Hot Spots Policing: A Case Study

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The first thought that many people may have when they perceive that crime is high or when crime directly affects them is that more police are needed to stop it. This is a common knee-jerk reaction made by many citizens when faced with a crisis situation. Even experienced police chiefs and politicians can often be too quick to put their faith behind quantity rather than quality. Any community can hire additional police officers for patrol. However, the effectiveness of those officers may only be felt if they are distributed to where the most need is as opposed to being evenly distributed across patrol areas. Citizens and politicians in one area won’t want to be left out if they see additional police presence in another area. The perception will be that they are more vulnerable, when in fact their crime rate may be lower than the crime rate in other areas of the community. According to Sherman (1997), whether additional police prevent crime may depend on how well they are focused on specific objectives, tasks, places, times and people. …show more content…
However, these are not focused efforts on reducing crime, but merely reactive strategies. The main focus should be on crime prevention. Hot spots policing covers a range of police responses that all share in common a focus of resources on the locations where crime is highly concentrated (“Hot Spots,” 2013). Identifying the hot spots and placing more officers in these locations is an improvement over just placing more officers across the community, but these officers need to take action in these hot spots. Mere presence alone may be a deterrent at the moment, but it is what the police do at these hot spots that is the most important. Directed patrols, proactive arrests, and problem solving at high crime “hot spots” has shown substantial evidence of crime prevention (Sherman,

Directed Patrol Research Paper

(Worrall). These specific areas that directed patrol hones in on are called hot spots. Hot spots are concentrated areas of large amounts of criminal activity (Worrall). There have been studies done that show the effect that directed patrol can actually have. One example, is a study done by the Kansas City Police Department on the effect of directed patrol of hot spots for gun violence (Sherman). The results of this study were that there was a 65% increase of gun seizures and a 49% decrease in gun…

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