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Gunshot detection technology (GDT) is expected to impact gun violence by accelerating the discovery and response to gunfire. GDT should further collect more accurate spatial data, as gunfire is assigned to coordinates measured by acoustic sensors rather than addresses reported via 9-1-1 calls for service (CFS). The current study explores the level to which GDT achieves these benefits over its first 5 years of operation in Kansas City, Missouri. Data systems are triangulated to determine the time and location gunfire was reported by GDT and CFS. The temporal and spatial distances between GDT and CFS are then calculated. Findings indicate GDT generates time savings and increases spatial precision as compared to CFS. This may facilitate police responses to gunfire events and provide more spatially accurate data to inform policing strategies. Results of generalized linear and multinomial logistic regression models indicate that GDT benefits are influenced by a number of situational factors.

This study explored the effectiveness of a novel technique for police departments to support their officers and promote wellness: the use of service dogs. We evaluated officer perceptions in two mid-sized, municipal police departments that have wellness programs with a service dog that is permanently assigned to a full-time police officer handler: Groton and Naugatuck, Connecticut. We assessed six factors believed to influence police officer wellness including: operational and organizational stress using the Police Stress Questionnaire; topical stressors including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic, police use of force and community relations, and police reform efforts; Perceived Organizational Support (POS); receptivity to service dogs; and willingness to seek assistance for mental health issues. We found evidence that exposure to service dogs is significantly linked to both POS and receptivity to service dogs in policing. We also found that officer willingness to seek their department’s assistance regarding mental health approaches significance with greater exposure to the service dog ( p = .07). Although we found no significant evidence that exposure to service dogs is linked to stress reduction, we found that police reforms pose a substantial perceived stress on officers in the study. This finding presents a serious challenge for reformers that risks undermining officer wellness. Implications of our findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Much research has analyzed the spatial patterns of drug overdose events and identified features of the environment associated with heightened overdose levels. Generally absent from the literature are studies that analyze how unique trajectories of overdoses vary over time. We address this gap in the literature through an analysis of drug overdoses occurring in Passaic County, New Jersey from 2015 through 2019. A group-based trajectory analysis classifies block groups according to their overdose trends. A mixed-effects panel negative binomial regression model then examines the built environment and neighborhood characteristics associated with overall overdose levels. Results indicate that Passaic County block groups can be classified across three groups based upon their overdose levels over the study period: low and stable, low with moderate increase, and elevated and increasing. While the largest effects were observed for concentrated disadvantage in the regression analysis, most variables positively associated with overdose levels were built environment measures.

Objective: Examine the place-based correlates of robbery activity displaced by a foot-patrol intervention in Newark, NJ. We use constructs from Crime Pattern and Social Disorganization theories to test hypotheses concerned with associations between the structure of the environment and the displacement of crime. Method: Robbery incidents were spatially joined to street segments to study micro-level displacement processes. Predictor variables were operationalized using data from the Newark Police Department and Infogroup USA. Generalized Linear models tested associations between the characteristics of street segments and displaced robbery in the target area as compared to a control. Results: Environmental structure is important to understanding the settings of displacement, though this varied between spatial and temporal displacement. Relationships between displaced crime activity and model covariates did not always appear in expected directions. For example, bus stops predicted increased spatial displacement while corner stores predicted decreased levels of temporal displacement. Conclusions: While testing for displacement has become commonplace in place-based policing interventions, less attention has been paid to the micro-level factors that may facilitate the displacement of crime events. Both bus stops and corner stores show consistent associations with displaced crime activity, but the directions of these relationships suggest more complex processes requiring further examination.

In the last two decades, closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras have come to occupy a central role in contemporary crime prevention across the world. Widely viewed as the “internatio...

The current study tests the effect of police layoffs on crime through a natural experiment involving Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey’s two largest cities. In response to severe budget shortfalls...

The extent to which environmental context has been considered when developing crime scripts has been limited to descriptions of the locations offenders visit during the crime. This research contributes a description of the environmental characteristics of an open-air drug market and identifies environmental facilitators and inhibitors toward offender actions during a drug-selling crime script. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera footage is combined with Google Street View images to determine whether physical disorder, decay, and “crime generators” characterize the drug market under study. There is little evidence to suggest that the former two dimensions influence the crime sequence; however, crime generators such as retail facilities and bars and liquor stores are environmental facilitators toward a drug-selling crime script; and transit locations, corner stores, and public parks are environmental inhibitors toward the script.

The study analyzed the criminogenic effect of legalizing recreational marijuana dispensaries in Denver. Street segments with recreational dispensaries experienced no changes in violent, disorder an...

