philadelphia foot patrol experiment results

Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment

The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment was a major research collaboration between the Philadelphia Police Department and researchers in the Department of Criminal Justice involving over 200 police officers on foot beats around some of the city’s most violent corners.

Since the 1980s, it had long been the opinion of many police and criminology researchers that police foot patrols improve community perception of the police and reduce fear of crime, but they don’t prevent actual crime. Results from the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment suggested a more positive view of intelligence-led targeting of foot patrol officers to violent crime hot spots.

Research design

On the invitation of the Philadelphia Police Department, police and academic researchers worked together to plan the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment as a randomized and controlled field experiment. With the resources to patrol 60 locations, researchers identified the highest violent crime corners in the city, using data from 2006 to 2008. Police commanders then designed 120 foot patrol areas around these corners, and stratified randomization was used to assign pairs of foot patrols with similar crime rates as either a control or a target area.

Officers patrolled in pairs with two pairs assigned to each foot patrol. They worked from Tuesday to Saturday in two shifts (10am to 6pm, 6pm to 2am) during the summer of 2009. After three months, relative to the comparison areas, violent crime decreased 23%. Official records of police activities during the intervention period reveal the following in the target areas: Drug‐related detections increased 15%, pedestrian stops increased 64%, vehicle stops increased 7%, and arrests increased 13%. Even with some crime displacement to nearby locations, analysis indicated that the foot patrols prevented 53 violent crimes during the summer.

With the help of friends at the Philadelphia Police Department, I also created a short six-minute video outlining the research shown here:

This project won the 2010 Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award from the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the 2013 Outstanding Experimental Field Trial Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Experimental Criminology.

The experimental results were reported in the journal Criminology. The full citation is: Ratcliffe, J. H., Taniguchi, T., Groff, E.R., & Wood, J. (2011) The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A randomized controlled trial of police patrol effectiveness in violent crime hotspots. Criminology, 49(3), 795-831. It is article number 43  here. 

A three-page research summary pdf is also available and is probably more accessible that the Criminology paper.

There is a 12 minute audio summary of the experiment available, including interviews with Larry Sherman and David Weisburd, as well as with Philadelphia Police Department officers 

Follow-up research and other findings

Was there a long-term impact of foot patrol.

Subsequent research by our team examined the long-term impacts of the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment to determine what happened after the experiment was over. Results showed that beats that were in place beyond three months had diminishing effects during the experiment, an effect not seen with the shorter term beats. Foot patrol beats returned to their pre-experiment crime levels once the foot patrol experiment was concluded and the foot patrols were largely withdrawn. There was no evidence that the benefits from the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment lasted beyond the time when the officers were assigned to the beats. These findings were published in an article in Criminology.  It is article number 49  here.

Did the presence of foot patrol change the way car patrols were used?

The question of how foot patrol affected the car patrol officers in which the foot beats were embedded was also examined by the team. Official data describing the activities of foot and car patrol officers was analyzed. We found noticeable differences in the activities of the two types of patrol. Foot patrol was more likely to conduct pedestrian stops and deal with disorder and drug offenses while car patrol handled the vast majority of reported crime incidents and calls from the public. As a result, police managers and researchers should consider the impact of new strategies on the dominant patrol style. Co-production of community safety among officers assigned to different patrol styles is an under-researched area with potential for improving the success of crime reduction efforts through better internal coordination of police resources. These findings were published in an article in Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management.  It is article number 48  here.

What was the experience of foot patrol officers?

During the experiment we conducted field observations alongside the foot patrol officers. The observations were designed to capture officers’ perceptions of and experiences with the foot patrol function. Officers developed extensive local knowledge of their beat areas, and were what we call ‘reflective agents’ with varying styles and approaches to their foot patrol role. They had to negotiate the tension between what they perceived to be ‘real police work’ (arresting offenders) and the ‘reassurance’ function of foot patrol. They exerted spatial control of their beats through a repertoire of techniques which depended in part on officer style. We also learned that in some ways, the experimental nature of the intervention clashed with the common sense judgment of officers, including the need to adapt policing practices to changing criminal behavior. This research reinforces the need to integrate line officer knowledge in the design of place-based interventions. These findings can be found in an article in Policing and Society.  It is article number 51  here.

Did the officers remain in their assigned beats?

Not entirely. During focus groups conducted with foot patrol officers after the experiment, we gave officers maps of their beats and asked where they actually patrolled. In general, the areas they actually patrolled were about 0.13 square miles greater than the originally assigned patrol zones. Officers left their assignments for a number of reasons, including because they perceived that offenders had adapted to their patrol areas and moved to nearby locations, because they felt that areas just out side their beat should have been included in the area because specific locations caused community problems, and sometimes to add some variety when they became bored with patrolling the same area every day. More details of these findings can be found in our article in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.  It is article number 53  here.

What public health challenges did officers face on their beats?

While the officers worked to establish rules and exercise some control over the areas they policed, they spent considerable time dealing with populations of people on the verges of society. On a daily basis, foot patrol officers assigned to small areas come face-to-face with not only traditional issues of crime, but also addition, mental illness, and homelessness. They struggled to see addicted drug users as vulnerable people at higher risks of morbidity and mortality; however, officers were more inclined to view people affected by mental illness as more vulnerable than threatening. They also had to deal with ‘microplaces of harm’ such as abandoned houses used for prostitution and drug use. In the end, officers, and foot patrol officers in particular, are ‘public health interventionists’. See our article in Police Practice and Research. It is article number 54  here.

Related research

Please also take a look at:

The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment

The Philadelphia Predictive Policing Experiment

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• Behavioral Health
• Philadelphia
• Public Safety

The police experiment that changed what we know about foot patrol

What works in policing high-crime areas, and what doesn't.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey addresses the city's sworn and civilian personnel on his new crime-fighting strategy, he wants to move more officers into high crime areas. (Matt Rourke/ AP Photo)

This story is from The Pulse , a weekly health and science podcast.

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Sgt. Bill Robbins gestured outside the window of his police cruiser as we drove through the gray, autumn streets of West Philadelphia.

“Now this is our 60th Street corridor,” Robbins said, as he made a turn. “This is like our hot spot. We get a lot of problems.”

“Hot spot” is a criminology term that refers to a high-crime area. And in Philadelphia — which consistently ranks above the national average when it comes to violent crime — there are plenty.

“This bar here, this can sometimes be a nuisance bar,” Robbins said, pointing out the windshield.

Across the street was another problem corner.

“Right where the guy’s standing at, they sell narcotics in front of that house there,” he said. “We get shootings on that block.”

In decades past, the Philadelphia Police Department dealt with high-crime areas in much the same way as the rest of the city — through preventive patrol, which relies on officers covering wide swaths of territory in their cars.

That changed in 2008, when Philadelphia’s then-new police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, decided to try something that was both traditional and radical — foot patrol.

Foot patrol hadn’t been standard on a wide scale since before World War II. But Ramsey had a hunch that, combined with modern techniques, foot patrol might be more effective than anyone imagined.

A new way to police

Despite Ramsey’s enthusiasm, then-Deputy Commissioner Kevin Bethel had his doubts.

“I just didn’t think, at the time, it would be an effective deployment that would have an impact,” he said, “because they would just kind of be relegated to such a small geographical area.”

Bethel had good reason to be doubtful. The automobile had transformed American policing before the Second World War.

