What do police do and where do they do it?

Abstract

Recent research in the economics of policing has been concerned with what the police do and how much time they spend on those activities. Some of this research has highlighted that, based on the number of incidents, “crime” comprises only ∼ 20% of the police workload with much of the remaining 80% addressing public safety concerns. In this article, we deconstruct the nature of police incidents within a suburban city. We show that police expenditures, relative to the entire municipal budget, have been relatively constant over 30 years and that the volume of police activity has also remained relatively constant, although with a slight increasing trend. We show that the most of the decrease in crime can be attributed to population growth in this suburban city and that the places in which the police undertake different activities vary.

Understanding the Spatial Patterns of Police Activity and Mental Health in a Canadian City

“…Consistent with previous research, the City only has criminal code-related calls for police service accounting for 20% to 30% of police activity (Wuschke, Andresen, Brantingham, Rattenbury, & Richards, 2018). In fact, when the calls for police service were ranked from top to bottom by percent, none of the first two thirds of calls were related to a criminal code.…”

Policing Directions: A Systematic Review on the Effectiveness of Quantitative Police Presence

“…GPS tracking of police activities allows for precise measurement of presence and utilizing big data analyses can shed new light on traditional assumptions of police work (Williams and Coupe 2017, Davies and Bowers 2019, Barnes et al 2020. For quite some time now, research has been interested in what officers do and how they patrol (Groff et al 2015, Wuschke et al 2018. Making use of precise tracking technology and big data analytics can help researchers to pinpoint effects of different policing styles and enable police departments whether police directives are carried out effectively.…”

Analysing the Police Patrol Routing Problem: A Review

“…This resulted in a wide range of routing strategies solely based on hot spot policing [21,22]. Nevertheless, routine police patrol, which is not geographically constrained to a small number of preidentified high-crime places, is nowadays still central to everyday policing in many police jurisdictions [17,[23][24][25]. In light of the general importance of routine police patrol, major technological and methodological advancements during the past five decades and the remaining ambiguity regarding routine police patrol and crime prevention, the efficacy of this policing tactic needs to be revisited and a strategy for routine police patrol has to be developed.…”

“…The aim of this article is to come up with a solution method that can be used to develop a police patrol routing strategy that meets the following objectives and characteristics. First, since the police are financed with public funds, a cost-efficient deployment of the available resources is an important factor [2,4,24,29]. Second, the effectiveness of routine day-to-day patrol in reducing crime and disorder needs to be monitored, which has not yet been established.…”