Sweet Spots for Hot Spots? A Cost-Effectiveness Comparison of Two Patrol Strategies

Gibson, Christopher; Slothower, Molly; Sherman, Lawrence W.

doi:10.1007/s41887-017-0017-8

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 15 publications

(20 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Lawrence Sherman has coined the idea of a sweet spot of intensity of just enough deterrence through police presence at hot spots. Gibson, Slothower, and Sherman (2017) found such an optimal sweet spot of minimally sufficient patrol in Merseyside, UK. Though it is well established that intensive patrol at hot spots can reduce crime (Braga, Papachristos, and Hureau 2014), Gibson and her colleagues are the first to explore the possibility of reducing the intensity of hot-spot patrol without increasing crime, perhaps even reducing it somewhat through optimizing that sweet spot.…”

Section: Inexorability Pursue Inexorable Consistency Of Detection Ofmentioning

confidence: 93%

Minimally Sufficient Deterrence

Braithwaite¹

2018

Crime and Justice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Dangers exist in both maximalist approaches to deterrence and minimalist ones. A minimal sufficiency strategy aims to avert these dangers. The objectives are to convince people that the webs of relationships within which they live mean that lawbreaking will ultimately lead to desistance and remorse and to persuading offenders that predatory crime is simply wrong. Alternative support and control strategies should be attempted until desistance finally occurs. Communities can be helped to understand that this is how minimally sufficient deterrence works. By relying on layered strategies, this approach takes deterrence theory onto the terrain of complexity theory. It integrates approaches based on social support and recovery capital, dynamic concentration of deterrence, restorative justice, shame and pride management, responsive regulation, responsivity, indirect reciprocity, and incapacitation. Deterrence fails when it rejects complexity in favor of simple theories such as rational choice. Some criminologists are inclined to question why any role should be given to deterrent crime prevention strategies. The evidence for the power of deterrence in reducing crime is thin, after all (Nagin 2013; Chalfin and McCrary 2017; Tonry 2018). There are three reasons why deterrence should have a role. One is that a good meta-strategy for crime control achieves strength through the convergence of weaknesses: deterrence can help to motivate crime control strategies that are more effective than

show abstract

Section: Inexorability Pursue Inexorable Consistency Of Detection Ofmentioning

confidence: 93%

Minimally Sufficient Deterrence

Braithwaite¹

2018

Crime and Justice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the case of a minimal level of patrol, a sweet spot of residual deterrence is the amount or frequency of patrol that can yield the most residual deterrence per minute of patrol. It has even been demonstrated, quasiexperimentally, by a major reduction in patrol time that had no effect on crime in an area (Gibson et al, 2017). The identification of such a sweet spot can also be explored by varying the total time of patrol visits, the length of each patrol visit (Williams & Coupe, 2017), or the length of intervals of time between visits of a similar length.…”

Section: Residual Deterrence and Its "Sweet Spots"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sweet Spots of Residual Deterrence: A Randomized Crossover Experiment in Minimalist Police Patrol

Barnes¹,

Williams²,

Sherman³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we examine how communities can maximize deterrence of crime while minimizing cost and police intrusion on public life. Using 3,720 hot spot-days, we show that the “sweet spot” duration of police absence, to maximize the residual deterrence of crime, was a full four days after the last day of targeting police patrol at each hot spot. Over a 248-day period, we randomly reshuffled 15 separate hot spots daily into either treatment (targeted police patrols) or control (no targeted patrols) for that day, so that all locations repeatedly switched between randomly assigned groups. This repeated crossover design (Cochrane & Cox, 1957; Fienberg et al., 1980) included random periods of up to 20 consecutive days in which individual hot spots remained in the control condition, allowing us to measure how soon, and by what trajectory, the residual deterrent effect of targeted patrolling wore off. After four days without patrolling, there was a sudden termination of residual deterrence, marked by a 66% rise in offense frequency, and a 395% spike in our index of crime harm (House & Neyroud 2018), compared to the treatment condition. It may be possible to deploy less, not more policing and still maximize deterrent effects.

show abstract

“…This is because hot spot policing studies have typically focused on the effects of marginal increases in police dosage relative to baseline levels (which are not always specified). Researchers have rarely examined the effects of reducing police dosages in hot spots or explicitly tested for minimal dosages that can prevent crime in these locations (for exceptions, see Barnes et al., 2020; Gibson et al., 2017). 2 Yet, understanding minimum dosage levels needed for hot spots could be very important to agencies seeking to expand their coverage across large numbers of problem locations as well as agencies struggling with staffing reductions and/or negative community reactions to what citizens perceive as over-policing.…”

Section: Preventing Crime In Hot Spots and Lower Risk Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibrating Police Activity Across Hot Spot and Non-Hot Spot Areas

Koper

Lum

2021

Police Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Maximizing crime prevention through large-scale implementation of hot spot policing requires a more refined understanding of how to calibrate police activity across high and low-risk areas. This study investigates these issues based on the experience of a large urban police agency that substantially reduced proactive activities across a large area due to resource cutbacks while also shifting a larger share of its declining proactive work into prioritized micro hot spots. Time series models were used to estimate the effects of these changes on crime-related calls in hot spots and non-hot spot areas. Hot spots required higher levels of proactivity (expressed as rates per day or per crime) to control crime, and serious crime rose in these locations following modest reductions in proactivity. In areas outside hot spots, minor and property crimes rose, but only after reductions of one-half to two-thirds in proactive work. Violence was unaffected in these areas, and they did not experience accelerated growth in crime relative to prioritized hot spots. These results help to illuminate minimum levels of police activity that may be necessary to control crime in places of varying risk. They also suggest that police can reduce proactive work by substantial amounts in lower risk areas to place more emphasis on hot spots. Better understanding of these issues is central to widespread, systematic operationalization of hot spot policing as a means to reduce crime across large areas.

show abstract

Sweet Spots for Hot Spots? A Cost-Effectiveness Comparison of Two Patrol Strategies

Cited by 17 publications

References 15 publications

Minimally Sufficient Deterrence

Minimally Sufficient Deterrence

Sweet Spots of Residual Deterrence: A Randomized Crossover Experiment in Minimalist Police Patrol

Calibrating Police Activity Across Hot Spot and Non-Hot Spot Areas

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About