“Cars [were] readily available and relatively cheaper than in the past,” said David Weisburd, a professor of criminology, law and society at George Mason University. “And all of a sudden, you had the radio that could be used. So police departments were gearing up technologically for a new way to police.”

The result was random preventive patrol, in which officers in cars randomly patrol all parts of a community — when they’re not answering 911 calls.

“Part of that was responding quickly to citizen calls,” Weisburd said. “And there was a belief at the time that such responses, rapid responses, would reduce crime.”

But there were other factors changing policing, too — or rather, public perceptions of police.

“The crisis in police legitimacy came out of the 1960s, with riots caused by police encounters with minorities,” said Lawrence Sherman, a professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge.

Those often-violent encounters led to public scrutiny of police — and, eventually, a series of government reports on the state of American policing.

“Along the way, it became clear that the police response was part of the problem, not part of the solution,” Weisburd said.

In response, the Ford Foundation created an organization called the National Police Foundation, which aimed to improve American policing through science.

It started that mission by questioning what was then seen as the bedrock of American policing — random preventive patrol. The result was the landmark Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment in 1973.

The experiment heralded a new, more scientific way of approaching police practices. They tried multiple beats, with varying levels of patrolling — but the results were disappointing.

“What’s surprising is that it seems to make no difference,” Weisburd said.

Preventive patrol — in defiance of what most people believed — appeared to have no effect on crime rates.

A few years later, the National Police Foundation organized another experiment — this time, to test a different approach: foot patrol.

“The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment — also an important Police Foundation experiment — set out to see what happens when the police get more familiar, when they actually walk beats the way they did before,” Weisburd said.

Again, the experiment yielded anticlimactic results. Foot patrol had no effect on crime levels, though it did increase residents’ feeling of safety.

The Newark experiment would go on to spark a new kind of policing, called community policing, in which officers focus on developing relationships with the locals. But it also earned foot patrol a reputation for being ineffectual against crime — a reputation that stuck all the way to 2009.

Designing the Philadelphia experiment

To help design and track their own experiment, Deputy Commissioner Kevin Bethel reached out to Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University and former London police officer.

Ratcliffe knew about the Newark experiment, but was hopeful that a more advanced — and more focused — approach might yield different results.

“Here was a chance, 30 years later, to look at foot patrol in a way that… used more up-to-date data and science knowledge to identify these street corners,” Ratcliffe said. “It was an ideal opportunity to rethink foot patrol, but do it with a much more scientific approach.”

Part of that approach involved a technique called “hot spots policing,” which had emerged in the 1990s thanks to the efforts of David Weisburd and Lawrence Sherman.

Weisburd said the Kansas City experiment had led some in the criminology world to despair that police could effect any change on crime at all. But he and Sherman speculated that there could be a factor that police weren’t considering.

“We said: What happens if they focus their efforts and increase the dosage, if you like, on a small number of streets?” Weisburd said.

The idea was based on a startling discovery Sherman had made while doing research in Minneapolis.

“We discovered that 3% of the addresses had over half of all the crime,” Sherman said. “And this enormous concentration created an opportunity to use massive increases in the proportion of time police spent in high-crime locations to see whether that would reduce crime.”

In other words — intensifying police presence in these areas might’ve just given them an exponentially greater bang for their buck.

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So Sherman and Weisburd decided to test their theory using the Minneapolis Hot Spots Experiment . In it, they found that by doubling the amount of time police spent in high-crime areas, they were able to reduce crime substantially.

The experiment helped give rise to the practice of hot spots policing, or increasing police presence in high-crime areas — which departments could do with even greater precision than in the past thanks to technological advancements.

The Philadelphia experiment would be the first to combine hot spots policing and foot patrol. But unlike in previous foot patrol experiments, Ratcliffe said, they’d be focusing on much smaller beats — ones located around hot spots.

“We knew that crime was heavily concentrated in street corners in Philadelphia,” Ratcliffe said. “We could say that around 5% of corners in the city of Philadelphia had over 30 or 40% of the violent crime in the homicides and the robberies.”

Ratcliffe and his colleagues used crime data to identify 120 hot spots across the city, and then randomly chose 60 that would receive foot patrols. The other 60 would serve as a control, receiving regular service but not walking patrols.

The next thing they needed were officers.

Recruit response

Ratcliffe had another reason for believing in the experiment: As a former police officer in London, he said, he saw the benefits of walking patrol firsthand.

“You have much more of an opportunity to spend time building a relationship, establishing a rapport, and getting a much better sense of what people are like,” Ratcliffe said. “We were much better at identifying and understanding people’s characteristics and getting a feel for what those people are like when we approach them slowly on foot than when we rush up in the car and jump out.”

Philadelphia’s newest recruits were somewhat less enthused.

“We had a variety of responses, but it’d be fair to say that many of them didn’t love it,” Ratcliffe said.

For one thing, they were trading driving in air-conditioned cars for treading the streets during Philadelphia’s hot, sticky summer. Eating and breaks were also harder to manage — and it was tedious work.

“We were asking people to spend months on foot patrol, slowly pacing the streets of Philadelphia,” he said. “I think for a lot of the people that came out of the police academy, it was an anticlimax to be seen policing at such a slow pace.”

But over the months, Ratcliffe said, he saw a change in the officers assigned to walking patrol. Soon, they knew many of the residents by name, and could even identify them from a block or two away just by their dress or gait.

“It really reinforced for some of them the humanity of the people who they often don’t see,” he said. “It’s really easy, when you spend your time rushing from call to call to call, to feel that everybody in the neighborhood that you police is a victim or an offender. And what you actually have is there are a few offenders, there are a few victims, and everybody else. They’re just there by dint of circumstances, trying to get through the day as best they can like everybody else.”

Noticing an impact

Researchers already knew that foot patrol was good for police-community relations, what they didn’t know was how it affected crime.

The experiment ran through the summer of 2009. Afterward, Jerry Ratcliffe and his colleagues crunched the numbers. They gathered data from the 120 hot spots they were studying — 60 with foot patrol and 60 without — and compared their crime numbers.

What they found was a 23% reduction in violent crime in the areas with foot patrol versus those without.

“So what we had was a net benefit at the end of three months — that we had 53 people who weren’t murdered, who weren’t shot, who weren’t robbed,” Ratcliffe said. “And that’s a decent number for a city like Philadelphia, that’s considering adding a considerable improvement to the quality of life in neighborhoods.”

Even Kevin Bethel — the deputy commissioner who’d originally opposed foot patrols — became a believer.

Though he’d initially worried that foot patrols were too resource-intensive and would divert police ability to answer 911 calls, he said the change in crime stats — and in the officers — is undeniable.

“I often tell young officers that the community has a pulse,” Bethel said. “And you have to get in it and touch it and feel it and smell it to know it. It’s not something you can do driving to and from in a car with the windows up and the air conditioner on. Anytime you can get out of that car and touch people, you get to really understand what their plight is.”

Since then, the Philadelphia Police Department said, foot patrol has become a permanent part of policing throughout the city.

The Philadelphia experiment’s legacy

In one summer, the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment upended the decades-old consensus about foot patrol — that it was good for community policing, but useless for fighting crime.

But across the country, experts say, preventive patrol — with its focus on car-based patrolling and rapid response to calls — remains the dominant model.

Criminologist Lawrence Sherman says that’s a problem.

“If police spend all their time going rapidly by things that are happening on the street, but nobody’s called them, you’re really creating a kind of tunnel-vision policing, where the only police work is the work that involves answering a phone call,” Sherman said. “That’s the standard model of policing that has to be abandoned.”