Private security personnel play an important but largely overlooked role in the operation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance to prevent crime in public and private areas. This role can take a number of forms, including active monitoring of cameras. Drawing upon a global database of CCTV evaluations ( N = 165), this article examines the function and performance of private security personnel as related to the effectiveness of CCTV. Findings indicate that CCTV schemes operated by private security personnel generated larger crime prevention effects than those operated by police or those using a mix of police and security personnel. Policy and research implications are discussed.

This study focuses on crimes involving firearms in Baltimore, Maryland to answer three research questions concerning the effect of seasonality: (1) Do changes in the seasons affect which spatial fa...

A large body of research has found that crime is much more likely to occur at certain places relative to others. Attempting to capitalize on this finding to maximize crime prevention, many police administrators have sought to narrow their department’s operational focus and allocate resources and attention to the most problematic locations. However, in the face of a growing number of technological advances in crime forecasting that have facilitated this trend, it is still unclear how to best identify the most appropriate set of places to which resources and attention should be directed. Our goal was to examine this issue by exploring the ways in which spatial vulnerabilities and exposures could be used to identify the best target areas for policing. Using the Theory of Risky Places as a guide, we employed kernel density estimation (KDE) to measure crime exposures and risk terrain modeling (RTM) to identify crime vulnerabilities with the expectation that crime would be predicted more accurately by integrating the outputs from these two methods. To test this hypothesis, our analysis utilized 1 year of data on street robbery in Brooklyn, New York. A common metric, the prediction accuracy index (PAI), was computed for KDE, RTM, and the integrated approach, over 1 month and 3 month intervals. We found that the integrated approach, on average and most frequently, produces the most accurate predictions. These results demonstrate that place-based policing and related policies can be improved via actionable intelligence produced from multiple crime analysis tools that are designed to measure unique aspects of the spatial dynamics of crime.

Purpose Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) has been effectively used to spatially diagnose risk for crimes such as robbery, aggravated assault , and gun violence. An important contribution is to consider how risk differs across individual crimes and different target types. This study tests four different robbery target types in unique models to examine the potential for variation across significant risk factors and high-risk locations. Methods Using the online diagnostic software RTMDx, individual robbery models were run for four robbery target types in Denver, Colorado: commercial (businesses), carjacking (driver/vehicle), residential (home/dwelling), and street (pedestrians). A conjunctive analysis of case configurations was also conducted to determine the potential for spatial differences in high-risk places across target types. Results The results indicate that there is variation across risk factors, and observable differences in risk factor spatial influence, operationalization and relative risk values in each target model. Convenience stores were the only risk factor significantly associated with every target type and the conjunctive analysis matrix found that very few places were high-risk for all four robbery types. Conclusions The findings suggest different target types should be analyzed individually and interventions should focus on different high-risk locations and be tailored to specific target types.

The present study uses Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) to analyze how nine different alcohol outlet types differentially influence the likelihood of aggravated assault and street robbery at micro-level...

Despite rapid growth in criminological studies of police technology, examinations of police land mobile radios are absent in the literature. This is troubling given the central role mobile radios s...

In this paper, we explore the conditions under which clearance rates improve by looking at the experience across New York City. Using one agency provides a control on the administrative differences that appear across other jurisdictions that have been studied, usually through cross-national analysis. Our analysis uses Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) to identify environmental features that relate to closed versus open homicide cases using two years of New York City Police Department (NYPD) data. This analysis is supplemented with an investigation of precinct-wide social structure variables to examine how context matters in influencing closure rates.

The current study tests the effect of police layoffs on crime through a natural experiment involving Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey’s two largest municipalities. In response to severe budget shortfalls resulting from the economic recession beginning in 2008, officials in both Newark and Jersey City explored police layoffs as a potential component of their cutback strategies. In November 2010, the Newark Police Department terminated 13% of the police force while Jersey City officials were able to avert any layoffs from occurring. The current study uses monthly Part 1 crime counts spanning from 2006 to 2015 to measure the effect of the police layoffs on crime in Newark. Findings of time series generalized least squares regression models using panel data indicate the police layoffs were associated with significant increases of violent crime, murder, robbery, and larceny theft in Newark as compared to Jersey City. This study contributes to the literature on the relationship between police force size and crime by demonstrating sudden, drastic reductions in police force size may generate significant crime increases.

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) and body-worn video cameras (BWVCs) have rapidly spread throughout policing. Such widespread deployment has heightened the importance of identifying best practices for both of these technologies. The research community has worked toward the identification of such best practices, with bodies of knowledge emerging for both CCTV and BWVCs over recent decades. Given its earlier emergence, research on CCTV is more developed. Nonetheless, the BWVC literature is quickly becoming robust, with BWVC research developing at a much more rapid pace than research on most other police technologies. This essay reviews the CCTV and BWVC literatures across four main areas of inquiry: (1) program effect and common outcome measures, (2) contextual factors influencing program effect, (3) intervention costs, and (4) implementation issues. Specific attention is paid to knowledge gaps within the CCTV literature and how BWVC research can avoid (or, in certain cases, already has avoided) similar knowledge gaps.

