The Importance of Place in Policing - Empirical Evidence and Policy ...

8licing. By place, we do not mean large geographic units such asneighborhoods or communities that have commonly been the focusof criminologists concerned with crime prevention (see Bursik &Webb, 1982; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997; Shaw &McKay, 1942 [1969]), or the beats and precincts that have been keyto the organization of policing. Places in this context are specificlocations within the larger social environments of communities andneighborhoods (Eck & Weisburd, 1995). They may be defined asbuildings or addresses (see Green, 1996; Sherman, Gartin, & Buerger,1989), as block faces or street segments (see Sherman & Weisburd,1995; Taylor, 1997), or as clusters of addresses, block faces orstreet segments that have common crime problems (see Block, Dabdoub,& Fregly, 1995; Weisburd & Green, 1995a).The strategies of place-based policing can be as simple as hot spotspatrol, as was the case in the Minneapolis Hot Spots Policing Experiment(Sherman & Weisburd, 1995), where the police interventioninvolved placing more patrol resources at places where crimewas concentrated. But place-based policing can also take a muchmore complex approach to the amelioration of crime problems. Inthe Jersey City Drug Market Analysis Project (Weisburd & Green,1995a), for example, a three-step program (including identifying andanalyzing problems, developing tailored responses, and maintainingcrime control gains) was used to reduce problems at drug hot spots.In the Jersey City Problem-Oriented Policing Project (Braga, Weisburd,Waring, Mazerolle, Spelman, & Gajewski, 1999), a problemorientedpolicing approach was taken in developing a specific strategyfor each of the small areas defined as violent crime hot spots.Why should police reorient the strategies and organization of policingto be more concerned with place? Why should place-basedpolicing become a core approach in police efforts to control crimeand disorder? In this monograph we present the case for place-basedpolicing drawing from an emerging body of basic and applied evidencethat suggests that policing places is efficient and effective. Webegin in the next section by tracing the emergence of crime places incrime prevention in the 1980s, and then in the third section, wepresent basic research on crime and place that shows that crime isconcentrated in cities in crime hot spots. This is a key finding in thejustification of place-based policing, because it provides a logic forfocusing police resources on small areas, rather than spreading themwidely across the city. But even if crime is concentrated at place, if itsimply shifts from place to place in a city it would not present astable focus for police crime prevention efforts. The fourth section ofour monograph describes the strong stability of crime at place, ascontrasted with the instability of criminal offending. We then showin the fifth section how basic research on the geographic distributionof crime places supports strongly the need to focus in on hot spots of