It’s part of a bigger question on how we approach public safety, he said.

The alternative, Sherman said, is evidence-based policing — using research to test and refine the way American policing is done.

“The tension between prevention and response is the fundamental issue,” he said.

When police focus on response, they often arrive too late to have much effect. But when they focus on prevention — by walking the streets of high-crime areas, and developing relationships with the community — they can stop crime before it starts. Sherman said the approach could even expand to cover jobs we more readily associate with social services — working directly with families experiencing violence, or with teens involved with gangs.

“All of these [are] things that the police can go after in a very focused way, just like public health can try to address obesity and smoking and insufficient exercise or eating vegetables,” Sherman said. “These are all things that would have massive benefits compared to treating sick people in doctor’s offices, by which time they’re so sick that there’s not much you can do for them.”

However, making that change requires a commitment to evidence-based policing. It took 30 years for three experiments to establish the beginnings of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to patrolling. And the results have been slow to make an impact across the country.

“I think on a scale of 1 to 10, evidence-based policing in the U.S., in terms of practice, is about a 2,” Sherman said. “In terms of knowledge, it’s the best in the world.”

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• Theory & Methods

The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A randomized controlled trial of police patrol effectiveness in violent crime hotspots

Originating with the Newark, NJ, foot patrol experiment, research has found police foot patrols improve community perception of the police and reduce fear of crime, but they are generally unable to reduce the incidence of crime. Previous tests of foot patrol have, however, suffered from statistical and measurement issues and have not fully explored the potential dynamics of deterrence within microspatial settings. In this article, the authors report on the efforts of more than 200 foot patrol officers during the summer of 2009 in Philadelphia.

Geographic information systems analysis was the basis for a randomized controlled trial of police effectiveness across 60 violent crime hotspots. The results identified a significant reduction in the level of treatment area violent crime after 12 weeks. A linear regression model with separate slopes fitted for treatment and control groups clarified the relationship even more. Even after accounting for natural regression to the mean, target areas in the top 40 percent on pretreatment violent crime counts had significantly less violent crime during the operational period. Target areas outperformed the control sites by 23 percent, resulting in a total net effect (once displacement was considered) of 53 violent crimes prevented.

The results suggest that targeted foot patrols in violent crime hotspots can significantly reduce violent crime levels as long as a threshold level of violence exists initially. The findings contribute to a growing body of evidence on the contribution of hotspots and place-based policing to the reduction of crime, and especially violent crime, which is a significant public health threat in the United States. The authors suggest that intensive foot patrol efforts in violent hotspots may achieve deterrence at a microspatial level, primarily by increasing the certainty of disruption, apprehension, and arrest.

Copyright 2017, Temple University | 1719 N. Broad Street, Klein Hall, Room 509, Philadelphia, PA 19122 | Terms of Use

The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots

Criminology, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 795-831, 2011

25 Pages Posted: 23 Feb 2012

Jerry Ratcliffe

Temple University

T. Taniguchi

Affiliation not provided to ssrn.

Date Written: 2011

Originating with the Newark foot patrol experiment, research has found police foot patrols improve community perception of the police and reduce fear of crime, but are generally unable to reduce the incidence of crime. Previous tests of foot patrol have, however, suffered from statistical and measurement issues and have not fully explored potential dynamics of deterrence within micro-spatial settings. In this paper we report on the efforts of over 200 foot patrol officers during the summer of 2009 in Philadelphia. GIS analysis was the basis for a randomized controlled trial of police effectiveness across 60 violent crime hotspots. Results identified a significant reduction in the level of treatment area violent crime after 12 weeks. A linear regression model with separate slopes fitted for treatment and control groups clarified the relationship further. Even after accounting for natural regression to the mean, target areas in the top 40% on pre-treatment violent crime counts had significantly less violent crime during the operational period. Target areas outperformed the control sites by 23 percent, resulting in a total net effect (once displacement was considered) of 53 violent crimes prevented. The results suggest that targeted foot patrols in violent crime hotspots can significantly reduce violent crime levels as long as a threshold level of violence exists initially. The findings contribute to a growing body of evidence on the contribution of hotspots and place-based policing to the reduction of crime, and especially violent crime, a significant public health threat in the United States. We suggest that intensive foot patrol efforts in violent hotspots may achieve deterrence at a micro-spatial level, primarily by increasing the certainty of disruption, apprehension and arrest. The theoretical and practical implications for violence reduction are discussed.

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Jerry Ratcliffe (Contact Author)

Temple university ( email ).

Philadelphia, PA 19122 United States

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• DOI: 10.1111/J.1745-9125.2011.00240.X
• Corpus ID: 18669448

The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots

• J. Ratcliffe , Travis A. Taniguchi , +1 author Jennifer D. Wood
• Published 1 August 2011
• Sociology, Political Science
• Law & Society: Public Law - Crime

408 Citations

The efficacy of foot patrol in violent places, foot patrol in violent crime hot spots: the longitudinal impact of deterrence and posttreatment effects of displacement†.

• Highly Influenced

The Dayton Foot Patrol Program: An Evaluation of Hot Spots Foot Patrols in a Central Business District

Foot patrol in violent crime hot spots : the longitudinal impacts of deterrence and post-treatment effects of displacement final draft, the philadelphia predictive policing experiment, the spatial effect of police foot patrol on crime patterns: a local analysis, foot patrols and crime prevention in harare central business district: police officers’ perspectives, 90 references, a randomized controlled trial of different policing strategies at hot spots of violent crime, general deterrent effects of police patrol in crime “hot spots”: a randomized, controlled trial, problem-oriented policing in violent crime places: a randomized controlled experiment, continuing the discussion on community policing, issue 2carry on constable revaluing foot patrol, police crackdowns on illegal gun carrying: a systematic review of their impact on gun crime, near-repeat patterns in philadelphia shootings, policing crime and disorder hot spots: a randomized controlled trial*, hot spots of predatory crime: routine activities and the criminology of place, policing drug hot spots: the jersey city drug market analysis experiment, the effect of the police on crime, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey address city's sworn and civilian personnel on his new crime-fighting strategy at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2008. Ramsey has been telling meetings leading up to the Wednesday morning event that he wants to move more officers into high crime areas.

 Matt Rourke / AP Photo

The police experiment that changed what we know about foot patrol

(Undated) — Sgt. Bill Robbins gestured outside the window of his police cruiser as we drove through the gray, autumn streets of West Philadelphia.

“Now this is our 60th Street corridor,” Robbins said, as he made a turn. “This is like our hot spot. We get a lot of problems.”

“Hot spot” is a criminology term that refers to a high-crime area. And in Philadelphia — which consistently ranks above the national average when it comes to violent crime — there are plenty.

“This bar here, this can sometimes be a nuisance bar,” Robbins said, pointing out the windshield.

Across the street was another problem corner.

“Right where the guy’s standing at, they sell narcotics in front of that house there,” he said. “We get shootings on that block.”

In decades past, the Philadelphia Police Department dealt with high-crime areas in much the same way as the rest of the city — through preventive patrol, which relies on officers covering wide swaths of territory in their cars.

That changed in 2008, when Philadelphia’s then-new police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, decided to try something that was both traditional and radical — foot patrol.

Foot patrol hadn’t been standard on a wide scale since before World War II. But Ramsey had a hunch that, combined with modern techniques, foot patrol might be more effective than anyone imagined.