Evidence-based policing emphasizes the evaluation of interventions to create a catalogue of effective programs and practices. Program evaluation has primarily been considered the purview of academic researchers, with police agencies typically uninvolved in the evaluation of their own interventions. Scholars have recently advocated for police to take more ownership over program evaluation, often arguing for an increased role of three primary entities: embedded criminologists, police pracademics, and crime analysts. While an emerging body of literature has explored these entities individually, research has yet to explore the unique contributions each can make to police-led science. The current study is a survey of scholars who authored or co-authored one or more studies included in the evidence-based policing matrix. The authors explore four distinct research questions pertaining to police-led science. Findings suggest that embedded criminologists, police pracademics, and crime analysts may each have a unique role to play in promoting police-led science.

Research outside the field of policing has shown that job satisfaction predicts job performance. While policing research has demonstrated performing community-oriented policing (COP) activities generally improves police officer job satisfaction, the mechanism through which it occurs remains unclear. This study contributes to the community-policing literature through a survey of 178 police officers at the Toronto Police Service. The survey instrument measures the mechanism through which job satisfaction is impacted. Results indicate that primary response officers are more likely to be somewhat or very unsatisfied with their current job assignment compared with officers with a COP assignment—confirming what previous research has found. Further, those who interact with the public primarily for the purpose of engaging in problem-solving are more likely to be very satisfied with their current job assignment compared with those who do so primarily for the purpose of responding to calls for service. Engaging in problem-solving increases the odds of being very satisfied in one’s job assignment, and the combination of frequent contacts with the public and problem-solving is less important than problem-solving alone. The implications of the study findings for COP strategies are discussed.

The current study tests the crime prevention effect of different police actions conducted during a foot-patrol saturation initiative in Newark, New Jersey. Police actions were categorized into two typologies: enforcement actions (i.e., arrests, quality of life summonses and field interrogations) and guardian actions (i.e., business checks, citizen contacts, bus checks, and taxi inspections). Logistic regression models tested the effect of enforcement and guardian actions on crime during daily (i.e., 24-hr) periods as well as the intervention’s operational (6:00 p.m.-2:00 a.m.) and nonoperational (2:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.) periods. Analyses were conducted twice, once for the Operation Impact target area and once for a surrounding catchment zone (to measure spatial displacement). Findings suggest that guardian actions had a greater crime prevention effect than enforcement actions on crime occurrence. Policy implications of the findings are discussed.

The contemporary policing literature contains numerous examples of partnerships between academic researchers and police agencies. Such efforts have greatly contributed to evidence-based policing by increasing the knowledge base on effective strategies. However, research has demonstrated that successful collaboration between researchers and practitioners can be a challenge, with various organizational and inter-agency factors presenting difficulties at various stages of the process. Additionally, applied research can oftentimes face implementation challenges when the time comes to convert research into practice. The current study contributes to the literature by discussing researcher/practitioner partnerships and program implementation in the context of a multi-city risk-based policing project in the United States. We conceptualize police interventions as contingent on four distinct phases: 1) problem analysis, 2) project design, 3) project implementation, and 4) project evaluation. In this project, the research partners were able to successfully complete each phase in certain cities while the project experienced difficulty at one or more phases in other cities. We discuss these disparate experiences, identifying factors that facilitate or impede successful completion of each step. Policy implications and recommendations for future risk-based policing interventions are discussed.

Objectives: Through the use of closed-circuit television (CCTV) video footage, the current study builds upon the drug transaction work of Piza and Sytsma by developing a crime script for open-air drug selling. Methods: Researchers conducted a systematic social observation of CCTV footage of open-air drug markets in Newark, NJ. The data were used to identify sequential stages of drug transactions. Fisher’s exact tests measured whether buyer and seller activities during specific acts of the drug transaction event were related to activities seen in subsequent stages. Results: This study finds three distinct acts to open-air drug events. During the pretransaction act, one party (usually the buyer) initiates the transaction. There must then be an exchange of narcotics for money, which typically occurs in one simultaneous transfer and in one location. There is necessarily posttransaction mobility, with sellers most commonly maintaining their anchor point within the drug territory—particularly when the interactions are buyer initiated. Conclusions: Results of this study contribute to the crime script and situational crime prevention literatures by demonstrating acts inherent in public drug selling and by advocating for a focus on the posttransaction period and seller anchor points within drug markets through leveraging the sentinel role of police officers.

