australian communities. It demonstrates how new patterns of law enforcement, set in train by an ‘Emergency Intervention’ in 2007, ostensibly to tackle child sexual abuse and family violence, led to a dramatic increase in the criminalisation of Indigenous people for driving-related offending. We suggest that the criminalisation of driving-related offending was part of a neocolonial turn in the NT through which the state sought to discipline, normalise and incorporate as yet uncolonised, or unevenly colonised, dimensions of Indigenous domain into the Australian mainstream. In terms of methodology, we adopted a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches, blending criminal justice and policing data with insights from criminological, anthropological and postcolonial theory. We argue that running together the insights from different disciplinary traditions is necessary to tease out the nuances, ambiguities and complexities of crime control strategies, and their impact, in postcolonial contexts.

Unpolicing the Urban Poor

Recent decades have witnessed a double movement within the field of crime control characterized by the prison boom and intensive policing, on the one hand, and widespread implementation of new approaches that assign policing responsibilities to non-police actors, on the other. The latter development has been accomplished by expansion of third-party policing policies; nuisance property ordinances, which sanction landlords for their tenants’ behavior, are among the most popular. This study, an analysis of every nuisance citation distributed in Milwaukee over a two-year period, is among the first to evaluate empirically the impact of coercive third-party policing on the urban poor. Properties in black neighborhoods disproportionately received citations, and those located in more integrated black neighborhoods had the highest likelihood of being deemed nuisances. Nearly a third of all citations were generated by domestic violence; most property owners abated this “nuisance” by evicting battered women. Landlords also took steps to discourage tenants from calling 911; overrepresented among callers, women were disproportionately affected by these measures. By looking beyond traditional policing, this study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of new crime control strategies for women from inner-city neighborhoods.

(In)security-at-a-distance: rescaling justice, risk and warfare in a transnational age

The article examines the progressive de-bounding of social risks and the blurring boundaries between internal and external notions of security. Contemporary forms of cross-border connectivity bring to our attention the renewed importance of analysing distance (physical, social and other) in criminology. Globalising processes significantly expand the scale and scope of social interaction, including violent conflict and crime control and security strategies, by offering social agents a possibility of acting from the point of ‘strategic globality’. The article outlines an emerging landscape of ‘security at a distance’, where previously local and national phenomena are transformed by new forms of transnational connectivity, risk and movement. It suggests that, through the emerging forms of globalism, criminal justice is plugging into trans-border circuits of circulation of people, forms of knowledge and social and political action, where, ultimately, crime control can become an export and war can be, metaphorically, seen as an import.