A new way to police

Despite Ramsey’s enthusiasm, then-Deputy Commissioner Kevin Bethel had his doubts.

“I just didn’t think, at the time, it would be an effective deployment that would have an impact,” he said, “because they would just kind of be relegated to such a small geographical area.”

Bethel had good reason to be doubtful. The automobile had transformed American policing before the Second World War.

“Cars [were] readily available and relatively cheaper than in the past,” said David Weisburd, a professor of criminology, law and society at George Mason University. “And all of a sudden, you had the radio that could be used. So police departments were gearing up technologically for a new way to police.”

The result was random preventive patrol, in which officers in cars randomly patrol all parts of a community — when they’re not answering 911 calls.

“Part of that was responding quickly to citizen calls,” Weisburd said. “And there was a belief at the time that such responses, rapid responses, would reduce crime.”

But there were other factors changing policing, too — or rather, public perceptions of police.

“The crisis in police legitimacy came out of the 1960s, with riots caused by police encounters with minorities,” said Lawrence Sherman, a professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge.

Those often-violent encounters led to public scrutiny of police — and, eventually, a series of government reports on the state of American policing.

“Along the way, it became clear that the police response was part of the problem, not part of the solution,” Weisburd said.

In response, the Ford Foundation created an organization called the National Police Foundation, which aimed to improve American policing through science.

It started that mission by questioning what was then seen as the bedrock of American policing — random preventive patrol. The result was the landmark  Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment  in 1973.

The experiment heralded a new, more scientific way of approaching police practices. They tried multiple beats, with varying levels of patrolling — but the results were disappointing.

“What’s surprising is that it seems to make no difference,” Weisburd said.

Preventive patrol — in defiance of what most people believed — appeared to have no effect on crime rates.

A few years later, the National Police Foundation organized  another experiment  — this time, to test a different approach: foot patrol.

“The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment — also an important Police Foundation experiment — set out to see what happens when the police get more familiar, when they actually walk beats the way they did before,” Weisburd said.

Again, the experiment yielded anticlimactic results. Foot patrol had no effect on crime levels, though it did increase residents’ feeling of safety.

The Newark experiment would go on to spark a new kind of policing, called community policing, in which officers focus on developing relationships with the locals. But it also earned foot patrol a reputation for being ineffectual against crime — a reputation that stuck all the way to 2009.

Designing the Philadelphia experiment

To help design and track their own experiment, Deputy Commissioner Kevin Bethel reached out to Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University and former London police officer.

Ratcliffe knew about the Newark experiment, but was hopeful that a more advanced — and more focused — approach might yield different results.

“Here was a chance, 30 years later, to look at foot patrol in a way that… used more up-to-date data and science knowledge to identify these street corners,” Ratcliffe said. “It was an ideal opportunity to rethink foot patrol, but do it with a much more scientific approach.”

Part of that approach involved a technique called “hot spots policing,” which had emerged in the 1990s thanks to the efforts of David Weisburd and Lawrence Sherman.

Weisburd said the Kansas City experiment had led some in the criminology world to despair that police could effect any change on crime at all. But he and Sherman speculated that there could be a factor that police weren’t considering.

“We said: What happens if they focus their efforts and increase the dosage, if you like, on a small number of streets?” Weisburd said.

The idea was based on a startling discovery Sherman had made while doing research in Minneapolis.

“We discovered that 3% of the addresses had over half of all the crime,” Sherman said. “And this enormous concentration created an opportunity to use massive increases in the proportion of time police spent in high-crime locations to see whether that would reduce crime.”

In other words — intensifying police presence in these areas might’ve just given them an exponentially greater bang for their buck.

So Sherman and Weisburd decided to test their theory using the  Minneapolis Hot Spots Experiment . In it, they found that by doubling the amount of time police spent in high-crime areas, they were able to reduce crime substantially.

The experiment helped give rise to the practice of hot spots policing, or increasing police presence in high-crime areas — which departments could do with even greater precision than in the past thanks to technological advancements.

The Philadelphia experiment would be the first to combine hot spots policing and foot patrol. But unlike in previous foot patrol experiments, Ratcliffe said, they’d be focusing on much smaller beats — ones located around hot spots.

“We knew that crime was heavily concentrated in street corners in Philadelphia,” Ratcliffe said. “We could say that around 5% of corners in the city of Philadelphia had over 30 or 40% of the violent crime in the homicides and the robberies.”

Ratcliffe and his colleagues used crime data to identify 120 hot spots across the city, and then randomly chose 60 that would receive foot patrols. The other 60 would serve as a control, receiving regular service but not walking patrols.

The next thing they needed were officers.

Recruit response

Ratcliffe had another reason for believing in the experiment: As a former police officer in London, he said, he saw the benefits of walking patrol firsthand.

“You have much more of an opportunity to spend time building a relationship, establishing a rapport, and getting a much better sense of what people are like,” Ratcliffe said. “We were much better at identifying and understanding people’s characteristics and getting a feel for what those people are like when we approach them slowly on foot than when we rush up in the car and jump out.”

Philadelphia’s newest recruits were somewhat less enthused.

“We had a variety of responses, but it’d be fair to say that many of them didn’t love it,” Ratcliffe said.

For one thing, they were trading driving in air-conditioned cars for treading the streets during Philadelphia’s hot, sticky summer. Eating and breaks were also harder to manage — and it was tedious work.

“We were asking people to spend months on foot patrol, slowly pacing the streets of Philadelphia,” he said. “I think for a lot of the people that came out of the police academy, it was an anticlimax to be seen policing at such a slow pace.”

But over the months, Ratcliffe said, he saw a change in the officers assigned to walking patrol. Soon, they knew many of the residents by name, and could even identify them from a block or two away just by their dress or gait.

“It really reinforced for some of them the humanity of the people who they often don’t see,” he said. “It’s really easy, when you spend your time rushing from call to call to call, to feel that everybody in the neighborhood that you police is a victim or an offender. And what you actually have is there are a few offenders, there are a few victims, and everybody else. They’re just there by dint of circumstances, trying to get through the day as best they can like everybody else.”

Noticing an impact

Researchers already knew that foot patrol was good for police-community relations, what they didn’t know was how it affected crime.

The experiment ran through the summer of 2009. Afterward, Jerry Ratcliffe and his colleagues crunched the numbers. They gathered data from the 120 hot spots they were studying — 60 with foot patrol and 60 without — and compared their crime numbers.

What they found was a 23% reduction in violent crime in the areas with foot patrol versus those without.

“So what we had was a net benefit at the end of three months — that we had 53 people who weren’t murdered, who weren’t shot, who weren’t robbed,” Ratcliffe said. “And that’s a decent number for a city like Philadelphia, that’s considering adding a considerable improvement to the quality of life in neighborhoods.”

Even Kevin Bethel — the deputy commissioner who’d originally opposed foot patrols — became a believer.

Though he’d initially worried that foot patrols were too resource-intensive and would divert police ability to answer 911 calls, he said the change in crime stats — and in the officers — is undeniable.

“I often tell young officers that the community has a pulse,” Bethel said. “And you have to get in it and touch it and feel it and smell it to know it. It’s not something you can do driving to and from in a car with the windows up and the air conditioner on. Anytime you can get out of that car and touch people, you get to really understand what their plight is.”

Since then, the Philadelphia Police Department said, foot patrol has become a permanent part of policing throughout the city.

