ABSTRACT
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INTRODUCTION
Police patrols are integral in the proper functioning of a community, and the safety of a community can often be changed with a little bit of oversight insofar as police patrols are concerned. Police patrols may take a number of different forms, including foot patrols, car patrols bike patrols, and even horse patrols can reduce the incidence of crime in any given neighborhood at any given time. In most areas, patrol officers are uniformed officers that patrol a given area; some areas even have community patrols, made up of volunteer members of the community, often individuals that live in the neighborhood in question. These patrols are different from police patrols, and will not be discussed (except explicitly) within the text, as they present different legal questions and issues than the issue of police patrols.
The purpose of this research will be to examine the effect of police patrols in areas of high rates of crime. This will be done through a variety of means, including quantitative and qualitative research done with the help and assistance of the local law enforcement units tasked with community patrols. In addition, police patrols will be compared with areas that do not have police patrols; this comparison will be done with the intention of determining whether or not police patrols work as a preventative measure insofar as crime rates within the community are concerned.
Within the text, the types of behaviors most commonly quelled due to community police patrols will also be examined. In particular, drug crime and violent crime will be considered by the study as two types of crime that are often associated with bad, crime-ridden areas. Police suggestions concerning community safety and community standards will also be considered and investigated within the report.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The literature tends to suggest that there are a number of community benefits that can be had from police patrols in heavy-crime areas. However, before discussing the benefits of patrols, it is important to discuss what kind of patrols seem to have a positive effect on the community that the police officers in question serve. As previously mentioned, there are a number of different types of patrols that police can take part in. This paper discusses non-military police patrols, in which law enforcement officers are uniformed and assigned to address the safety of a given geographic area (Dietz, 1997).
Police officers that are working as patrol officers are the officers that are most commonly seen by the public, according to Dietz (1997). Dietz (1997) notes that officers who have a duty to patrol areas where suspicion regarding police is high can sometimes cause harm in the public perception of police if care is not taken in their interactions with the public. The patrol officer is often the first officer to arrive at the scene of any given crime within a community, and his or her interaction with the public at these crime scenes is fundamental to the perception of police within the community. Developing good contacts and a good rapport within the community is the primary duty of the patrol officer, as when a crime occurs, these contacts can frequently be instrumental in solving the crime (Dietz, 1997).
However, Dietz (1997) also suggests that there is not a strong correlation between the public perception of a police department and the police patrols that a department conducts and the overall quality of police services. Dietz (1997) writes, “[this study] indicates that there is little relationship between citizen’s perception of safety and the quality of police services. The strongest relationship was found between perception of safety in the home and citizen’s general knowledge of the police department. Suggests that fear of crime is in many ways a theoretical concept that needs to be explained better if practitioners of community policing are going to measure their success against it” (Dietz, 1997). Those who rely upon police to keep them safe must be better-educated if they are to trust the police whose responsibility is their neighborhood.
Rake (1987) also notes that there is evidence to suggest that when there are good community-law enforcement relations within a community, police can use grassroots, community law-enforcement tactics to help stop crime in particular areas. Rake (1987) notes that there are very low crime rates in Tokyo, Japan, and hypothesizes that this low crime rate is largely the result of “the lack of different, conflicting population groups; relative economic equality; racial homogeneity; pressure for individual conformity; and resilience of traditional values” (Rake, 1987). However, within Tokyo, Rake (1987) also found that there is a strong, grassroots approach to community safety; the Japanese become heavily involved in the safety of their communities, taking it upon themselves to be the eyes and the ears for law enforcement (Rake, 1987). Rake also notes that community involvement with the police in the United States generally has a much lower rate; however, in Santa Ana, California, the police have been integrating heavily with the community since the 1970s. This community saw a heavy decrease in crime once patrol officers began integrating with the community and developing a good rapport with the local people within the community (Rake, 1987).
