Directive Patrol Essay

717 Words2 Pages

Preventative patrolling can be defined as a police effort to reduce crime by walking or driving around an area and deterring crime in order to ensure the safety of others. Today, it is widely believed that preventative patrol done by police officers reduces crime. Others tend to think that a more directive and straight-forward form of police patrol can be more effective. According to Seigel (2003), reducing crime has been successful to police organizations that assigned officers to areas with higher crime rates and took a more focused approach. Other organizations may act oppositely to that by performing a more preventative patrol effort in order to reduce crime. As Vigoa (2010) stated, there is only a small amount of research that has been …show more content…

According to Vigoa (2010), working overtime for preventative patrolling is at a minimum in order to save money for the police departments. An important point brought up by Vigoa (2010) is about crime taking over a certain area. He stated, “if crime is allowed to permeate an area, citizens are inclined to move-away reducing the tax base (Vigoa, 2010).” Taxes are very essential in keeping a police department up and running. If people move away from a crime-ridden area, the taxes will decrease and it will negatively affect the police department. Cost plays a huge part in determining what form of patrol should be used because of necessary resources and working …show more content…

This experiment covered the issues surrounding preventative patrol and whether it reduced crime effectively or not. As stated by Vigoa (2010), this experiment was established mainly because, at the time, no one conducted any studies or experiments to find out if more police officers performing preventative patrol actually reduced crime. The experiment split police sectors into different groups and were assigned to different tasks. One group was assigned to only respond to service calls, the other group was to perform normal preventive patrols, and the last group had to take a more aggressive patrolling approach (Vigoa, 2010). The results of the experiment showed that they were not able to find any evidence that stated preventative patrol being successful in reducing crime rates (Telep & Weisburd,

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