Hot Spots Policing: A Literature Review

This article is a summary of the up-to-date researches about hot spots policing. After carefully reviewing more than 80 articles regarding the effectiveness of hot spots policing and related topics, David Weisburd and Cody Telep summarized the evidence of the effectiveness of different perspectives of hot spots policing, and more importantly, shed the lights on the direction of the hot spots policing research in future. Generally speaking, they have illustrated what has been known and pointed out what need to be known about hot spots policing in this article.

This review article was published in 2014. The authors introduced the concept of “hot spots policing”, then briefly reviewed the evidence regarding the general effectiveness of hot spots policing, and followed by the detailed discussion of the perspectives of hot spots policing where new

They pointed out that hot spots policing can sometimes be referred as place-based policing. It represented a range of police responses that focus police resources on the small geographical areas where crime was highly concentrated. Then the confirmation of the effectiveness of hot spots policing was given based on. According to authors, this is “an established fact based on strong experimental and quasi-experimental evidence (p. 202).” This position was supported by NRC’s (2004), Braga’s (2007) and Braga et al.’s (2012) studies and evaluations. Therefore, hot spots policing could be considered as an effective crime prevention strategy. Moreover, they also affirmed that hot spots policing did not necessarily lead to the immediate spatial displacement, and on the contrary, a diffusion of crime control benefits was likely to be witnessed. However, it still remains unclear whether the crime displacement could happen to areas father away. Likewise, non-spatial displacement such like displacement of crime types also need more research