The Philadelphia experiment’s legacy

In one summer, the  Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment  upended the decades-old consensus about foot patrol — that it was good for community policing, but useless for fighting crime.

But across the country, experts say, preventive patrol — with its focus on car-based patrolling and rapid response to calls — remains the dominant model.

Criminologist Lawrence Sherman says that’s a problem.

“If police spend all their time going rapidly by things that are happening on the street, but nobody’s called them, you’re really creating a kind of tunnel-vision policing, where the only police work is the work that involves answering a phone call,” Sherman said. “That’s the standard model of policing that has to be abandoned.”

It’s part of a bigger question on how we approach public safety, he said.

The alternative, Sherman said, is evidence-based policing — using research to test and refine the way American policing is done.

“The tension between prevention and response is the fundamental issue,” he said.

When police focus on response, they often arrive too late to have much effect. But when they focus on prevention — by walking the streets of high-crime areas, and developing relationships with the community — they can stop crime before it starts. Sherman said the approach could even expand to cover jobs we more readily associate with social services — working directly with families experiencing violence, or with teens involved with gangs.

“All of these [are] things that the police can go after in a very focused way, just like public health can try to address obesity and smoking and insufficient exercise or eating vegetables,” Sherman said. “These are all things that would have massive benefits compared to treating sick people in doctor’s offices, by which time they’re so sick that there’s not much you can do for them.”

However, making that change requires a commitment to evidence-based policing. It took 30 years for three experiments to establish the beginnings of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to patrolling. And the results have been slow to make an impact across the country.

“I think on a scale of 1 to 10, evidence-based policing in the U.S., in terms of practice, is about a 2,” Sherman said. “In terms of knowledge, it’s the best in the world.”

WHYY is the leading public media station serving the Philadelphia region, including Delaware, South Jersey and Pennsylvania. This story originally appeared on  WHYY.org .

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The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots*

2011, Criminology

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The Philadelphia Experience

• First Online: 04 October 2017

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• Jerry H. Ratcliffe 3 &
• Evan T. Sorg 4  

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Criminology ((BRIEFSTRANSLAT))

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Starting with a brief review of the twentieth century policing in Philadelphia and formidable police chief Frank Rizzo’s perspective of foot beats in the late 1960s, this chapter explains the organizational and political background to the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment. It emphasizes the role of Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey in creating an environment open to exploring new ways of policing and running a randomized and controlled field experiment. The chapter describes the experimental design, implementation, and results in detail. It also documents some of the qualitative findings. The chapter then describes the foot patrol component of the subsequent Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment. It concludes with a review of the differences between the experiments and why the results differed.

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The web page at http://bit.ly/CSCS_PFPE also describes a number of other articles related to the experiment.

Ratcliffe recalls receiving a phone call from a flustered, former University Provost who had just learned of the purchase of ballistic vests and who immediately demanded that fieldwork stop: “If you have to wear bullet-proof vests, then you can’t do it.” While it was pointed out that the wearing of vests was a requirement of the police department on ride-alongs (and still is), an offer to go on fieldwork not wearing the vests was met with stony silence. It was further pointed out that the researchers were going out with ballistic vests and armed police officers, which was a lot more protection than the university provided to students of other departments such as sociology, public health, geography and urban studies, and the medical school, all of whom were conducting fieldwork in the same areas of the city. When Ratcliffe offered to contact every other department in the university engaged in experiential learning in the city, permission to resume fieldwork soon followed!

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Ratcliffe, J.H., Sorg, E.T. (2017). The Philadelphia Experience. In: Foot Patrol. SpringerBriefs in Criminology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65247-4_3

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Home › Evidence-Based Policing › The Matrix › Research on Micro-Places › Micro Places – Ratcliffe et al. (2011)

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Micro Places – Ratcliffe et al. (2011)

Study Reference:

Ratcliffe, J., Taniguchi, T., Groff, E. R., Wood, J. D. (2011). The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A randomized controlled trial of police patrol effectiveness in violent crime hotspots.  Criminology, 49 (3), 795-831.

Location in the Matrix; Methodological Rigor; Outcome:

Micro places; General; Proactive; Very Rigorous; Effective

What police practice or strategy was examined?

This study tests the impact of increased foot patrol on reported violent crime. It reports on the efforts of over 200 foot patrol officers in Philadelphia during the summer of 2009. Each target area was patrolled by two pairs of new officers. After a 1-week orientation and  an initial period with an experienced officer, the pairs patrolled their hot spots for a 12 week treatment period. The officer pairs worked either a morning (10 a.m. to 6 p.m.) or an evening shift (6 p.m. to 2 a.m.) Tuesday through Saturday. The pairs alternated morning and evening shifts every other week.

How was the intervention evaluated?

Hot spots were identified using violent crime incident data.  A randomized experimental methodology was used with 30 hot spots randomly allocated to the foot patrol treatment and 30 assigned to a control group that received no special police attention.. Violent crime was the main outcome of interest and was recorded for the three months prior to the intervention and the 12  week intervention.  The authors also used catchment areas to assess displacement.

What were the key findings?

Results identified a significant reduction in violent crime in the treatment areas after 12 weeks. Even after accounting for natural regression to the mean, target areas in the top 40% on pre‐treatment violent crime counts had significantly less violent crime during the intervention period. In total, target areas outperformed the control sites by 23 percent, resulting in a total net effect (once displacement was considered) of 53 violent crimes prevented. Significant displacement effects were found, but displacement was far less than overall crime prevented.

What were the implications for law enforcement?

The authors suggest that targeted foot patrols in violent crime hot spots can significantly reduce violent crime levels as long as a threshold level of violence exists initially, and that intensive foot patrol efforts in violent hot spots may achieve deterrence at a micro‐spatial level, primarily by increasing the certainty of disruption, apprehension, and arrest.

Where can I find more information about this intervention, similar types of intervention, or related studies?

• All studies in the Matrix on micro places
• Campbell systematic review on effects of hot spots policing on crime
• Koper Curve Principle
• CrimeSolutions.gov Practice Profile: Hot Spots Policing
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• CEBCP Special Lectures and Research Clips: Putting hot spots research into practice- Chris Koper
• Newark Foot Patrol Experiment Brief from the Police Foundation
• COPS Office Review on Hot Spots

The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment

• Law/Justice

Research output : Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

Patrolling on foot to convey a sense of omnipresence and deter crime had been a cornerstone of policing dating back to the night watch. The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment would challenge the assumptions head on, and provide new evidence that foot patrols deployed in hot spots can impact crime. The 60 beats that officers would ultimately patrol were identified using block randomization. Given a two-tailed test and a presupposed alpha of 0.10, 60 beats in the treatment condition and 60 beats in the control condition indicated that power was adequate when the effect size was large or medium, but low when effect size was small. The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment’s statistical power was comparable to other randomized experiments testing the impact of hot spots or other place-based strategies. The results suggested that a beat needed to have a threshold level of violence prior to the intervention in order to detect statistically meaningful change.

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T1 - The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment

AU - Sorg, Evan T.

AU - Haberman, Cory P.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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AB - Patrolling on foot to convey a sense of omnipresence and deter crime had been a cornerstone of policing dating back to the night watch. The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment would challenge the assumptions head on, and provide new evidence that foot patrols deployed in hot spots can impact crime. The 60 beats that officers would ultimately patrol were identified using block randomization. Given a two-tailed test and a presupposed alpha of 0.10, 60 beats in the treatment condition and 60 beats in the control condition indicated that power was adequate when the effect size was large or medium, but low when effect size was small. The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment’s statistical power was comparable to other randomized experiments testing the impact of hot spots or other place-based strategies. The results suggested that a beat needed to have a threshold level of violence prior to the intervention in order to detect statistically meaningful change.