Purpose This study tests whether the effect of police actions is influenced by similar crime generators and attractors (CGAs) that influence crime. Said differently, in recognition that the presence of CGAs presents higher risk of crime at certain places, we test whether CGAs similarly create a situation where specific police enforcement actions are more effective at certain types of places than others. Methods Using longitudinal logistic regression models incorporating panel data, we measure the effect of various police enforcement actions on gun violence in Newark, NJ. Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) was further used to test whether the effect of the enforcement activities vary across spatial contexts. Results When considered on their own, police enforcement actions were associated with increased likelihood of gun violence. However, certain types of enforcement actions conducted where CGAs highly co-locate, as identified through RTM, were associated with decreased likelihood of gun violence. Conclusions Findings suggest that where officers conduct enforcement activities may be as important as what precise enforcement activities they enact. This has implications for the place-based policing tactics. Understanding the spatial context of high-crime areas can help police design strategies in a manner that maximizes their crime prevention utility.

Maritime piracy has been a worldwide problem for decades before starting gradual declines around 2011. Situational crime prevention (SCP) techniques have been shown to reduce successful pirate attacks (Shane and Magnuson 2014; Shane et al. 2015), suggesting that they may also be capable of reducing violent ransom hijackings. This study uses data from the International Maritime Bureau to examine (1) which vessels are most at risk of a pirate attack and ransom demand; (2) the relationship between attacks for ransom and violence; (3) which countries experience the most attacks for ransom; (4) the effect of SCP on injuries during attack; and (5) the effect of SCP on ransom demands. The findings show that SCP is a useful strategy for reducing episodes of ransom and injuries, highlighting how SCP techniques can be adapted in unique environments when other traditional crime control resources are unavailable.

The purpose of this study is to compare a specialized community-oriented policing (COP) unit to a reactive unit on officer perceptions of public contact and officer perceptions of job performance. ...

Near repeat analysis has been increasingly used to measure the spatiotemporal clustering of crime in contemporary criminology. Despite its predictive capacity, the typically short time frame of nea...

Policing strategies that seek to simultaneously combat crime and vehicle crashes operate under the assumption that these two problems have a corollary relationship—an assumption that has received scant empirical attention and is the focus of the present study. Geocoded vehicle crash, violent crime, and property crime totals across were aggregated to Indianapolis census blocks over a 36-month period (2011-2013). Time series negative binomial regression and local indicators of spatial autocorrelation analyses were conducted. Results indicate that both violent and property crime are significantly related to vehicle crash counts, both overall and during the temporal confines of patrol tours. Relationship strength was modest. Spatiotemporal analysis of crime and crash data can identify places for police intervention and improved scholarly evaluation.

Crime analysts play a pivotal role in evidence-based policing by readily diagnosing the nature of crime and disorder problems. Such analysis products are key in the design of evidence-based strategies. The role of analysts in the subsequent process of evidence-based policing, the evaluation of programs to determine what works, is less known. The current study seeks to fill this gap in the literature through a survey of the International Association of Crime Analyst Membership. Findings suggest that program evaluation lies on the periphery of the crime analysis profession. Across all measures incorporated in this study, program evaluation was emphasized less than all other crime analysis functions. Findings of logistic regression models further suggest that, for the most part, no specific factors are associated with increased levels of program evaluation experience. We conclude with a discussion of how crime analysts can become more involved in evaluations of police programs and strategies.

Risk terrain modeling (RTM) is a geospatial crime analysis tool designed to diagnose environmental risk factors for crime and identify the places where their spatial influence is collocated to produce vulnerability for illegal behavior. However, the collocation of certain risk factors’ spatial influences may result in more crimes than the collocation of a different set of risk factors’ spatial influences. Absent from existing RTM outputs and methods is a straightforward method to compare these relative interactions and their effects on crime. However, as a multivariate method for the analysis of discrete categorical data, conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC) can enable exploration of the interrelationships between risk factors’ spatial influences and their varying effects on crime occurrence. In this study, we incorporate RTM outputs into a CACC to explore the dynamics among certain risk factors’ spatial influences and how they create unique environmental contexts, or behavior settings, for crime at microlevel places. We find that most crime takes place within a few unique behavior settings that cover a small geographic area and, further, that some behavior settings were more influential on crime than others. Moreover, we identified particular environmental risk factors that aggravate the influence of other risk factors. We suggest that by focusing on these microlevel environmental crime contexts, police can more efficiently target their resources and further enhance place-based approaches to policing that fundamentally address environmental features that produce ideal opportunities for crime.

This study explores the prospect of utilizing CCTV as an early intervention mechanism to detect and disrupt street-level activity that can lead to violence. The analysis focuses on nine case studies in Newark, NJ, incorporating data from several sources, including video footage, computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system incident data, CAD event chronologies and face-to-face interviews with CCTV operators. The findings suggest that the benefits offered by CCTV, namely the instantaneous discovery and reporting of crime, may be rendered inconsequential by the process times associated with the differential-response policy of police dispatch. Potential methods by which police can more proactively utilize CCTV to prevent crime are discussed.