History and Effectiveness of a Police Foot Patrol

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Sir Robert Peel created the first organized police department in London U.K. in 1829. His central idea for this creation was to provide “unremitting through visible patrol” (Ratcliffe et al. 2011). He believed that local citizens be deterred from his aggressive police presence in the area and knowing their chance of being apprehended and punished would be high. The debate in these modern times seems to hinge on the idea of whether police patrol deters crime in hot spots.

This essay is significant because by using foot patrol as a unit of analysis, it will be easier to control the perspective of the task at hand while keeping the information processing at a simplified level. It is the hope of this essay to accomplish the main goal of proving that police foot patrol in hot spots is an effective deterrent.

The National Research Council summarized that police foot patrol was an unfocused community policing strategy that provided only weak-moderate evidence of reducing fear of crime (Ratcliffe et al. 2011). In a study done in 2005, (Braga 2005) concluded that there was a significant difference in residence opinion of police foot patrol in the targeted area. He found that because of the focused aggressive police presence residents submitted complaints about the enforcement strategies. The residents feared police misconduct and abuse of force, in a minority dominated area residents will feel that bored officers racially targeted them.

Ratcliffe et al (2011) suggest that previous research on foot patrol suffered from statistical and measurement issues that did not fully explore the potential dynamics of deterrence within microspatical settings. The Operation Impact program in Newark, New Jersey, was a foot patrol exper...

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...in a hot spot, will promote positive results.

Bibliography

Braga, A. (2005). “Hot spots policing and crime prevention: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials”. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 1(3), 317-342.

Braga, Anthony A., and Brenda J. Bond. 2008. “Policing Crime and Disorder Hot Spots: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Criminology 46(3):577–607.

Piza, Eric L., and Brian A. O’Hara. 2012. “Saturation Foot-Patrol in a High-Violence Area: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation.” Justice Quarterly 1–26.

Ratcliffe, J H, Taniguchi, T, Groff, E R, et al. (2011). “The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots.” Criminology, 49(3), 795-831

Thale, C. 2007. The Informal World of Police Patrol: New York City in the Early Twentieth Century. Journal of Urban History 33: 183-216

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