Translational Criminology

Recommendations

Info

team at the New York City Police Department, we developed The Playbook, which includes a series of crime prevention and trust and confidence tactics (i.e., “plays”) that police officers, detectives, and first-line supervisors can carry out during their shifts that reflect the evidence. As first-line supervisors are essential to research translation in the field, we created workshops especially for this group and also undertook a year-long series of interactions with first-line supervisors in Leesburg (Virginia) to try out the idea of bringing research knowledge to this under-served group. New Developments More recently, a number of new developments have occurred. Most importantly, we expanded our description of each study within the Matrix. Early on, the description of each Matrix study was the author-provided abstract in the National Criminal Justice Reference Service. However, spurred on by a collaboration with the Police Foundation to make the Matrix material more smartphone and app friendly, we went through a major effort last year to replace authorwritten abstracts with more detailed, structured, and standardized descriptions that also include links to other resources specific to that intervention. This effort also included partnering with the Police Foundation to convert the Playbook and the Matrix into a freely available mobile app, also increasing its accessibility. Yet another recent creation is our Building Trust demonstration, developed in collaboration with the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Training Academy, and Fulbright scholar Tor Garnett from the Metropolitan Police Service in London, England. Here, the idea was to create a free web resource that could respond to the contemporary discourse and challenges facing law enforcement today with regard to rebuilding trust and confidence with their communities. Many agencies may not have the funds to hire regular subject matter experts to teach academy recruits or in-service officers about subjects such as implicit bias, procedural justice, and other important concepts of trust and confidence, but still want to provide their officers with evidence-based, reliable knowledge around these subject areas. Although the Matrix has focused a great deal on crime prevention activities, evidence-based policing encompasses a wide array of topics for which research can be helpful. Our development of the trust and confidence website intends to support this need. much about the demand and receptivity for research as it is about the supply and generation of knowledge. In particular, the Matrix projects have shaped our own learning about policing research, practice, and partnerships, and have provided us with the opportunity to train new policing scholars in this philosophy. One of our most exciting new ideas is with our partners at the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (and with the help of the US-UK Fulbright Program) with whom we are developing an international summer school for doctoral students of policing. The first summer school takes place this May and will not only focus on policing research, but also research translation and practitioner partnerships. In cooperation with the Police Foundation, we are thinking of even more creative and technologically friendly ways to provide research knowledge to officers, detectives, and supervisors in the field. We have much more to accomplish, but the sky is the limit with the Matrix, the Matrix Demonstration Projects, and evidence-based policing. References Lum, C. (2009). Translating police research into practice. Ideas in American Policing. Washington, DC: Police Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.policefoundation.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/06/Ideas_Lum_0.pdf Lum, C., and Koper, C. S. (2011). Is crime prevention relevant to counter-terrorism? In Forst, B. Greene, J. R., and Lynch, J. P. (Eds.), Criminologists on Terrorism and Homeland Security. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lum, C., Koper, C. S., and Telep, C. (2011). The Evidence-Based Policing Matrix. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 7(1), 3-26. Lum, C., Telep, C., Koper, C. S., and Grieco, J. (2012). Receptivity to research in policing. Justice, Research and Policy, 14(1), 61-95. Veigas, H., and Lum, C. (2013). Assessing the evidence-base of a police service patrol portfolio. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 7(3), 248-262. Looking Ahead Many projects lay ahead for the Matrix team. We have, for example, received numerous requests to create matrices for other areas of policing research that focus on non-crime prevention outcomes (e.g., internal management, citizen fear, and police legitimacy). More importantly, our innovations are driven by our goals of finding new ways to make research evidence more digestible, of translating research into tangible, everyday policing activities, and of helping to connect research and researchers to practitioners. This means that ideas from the field are important; evidence-based policing is as 4 www.cebcp.org
Community Building in Hot Spots: Seattle Neighborhood Group’s Non-Police-Led Crime Prevention Approach BY CODY W. TELEP, TARI NELSON-ZAGAR, AND JULIE HIBDON Cody W. Telep is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. Tari Nelson-Zagar is a senior program manager at Seattle Neighborhood Group. Julie Hibdon is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Cody W. Telep Tari Nelson-Zagar Julie Hibdon There is strong empirical evidence that crime is highly concentrated at small units of geography, commonly referred to as hot spots. Prior studies have found that a relatively small number of micro places are responsible for a significant amount of total crime in a city (Weisburd, 2015) and that what police do in these places can have an impact on reported crime and disorder (Braga, Papachristos, & Hureau, 2014). However, less attention has been focused on attempts to address high crime locations with non-police-led interventions. 1 Seattle Neighborhood Group (SNG), 2 a community-based, nonprofit organization in Seattle, Washington, has recently worked on a practitioner-led approach to crime prevention in hot spots. For many years SNG used a community organizing approach focused on two objectives: engagement between the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and affected communities, and development of communitybased responses to improve high crime neighborhoods. SNG’s efforts developed into an early community policing model, and a National Institute of Justice-funded evaluation deemed the program “a model partnership” (NIJ, 1992). Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, SNG developed a number of projects and programs to fill gaps in service. These included coordinating and supporting neighborhood-based “crime councils,” providing trainings for residents on personal safety and using 9-1-1, helping landlords maintain crime-free property through education, coordinating neighborhood cleanups and events, organizing graffiti paint-outs, facilitating relationships between immigrant communities and law enforcement, and working with neighbors affected by chronic nuisance activities. SNG staff developed approaches to crime prevention that it felt worked well. But while there was strong anecdotal evidence from partners and the community that these multifaceted activities had made a difference, the organization was not able to say for sure that specific elements had been effective. In part, this was because there were often many variables that affected the outcome of their actions, and while partnering with SPD had been incredibly useful in community policing projects, it made it difficult to disentangle the specific effects of SNG’s efforts. Additionally, for many years SNG staff had a strong sense that some small places generated much of the crime and disorder in the neighborhoods and large geographic areas they focused on. A series of studies on the criminology of place, a number of which focused specifically on Seattle, strongly supported these beliefs (Weisburd, Groff, & Yang, 2012). The evidence that geographically constrained hot spots were responsible for much of the city’s crime problem clearly echoed the ongoing experiences of SNG staff in the field. 1 The Bureau of Justice Assistance Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) Project recently began supporting a number of collaborative multi-agency effort focused on small units of geography (Griffith, 2014), including a project in Rainier Beach in Seattle that SNG has partnered on. That project is separate from this intervention. 2 See sngi.org Spring 2016 | TRANSLATIONAL CRIMINOLOGY 5
Page 1 and 2: THE MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER FOR EVID
Page 3 and 4: FROM THE DIRECTORS We are proud to
Page 5: Three important themes from the map
Page 9 and 10: Figure 1: SNG hot spot response mod
Page 11 and 12: at which point the YW begins outrea
Page 13 and 14: CALL FOR NOMINATIONS for the Distin
Page 15 and 16: What Research Is Needed to Help Fam
Page 17 and 18: designs that could be employed in t
Page 19 and 20: automated tick-the-box exercises th
Page 21 and 22: The Division of Policing of the Ame
Page 23 and 24: tags, is an important first step in
Page 25 and 26: Conclusions The implementation of e
Page 27 and 28: practices, neighborhood-level deter
Page 29 and 30: Interview with CEBCP’s Most Recen
Page 31 and 32: Hot off the Press Aviv, G., and Wei

Translational Criminology

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?