Pare, Felson, and Ouimet (2007) go further than Rake (1987) in their analysis of crime in communities, and discover that law enforcement patrols in more rural areas are more effective in the deterrence of crime-- and for the solving of crimes that do occur-- than they are in urban areas. Whether urban areas are merely ripe for crime or whether there are socioeconomic reasons for the difference at play is not examined by the research team (Pare, Felson and Ouimet, 2007). Pare, Felson and Ouimet (2007) write, “Based on a sample of 362,295 crime incidents clustered in 93 communities, multilevel analyses reveal that the police are more likely to clear crimes in small communities than in large urban areas and in communities with greater levels of poverty. Workload is not very important, having only a slight effect on the clearance of misdemeanors. The fact that offenders are much more likely to evade the law in some communities than others may have important implications for deterrence” (Pare, Felson and Ouimet, 2007). This is a very useful research study, as it gives police and law enforcement personnel the information need to centralize and localize their focus insofar as crime deterrence is concerned.
Goss, Van Bramer et al. (2008) also suggest that localizing and centralizing police patrols in areas of high crime is important to the deterrence of crime, although the Goss study (2008) is primarily concerned with alcohol-impaired driving and how alcohol-impaired driving can be deterred with proper law enforcement patrols (Goss, Van Bramer et al., 2008). Notably, the Goss et al. study (2008) also notes that studies in the area of law enforcement patrol have been methodologically weak, and that further studies should be done to truly understand the implications of law enforcement patrol on community safety.
However, the Goss et al. (2008) study also notes that there is a significant reduction in crime rates regarding alcohol-impaired driving when the perception of police presence in the community is high. When the perceived implication of driving while impaired by alcohol or drugs is a DUI/DWI ticket, the study found that people are much less likely to participate in that type of risk-taking behavior (Goss et al., 2008). However, the inverse is also true: when the perceived presence of law enforcement in the community is reduced, members of the community are more likely to begin engaging in risky behavior like intoxicated driving again (Goss et al., 2008). The recommendation in the Goss et al. study (2008) is sustained police presence in communities that are presenting with problems insofar as impaired driving is concerned.
This community perception of law enforcement as a deterrent may or may not be extrapolated to other areas of crime within the community. The perception of law enforcement and the respect for law enforcement in any given community is based upon a variety of factors (Goss et al, 2008). However, the Lum et al. study (2011), when discussing the use of license-plate readers in the community as a deterrent for crime, discovered that “ when small numbers of LPR [license plate reader] patrols are used in crime hot spots in the way the authors have tested them here, they do not seem to generate either a general or offense-specific deterrent effect. While the authors did not find significant findings of this intervention, a number of limitations and caveats to this study must be considered in conjunction with these findings. The authors suggest how already acquired LPRs might be used in ways that might increase their effectiveness in crime hot spots” (Lum et al., 2011). The Lum et al. study (2011) suggested using license plate readers in conjunction with increased police presence within the community, or at least increased police visibility within the community (Lum et al., 2011).
RESEARCH DESIGN
During the study, law enforcement personnel will be tasked with increasing patrols to the area; depending on law enforcement, these patrols may be on foot, bike, or in patrol cars; this has yet to be determined. However, after six weeks, nine weeks, and twelve weeks, statistics on crime rates and public perception of law enforcement in the community will be gathered again to investigate the changes in public perception of police and law enforcement, as well as the rates of violent crime in the community with the change in law enforcement engagement with the community.
SAMPLING
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DATA COLLECTION
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REFERENCES
Dietz, A. S. (1997). Evaluating community policing: quality police service and fear of crime. Policing: an international journal of police strategies & management, 20 (1), pp. 83--100.
Goss, C. W., Van Bramer, L. D., Gliner, J. A., Porter, T. R., Roberts, I. G. & Diguiseppi, C. (2008). Increased police patrols for preventing alcohol-impaired driving. Cochrane database of systematic reviews, 4.
Lum, C., Hibdon, J., Cave, B., Koper, C. S. & Merola, L. (2011). License plate reader (LPR) police patrols in crime hot spots: an experimental evaluation in two adjacent jurisdictions. Journal of experimental criminology, 7 (4), pp. 321--345.
Marx, G. T. & Archer, D. (1971). Citizen involvement in the law enforcement process the case of community police patrols. American behavioral scientist, 15 (1), pp. 52--72.
Pare, P., Felson, R. B. & Ouimet, M. (2007). Community variation in crime clearance: a multilevel analysis with comments on assessing police performance. Journal of quantitative criminology, 23 (3), pp. 243--258.
Rake, D. E. (1987). Crime control and police-community relations: a cross-cultural comparison of Tokyo, Japan, and Santa Ana, California. The annals of the American Academy of political and social science, pp. 148--154.