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On the invitation of the Philadelphia Police Department, police and academic researchers worked together to plan the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment as a randomized control trial. 60 violent crime hot spots were targeted during the summer of 2009, and after three months violence had reduced by 23 percent compared to comparison areas. Analysis of the results found little displacement, but did find at threshold level for effectiveness. Recent follow-up work has further illuminated the long-term effects of the study.  Faculty :  Jerry Ratcliffe ,  Eilzabeth Groff ,  Jennifer Wood

The  Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment  was a major research collaboration between the Philadelphia Police Department and researchers in the Department of Criminal Justice involving over 200 police officers on foot beats around some of the city’s most violent corners.

Since the 1980s, it had long been the opinion of many police and criminology researchers that police foot patrols improve community perception of the police and reduce fear of crime, but they don’t prevent actual crime. Results from the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment suggested a more positive view of intelligence-led targeting of foot patrol officers to violent crime hot spots.

On the invitation of the Philadelphia Police Department, police and academic researchers worked together to plan the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment as a randomized and controlled field experiment. With the resources to patrol 60 locations, researchers identified the highest violent crime corners in the city, using data from 2006 to 2008. Police commanders then designed 120 foot patrol areas around these corners, and stratified randomization was used to assign pairs of foot patrols with similar crime rates as either a control or a target area.

Officers patrolled in pairs with two pairs assigned to each foot patrol. They worked from Tuesday to Saturday in two shifts (10am to 6pm, 6pm to 2am) during the summer of 2009. After three months, relative to the comparison areas, violent crime decreased 23%. Official records of police activities during the intervention period reveal the following in the target areas: Drug‐related detections increased 15%, pedestrian stops increased 64%, vehicle stops increased 7%, and arrests increased 13%. Even with some crime displacement to nearby locations, analysis indicated that the foot patrols prevented 53 violent crimes during the summer. This project won the 2010 Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award from the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Outstanding Experimental Field Trial Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Experimental Criminology.

The  experiment results  were reported in the journal Criminology. The full citation is: Ratcliffe, J. H., Taniguchi, T., Groff, E.R., & Wood, J. (2011). The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A randomized controlled trial of police patrol effectiveness in violent crime hotspots. Criminology, 49(3), 795-831.

A three-page  research summary  is also available.

Follow-Up Research And Further Findings From The Experiment

Was there a long-term impact of foot patrol? Subsequent research by the team examined the long-term impacts of the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment to determine what happened after the experiment was over. Results showed that beats that were in place beyond three months had diminishing effects during the experiment, an effect not seen with the shorter term beats. Foot patrol beats returned to their pre-experiment crime levels once the foot patrol experiment was concluded and the foot patrols were largely withdrawn. There was no evidence that the benefits from the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment lasted beyond the time when the officers were assigned to the beats. These findings were published in an  article in Criminology .

Did the presence of foot patrol change the way car patrols were used? The question of how foot patrol affected the car patrol officers in which the foot beats were embedded was also examined by the team. Official data describing the activities of foot and car patrol officers was analyzed. We found noticeable differences in the activities of the two types of patrol. Foot patrol was more likely to conduct pedestrian stops and deal with disorder and drug offenses while car patrol handled the vast majority of reported crime incidents and calls from the public. As a result, police managers and researchers should consider the impact of new strategies on the dominant patrol style. Co-production of community safety among officers assigned to different patrol styles is an under-researched area with potential for improving the success of crime reduction efforts through better internal coordination of police resources. These findings were published in an  article in Policing : An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management.

What was the experience of foot patrol officers? During the experiment we conducted field observations alongside the foot patrol officers. The observations were designed to capture officers’ perceptions of and experiences with the foot patrol function. Officers developed extensive local knowledge of their beat areas, and were what we call ‘reflective agents’ with varying styles and approaches to their foot patrol role. They had to negotiate the tension between what they perceived to be ‘real police work’ (arresting offenders) and the ‘reassurance’ function of foot patrol. They exerted spatial control of their beats through a repertoire of techniques which depended in part on officer style. We also learned that in some ways, the experimental nature of the intervention clashed with the common sense judgment of officers, including the need to adapt policing practices to changing criminal behavior. This research reinforces the need to integrate line officer knowledge in the design of place-based interventions. These findings can be found in an  article in Policing and Society .

Did the officers remain in their assigned beats? Not entirely. During focus groups conducted with foot patrol officers after the experiment, we gave officers maps of their beats and asked where they actually patrolled. In general, the areas they actually patrolled were about 0.13 square miles greater than the originally assigned patrol zones. Officers left their assignments for a number of reasons, including because they perceived that offenders had adapted to their patrol areas and moved to nearby locations, because they felt that areas just out side their beat should have been included in the area because specific locations caused community problems, and sometimes to add some variety when they became bored with patrolling the same area every day. More details of these findings can be found in our  article in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency .

What public health challenges did officers face on their beats? While the officers worked to establish rules and exercise some control over the areas they policed, they spent considerable time dealing with populations of people on the verges of society. On a daily basis, foot patrol officers assigned to small areas come face-to-face with not only traditional issues of crime, but also addition, mental illness, and homelessness. They struggled to see addicted drug users as vulnerable people at higher risks of morbidity and mortality; however, officers were more inclined to view people affected by mental illness as more vulnerable than threatening. They also had to deal with ‘microplaces of harm’ such as abandoned houses used for prostitution and drug use. In the end, officers, and foot patrol officers in particular, are ‘public health interventionists’. See our  article in Police Practice and Research .

Newspaper accounts suggest that CCTV cameras are being implemented at a rate never seen before. Yet there has been a lack of high quality, independent evaluation studies, and only one significant study in the US, conducted over a decade ago. Drs Ratcliffe and Groff are currently working on an NIJ-funded study to evaluate the crime reduction impact of over 100 CCTV cameras in Philadelphia, PA, – an ongoing NIJ-funded large-scale, multi-method, quasi-experimental research study.  Faculty :  Jerry Ratcliffe ,  Elizabeth Groff

In a 2006 referendum, about 80% of Philadelphia voters indicated a desire to change the city charterand to allow for CCTV cameras to be deployed within the city .That year a pilot project involving 10 pan,tilt and zoom cameras, and 8 static cameras was implemented. Researchers from Temple University’sCenter for Security and Crime Science found that after building in controls for long-term trends andseasonality, the introduction of the cameras was associated with a 13% reduction in overall crime,though the violence rate near the cameras was too low to identify a reliable violence reduction. Theevaluation suggested that while there appeared to be a general benefit to the cameras, there were asmany sites that showed no benefit of camera presence as there were locations with a positive outcomeon crime*.

Since then over 200 public CCTV cameras have been erected across Philadelphia since late 2007.Therewas clearly a need for a larger study.On the invitation of the Philadelphia Police Department, and with grant support from the NationalInstitute of Justice, we report here the preliminary results of a statistical evaluation of the impact ofthose cameras on various crime types. We say preliminary because we are still in the process ofcompleting a range of other analyses, which when combined with the work reported here, will allow usto better determine the overall impact of the cameras. This further work will include propensitymatching for control sites and a test for displacement to non-camera sites.

