Smithville's police force wishes to increase "visibility" in town. The hope is that this will decrease crime rate. However, this would mean some significant changes to the operations of the police department. This arguement raises questions about the effectiveness of this new tactic. The first issue is the supposed allocation of resources. With this new plan, more officers, money and time are needed. The town may not have the resources to adequectly implement this program. For this project to go smoothly, more research must be done to quantify the proposed increases and justify their nessecity. The next issue is the vaugeness term "visibility". The police department would like to be more "visible" to the citizens of Smithville. However, this …show more content…
term negelects to deliniate what the officers will actually do with this increased time. It could simply mean more being obvious to the general public, making their routes more known or interacting more with people along their routes. This does not imply that they are doing better job. Accordingly, more time and people do not always coorelate to a better system.
The increased activity may not improve the system, but instead have the opposite effect. With the increased people, some tasks might be done redundantly or the amount of work may not be equivalent to amount of officers needed. The increased foot patrolling may make the officer less effective, espeically if the criminal is in a motor vehicle. All this combined may lead to an increase in crime as less work is being done by each individual. Lastly, there is little evidence to suggest that this approach will keep the citizens of Smithville safer. Smithville should look to other towns that have implented this type of programs to see whether crime decreased as a result. The increase visibiltiy may not deter criminal at all. This comparison would give conclusive evidence on whether the police department should take on such a large change. In conculsion, Smithville police department needs more questions to answer before these changes are made to try to decrease the crime rate. It needs to consider the allocation of resources and for what the increased time and "visibility" will be used. The best system does not always come from increases in any one area. The police department should also investigate the success of other similar programs to gauge the possible effectiveness. As of right now, the program will most likely not result in the intended
effects.
During the seventies in New Jersey created a program that could change life in society. This program occurred only in twenty-eight cities. Government and public officials were excited about this concept. Police officials were not so much. Foot patrol made officers walk in sleet and snow. Assigned foot patrol was a way of punishment for officers. State funding of foot patrol shut the mouths of some people. Silence stopped after the “Police Foundation”(Kelling) put foot patrol to the actual test. To contrary belief this rattled some arguments in the community an...
Part One The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment: An Introduction According to Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown (1974), patrol is the “backbone” of police work. This belief is based around the premise that the mere presence of police officers on patrol prohibits criminal activity. Despite increasing budgets and the availability of more officers on the streets, crime rates still rose with the expanding metropolitan populations (Kelling et al., 1974).
In looking at the Kansas City Patrol Experiment, it appears that adding more police officers has little or no affect on arrests or the crime rate. Please review the study and explain why more police does not mean less crime. Due Date March 11, 2005
9. Sherman L., Gottfredson D., MacKenzie D., Eck J., Reuter P., Bushway S. Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. A Report to the United States Congress. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1997.
Every generation of law enforcers deals with issues unique to their field. Canadian Royal Mounted Police (RCMP) corporal Terry Burns (2015), believes public perception, funding, staffing and equipment are some of the greatest issues 21st century Canadian police forces are facing (November 5, 2015, personal communication). Inspector Rosemary Hawkins (2015) with the Calgary Police service also acknowledges sexism, government control, drugs and gangs, and media coverage of law enforcement as modern issues to policing (October 23, 2015, personal communication).
Because of budget constraints, the study only used one beat to collect data on the effects of increasing police patrol. Even though money was an issue, the experiment could have yielded better data by repeating the experiment multiple times to see if the data they collected would be reliable. The experiment also took place during the winter. The report of the study even noted that there was some evidence that crime activity levels declined, just as street activity does, because of colder weather. Although the design of the study contained weaknesses, some of the methods used by the researchers worked well for this type of study. One of the strengths of this experiment was the different methods used to acquire illegal guns in the beat. By using a variation of ways to seize illegal weapons in the “hot spot,” it allowed officers to increase their chances of finding more illegal guns. Using different methods of search also could have led to greater number of potential offenders to know that officers were looking for illegal weapons and refrained from offending. Another strength of the study includes the relatively inexpensive method to try to answer their hypothesis. Increasing police patrol is one of the more inexpensive methods and it did manage to decrease the number of gun crimes and homicide in the
more problems with the police, more use of force used by the police, and police misconduct. Because the citizens feel they can’t rely on the police, they often turn to informal ways of handling issues in their community.
