By Barak Ariel, Alex Sutherland, David Weisburd, Yonatan Ilan and Matt Bland

Substantial evidence suggests that focussing police resources on hotspots of crime has a discernable crime-re duction effect. However, little is known about the efficacy of proactively policing areas with higher concentrations of more common low-harm problems in society. This study evaluates the first national double-blind randomized controlled trial in which clearly identifiable hotspots (n = 488) of low-harm ‘quality-of-life’ incidents nested in 31 participating police stations were randomized to be either actively policed by any available police officer or by ‘business-as-usual’ reactive policing over a 12-month period. A series of count-based regression models show a moderate and statistically significant reduction in the number of quality-of-life incidents in treatment versus control hotspots, with more than 2,000 quality-of-life incidents prevented, without evidence of spatial displacement to street segments nearby. However, we find no diffusion of benefits in terms of other crime types within the same hotspots, which may suggest that either low- and high-harm crime hotspots are not spatially aligned with each other, that focusing police officers on one type of crime does not produce a suppression effect on other types of crime, or both. We discuss the implications of these results for crime policy and future research.

Policing, Volume 17, pp. 1–23, 2023. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paad040

By: Joshua D. Freilich

This article compares Beccaria’s and Situational Crime Prevention’s (SCP) claims across six dimensions. Both perspectives question harsh penalties, embrace crime reduction as a goal, and view some individuals as possessing agency and rationality. The latter two points distinguish them from most other criminological theories that are not focused on crime reduction and downplay offenders’ rationality. Both approaches have also been criticized for ignoring the root causes of crime in society. Importantly though, the approaches also differ. The Classical School and SCP are usually differentiated from positivistic approaches in their assumption of offender agency. This article found, however, that SCP does not assume offender agency in all contexts. In fact, many SCP interventions could be explained in positivistic terms. The analysis indicates that it is sometimes unclear which causal mechanisms underlie each of SCP’s 25 techniques of crime prevention. Clarifying the precise causal mechanism of each technique could lead to more effective implementation. The article places these and other issues in context and outlines a series of suggestions for future research to address to strengthen the SCP approach.

Criminal Justice Review 1-20