At present we can report preliminary results of a time series analysis of the impact of the CCTV camera violence, disorder, narcotics incidents, vehicle crime and burglary.  Preliminary results of crime impact of CCTV cameras  (pdf) .

For more details contact- Dr Jerry Ratcliffe or Dr Elizabeth Groff.* Details of this pilot study can be found in Ratcliffe, JH, Taniguchi, T, and Taylor, RB (2009) The crimereduction effects of public CCTV cameras: A multi-method spatial approach, Justice Quarterly, 26(4):746-770.

This ongoing project will create a free software tool that will enable police departments to use their geocoded crime data in combination with freely-available census data to create micro-spatial estimates of future criminal activity at the local block level. Working with Azavea, an innovative Philadelphia-based GIS company, Drs Ratcliffe and Taylor are developing a methodology to combine long-term risk prediction from underlying socio-demographics with event-created near-repeat risk.  Faculty:  Jerry Ratcliffe ,  Ralph Taylor

The Philadelphia Predictive Policing Experiment was a collaboration between Temple University’s Center for Security and Crime Science (housed in the Department of Criminal Justice) and the Philadelphia Police Department. This National Institute of Justice funded research project has been the first place-based, randomized experiment to study the impact of different police strategies on violent and property crime in predicted criminal activity areas.

Predictive policing is an emerging tactic relying in part on software predicting the likely locations of criminal events. Predictive policing, while sometimes applied to offenders, is most frequently applied to high crime places. In this context, it involves ‘the use of historical data to create a spatiotemporal forecast of areas of criminality or crime hot spots that will be the basis for police resource allocation decisions with the expectation that having officers at the proposed place and time will deter or detect criminal activity’ [Ratcliffe, J. H. (2014). “What is the future… of predictive policing?” Translational Criminology, 2014 (Spring): 4-5 (definition on page 4)].

At present, the law enforcement field lacks robust evidence to suggest the appropriate policing tactic in predicted areas. That has been the subject of this timely study. The aim has been to answer the question of whether different varieties of theoretically informed, but also operationally realistic, police responses to crime predictions estimated by a predictive policing software program can reduce crime.

The research team from Temple University and the Research and Analysis section of the Philadelphia Police Department randomly assigned 20 Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) districts into one of four experimental conditions. Five districts acted as controls, with a business-as-usual patrol strategy. In five districts, officers were made aware of the predicted high crime activity area at roll call and asked to concentrate there when able (a simple awareness model). Five districts received the awareness model treatment as well as an additional patrol car solely dedicated to the predicted crime area. Finally, five districts received an intelligence-led, investigative response with an unmarked unit dedicated to the predicted area. A  three-page pdf  has a fuller description of the research methodology.

When examining both predicted high-crime grid cells and the grids cells immediately surrounding them, the marked car patrols resulted in a 31% reduction in property crime counts, or a 36% reduction in the number of cells experiencing at least one crime. This translates to a reduction in three crimes over three months for an average city district patrolling around three grids. There were also signs of a temporal diffusion of benefits to the eight hours following the property crime marked car patrols. While the percentages were substantial, the results were not statistically significant due to floor effects.

There were no crime reduction benefits associated with the violent phase of the experiment, nor were there any benefits with the property crime awareness or unmarked car interventions. In summary, it appears that marked police cars dedicated to predictive policing areas were effective at reducing property crime. Unmarked cars and efforts to combat violence were not shown to be effective in the Philadelphia Predictive Policing Experiment. A two-page pdf has a more detailed  description of the experimental results .

The predictive policing software employed was the  HunchLab  program designed by  Azavea . HunchLab is a web-based predictive policing system that accesses real-time Philadelphia Police data to produce crime forecasts for the city. It incorporates statistical modeling that considers seasonality, risk terrain modeling, near repeats, and collective efficacy. Azavea adapted the software at the request of the Philadelphia Police Department and researchers from Temple University to generate three predicted 500 feet square grids per district per shift. They also included a slight randomization component to reduce the possibility that the same grid cells were predicted every day. It is important to note therefore that the experiment artificially reduced the efficiency of the software, because it forced the software to choose grids in low crime districts, and limited the number of grids it could assign in high crime districts.

The software was able to predict twice as much crime as we would expect if crime were spread uniformly across the districts, even when artificially constrained by our experiment to be less effective than designed. A  two-page pdf  has more details of the software efficacy.

This project  has developed technology that will depict and predict current and future crime potential. In doing so, it operationalizes two grounded theoretical approaches to understanding localized spatial crime patterns. This combination of a long-term crime potential map surface with a short-term crime spike surface creates the opportunity for law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies to apply a theoretical understanding to the business of crime prediction. The resulting map of predicted crime will enable police departments to take a proactive approach to crime prevention, disruption and reduction, and will provide a foundation for predictive policing and crime prevention.

The project team of researchers from Temple University’s Center for Security and Crime Science (housed in the Department of Criminal Justice) and technical experts from  Azavea  (a Philadelphia-based company that specializes in the creation of geographic web and mobile software, as well as geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making) has created a custom software tool. This program will enable police departments and other agencies across the country to use their geocoded crime data in combination with freely-available census data and create micro-spatial estimates of future criminal activity at the local level.

As part of this ongoing project, one piece of research has been published already. We asked the question: Do fundamental demographic correlates of crime, proven important in community criminology, link to next year’s crime levels, even after controlling for this year’s crime levels? If they do, it would imply that shifting ecologies of crime apparent after a year are driven in part by dynamics emerging from structural differentials.

For Philadelphia (PA) census block groups, 2005 to 2009 data from the American Community Survey and 2009 crime counts were used to predict spatially smoothed 2010 crime counts in three different models: crime only, demographics only, and crime plus demographics. Models were tested for major personal (murder, rape-aggravated assault, and robbery) and property (burglary and motor vehicle theft) crimes.

We found that for all crime types investigated except rape and homicide, crime plus demographics resulted in the best combination of prediction/simplicity based on the Bayesian Information Criterion. Socioeconomic status (SES) and racial composition linked as expected theoretically to crime changes.

We concluded that intercommunity structural differences in power relationships, as reflected in SES and racial composition, link to later crime shifts at the same time that ongoing crime continuities link current and future crime levels. The main practical implication is that crime analysts tasked with long-term, one-year-look-ahead forecasting may benefit by considering demographic structure as well as current crime.

This research has been published  here  as: Taylor, R. B., Ratcliffe, J.H. and Perenzin, A. (2015) Can we predict long-term community crime problems? The estimation of ecological continuity to model risk heterogeneity.  Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency  52(5): 635-657.

This  National Institute of Justice  funded research project is ongoing, however the software is now available as of October 2016. Please visit the following  website  (you will leave the Temple University site) to access the software downloader, manual, and quick start guide.

A significant body of evidence exists that police are most effective at reducing crime when deployed to small, high crime areas known as hot spots. In the summer of 2010, the Philadelphia Police and researchers from Temple University’s Center for Security and Crime Science (housed in the Department of Criminal Justice), with support from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, set out to better understand the impact of different policing tactics deployed in hot spots. Three different tactics were tested problem oriented policing, offender focus policing and foot patrol.