Police officers need to find a unique balance between protecting the public and employing enforcement tactics. The Chief of Police Jerry Dodd stated in the MVPD annual report, “Accomplishing such a balance depends on our ability to focus on and find ways to resolve problematic issues as well as our ability to communicate and partner with citizens and businesses, eliciting their help and support” (MVPD, 2014, p.3). The objective of this presentation is to make Mount Vernon a safer place to live by demonstrating the benefits of proactive
This memo is in reference to the recent data received from the 3rd District Police Department in Grand Crossing which is a part of the Chicago Police Department located on the city’s South Side. It is also considered to be one of the city’s most violent neighborhoods. Therefore, I will be reporting on the dates between August 30, 2016 to September 12, 2016 for the police beat of 1533 and ward 28 and 29. Furthermore, I will give details on the administrative, tactical and strategic analysis for this area and how they can better help the department fight the high rate of crime for this small area that is made up of four main streets West Roosevelt Rd., South Laramie Ave, 5000 West Madison St. and South Cicero Ave. Although, this is a small area and the data that has been received is data for a two-week time frame there has been 24 incidents during this time. Now the incidents that have been mainly reported for this area has been six motor vehicle theft, eight larcenies, two aggravated assault, one burglary, six robberies and one criminal sexual assault. Unfortunately, for this small area this is a large amount of crime for only two weeks and the majority of it has been happening on the streets between the hours of 18:00 or 6 pm and 23:30 or 11:30 pm. Although, there are some reports of crime happening over in the morning or midday, the majority of it happens when people are either getting off of work or going out to dinner as well as happens on the streets, sidewalks or in an alley for a quick getaway. Now the reason it is happening is because the unemployment rate for this area is 18.8%, 17.9% in the area does not have a high school diploma and the average income per-capita is $17,213. Therefore, once again the low education rate a...
The Kansas City Preventative Patrol Experiment was a study done in the early 1970’s that would evaluate the success of routine preventative patrol. It was designed to test the techniques of modern policing such as visibility, regular, motorized and random patrol. The hypothesis of this research study is the presented policing techniques will directly deter crime, arrest offenders, and reduce the fear of crime. With the help of the Kansas City Police Department’s South Patrol Division, researchers from the Police Foundation, patrol officers, supervisors and task force, were included to evaluate the research surrounding how successful is the preventative patrol. The theories were tested through police shifts over a thirty-two square miles of
Wilson, J.Q., & Kelling, G. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly March: 29-38.
Crime Analysis has many benefits to the community. Community engagement, targeted initiatives, strategic use of resources, and data-driven decision-making contribute to decreasing crime. Crime prevention and community satisfaction with police services, while linked to the number of officers on the streets, does not depend entirely on the visibility of patrol officers. Community engagement, targeted initiatives, strategic use of resources, and data-driven decision-making contribute to decreasing crime. So in closing I believe that departments that take the positive elements of foot patrols and combine their efforts with crime analysis that focuses on the time, location, and type of crime, may use the findings to develop strategies to decrease crime and enhance the quality of life in their communities.
Instead I suggest we become more focused in our deployment efforts to ensure that the officers are patrolling specific areas at specific times, later known as data driven preventive patrols. While more “random” patrol may not clearly change crime numbers, specific focus areas and a robust complement of officers in those areas will surely alter crime statistics. Sir Robert Peel thought of the patrol officer as the primary mechanism in the overall machine that is law enforcement to deter and or prevent crime (Cordner, 2016). In the end I think I would take the experiment under advisement and simply move forward with attempting to develop better tactics for putting my officers in the right place at the right time. I had an Field Training Officer (FTO) ask me once on probation, “what do you think we do as patrol officers?”. I responded as I had been trained and as I believed, “to prevent crime and help our community”. The FTO laughed and said, No, our job is mostly to take reports. He explained how unlikely it is to simply stumble onto crime in progress and how much more likely it would be that the crime has already occurred by the time we
Evaluation of crime prevention programs, strategies, and policies is important for the most obvious reason, to see if what we’re implementing works or if it doesn’t work. Often times different things are implemented but never followed up on.
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,