The first step in the experiment was to identify the highest crime areas in Philadelphia using spatial analysis. We gave the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) a map showing those hot spots and asked for their input in two important. One was in defining hot spot boundaries that were operationally sound and the other was in identifying which type of tactic they thought best suited the problems at that hot spot. For example, if there were a few people that were causing the problem then it made sense to apply offender-focused policing. If the problem was street robbery, then a problem-oriented policing approach to address the why that place was so amenable to street robbery would be appropriate. Regional Operations Commanders worked with District Captains to identify 27 areas suitable for foot patrol, 27 suitable for problem-solving, and 27 where police would focus enforcement on violent repeat offenders. The PPD returned a new map with 81 hot spots defined and the most appropriate tactic for each hot spot listed. We applied a random selection process so that 20 areas of each type were selected for additional police activity, and seven of each area type would receive the normal police response.

District officers in collaboration with members of the community and the support of personnel from police headquarters from the PPD2020 team conducted the problem-oriented policing tactic. Local initiatives to address the causes of violence varied across districts as problems were unique to each area.

Criminal intelligence officers and district personnel identified repeat violent offenders and they informed command staff at the district level. The role of focusing enforcement activities on the identified individuals generally fell to officers assigned to a unit out of the normal shift pattern in each district.

District Captains assigned foot patrol officers to each site and decided both the shift times and the operational tactics applied. Foot patrol officers usually (though not in one case) worked in pairs and were volunteers. The general pattern was two officers, for 8 hours a day, five days a week.

We employed repeated measures multilevel modeling using contrast coding to analyze the results because these types of models describe changes in an outcome measured at multiple time points for a given unit of analysis – ideal for this type of complex problem. We also controlled for trends over time and temperature (as violence is known to increase as it gets warmer).

We found that offender focus areas were successful in reducing all violent crimes by 42% compared to the equivalent control areas. These violent incidents included homicide, robbery, and assaults – both aggravated and misdemeanor. The offender focus sites were even more effective on violent felonies, reducing them by 50% compared to the equivalent control areas. Beyond the crime reduction, additional potential benefits of a targeted enforcement strategy are that it is less intrusive for law-abiding citizens because it avoids the wholesale increases in pedestrian and traffic stops that are so damaging to police community relations and that produce large numbers of arrests and flood the criminal justice system. Depending on implantation, the tactic may also increase the perception of the police as more procedurally just and improve community satisfaction with the police.

The foot patrol areas were not successful in reducing violence during the experimental period, nor were the problem-solving areas.

In sum, by focusing police efforts on the problem people associated with the problem places, police can achieve significant crime reductions while potentially avoiding negative community perceptions of their actions. However, we need additional research that more precisely measures what police officers do while in hot spots if we are to develop greater insight into why some crime reduction tactics are more successful than other ones.

More details are available in a research brief  here  for practitioners.

The full study is published  here  as: Groff, E. R., Ratcliffe, J. H., Haberman, C. P., Sorg, E. T., Joyce, N. M., & Taylor, R. B. (2015). Does What Police Do At Hot Spots Matter? The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment. Criminology, 53(1), 23-53.

Although it is not their primary mission, law enforcement officers serve as mental health interventionists. In this role, they intervene with vulnerable people in spaces of the city that may be considered “hotspots of vulnerability.” This ongoing project is devoted to strengthening theoretical and practical linkages between law enforcement and public health. Central to this agenda are insights from the literatures on environmental criminology and problem-oriented policing which can help provide for a twin emphasis on "case management" and "place management" in efforts to enhance public health and safety. Visit  Jennifer Wood's  faculty page for information about a research monograph, policy brief and recent scholarly article.

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Additional Research Projects and Resources

• Links in Space and Time between Firearm Arrests and Shootings
• Related Publications
• The Impact of Philadelphia’s Public CCTV Cameras: PRELIMINARY FINDINGS FROM A TIME SERIES ANALYSIS

Director Jerry Ratcliffe 525 Gladfelter Hall [email protected]

Jennifer Wood 548 Gladfelter Hall [email protected]

Elizabeth Groff 531 Gladfelter Hall [email protected]

Ralph Taylor 537 Gladfelter Hall [email protected]

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North, Coates take top spots on county commission ballot

Phil ellsworth.

• Aug 19, 2024
• Aug 19, 2024 Updated 2 hrs ago

Voters get checked in at Restoration Church in Casper for the primary elections on Tuesday, Aug. 20.

When the next iteration of the Natrona County Board of Commissioners takes office, there will be one new face, albeit one with a familiar name.

Incumbent Dave North earned the top spot on the Republican ballot with 5,394 votes out of 23,256 votes cast, or 23.19%. Close behind was newcomer Casey Coates with 4,716 votes, or 20.28%. Coates, for whose family Coates Road is named, will take the seat being vacated by Steve Freel.

On Tuesday night, Coates said, “I’m just really grateful to the residents of Natrona County for putting their faith in me. It’s pretty exciting.”

Coates said he wanted to thank his family for their support.

“I think good things are on the horizon for Natrona County,” he added.

North said he appreciated that the county commissioners’ race was a cordial one, unlike some other races.

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“There wasn’t any mud-slinging. The candidates took the high road, and I think that’s how Wyoming is supposed to be done,” he said.

There were no challengers for the county commission seats on the Democratic ballot.

The wait for results was considerably longer than usual. Neither the Natrona County Clerk’s office nor the Wyoming Secretary of State provided preliminary results, as has been the custom in years past. When results were eventually posted on the county website, an IT glitch made the results inaccessible.

The incoming board members will likely find themselves caught between a rock and a bunch of rocks. A proposed gravel mine on state school trust lands on Coates Road has dominated the news out of the board for much of the year.

Prism Logistics, led by Kyle True, wants to build a 15-acre gravel mining operation on Coates Road at the base of Casper Mountain.

The proposal has sparked considerable opposition, primarily from the Casper Mountain Preservation Alliance, which has gathered more than 17,000 signatures on a petition opposing the plan.

As a candidate, Coates said the fact that the plan has moved forward as far as it has “represents a failure at the state lands and leasing level.” In response to a Star-Tribune questionnaire, he said he opposes any mining in the area, but “should mining activities be pursued in a manner that satisfies the parameters set forth by the state and conditional use, I would have no recourse other than to support their furtherance.”

The group says the mining operation would scar the mountain, create excessive traffic, damage residents’ water systems, and damage the ecosystem in the area. They also worry that the operation would grow beyond the initial 15-acre footprint.

True, who says the proposed operation would create jobs and meet the needs of construction work in the county, says the group’s fears are unfounded. Prism has not yet filed an application for a conditional use permit for the project with the county, although the commissions have heard plenty of opinions about the plan during the board’s public comment periods.

True has pointed out that there are other gravel operations in the Casper area, some of which are in or near residential areas. Additionally, he has said the operation would align with the state mandate to maximize revenue from school trust lands.

True has also stated that the company would mitigate dust and noise from the operation, and that it would likely run no earlier than 6 a.m. and no later than 6 p.m. The company is committed to the reclamation of the property as well, he’s stated.

When asked for their position on the Coates Road issue, all of the candidates said they either oppose the plan or need more information. The only incumbent in the race, North, declined to comment because the board will likely have to decide the issue at some point.

North and Coates edged out former county commissioners Terry Wingerter (3,861 votes, 16.60%), Paul C. Bertoglio (3,684 votes, 15.84%), and Matt Keating (3,011 votes, 12.95%). Candidate Rozmaring Czaban finished with 1,264 votes, or 5.44%; Curt Simpson Jr. finished with 686 votes, or 2.95%; and Arthur Youngberg received 545 votes, or 2.34%.

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