By Sean Barry Butcher

Within contemporary policing and community safety discourses, citizen-led initiatives have rarely commanded the degree of attention afforded elsewhere. Typically, research has tended to focus upon state, and more recently market provision. This thesis addresses that deficit by investigating volunteer citizen patrol initiatives. It adopts an exploratory approach to conceptualise and determine the composition of patrols, and subsequently offers insights into the reasons why individuals partake in organised patrols, the nature of their activities, and how they are received by other citizens and local stakeholders. In the first half of the study, citizen patrols are defined, charted across extended historical periods, and located within the contemporary policing landscape. The second half presents the empirical findings of a qualitative study that explores three citizen patrol case studies in northern England. Data collected within these sites consisted of a total of 150 hours of participant observation and 40 semi-structured interviews, with participants, coordinators and external stakeholders. The findings indicate that despite state dominance and more recent market expansion across the policing landscape, the presence of citizen patrols illustrates a space for civil society that demonstrates continuities with the past. Participants exhibited a range of motivations for partaking and completed various activities; as responses to perceived threats, broader vulnerability, and for the purposes of information sharing. Elsewhere, a distinction emerged between those that the patrols engaged, and those that more broadly benefited. Serving the interests of the latter presented implications not only for the fair and even spread of patrol activities, but also for the delivery of policing provision more generally. Finally, the patrols were well-received by stakeholders, who connected with initiatives both strategically and operationally. There was evidence of positive relationships and collaboration, though frontline police articulated concern about their capacity to effectively support initiatives in light of reductions to personnel and resources.

  Leeds, UK: The University of Leeds, School of Law, Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, 2019. 309p.  

By Paul Pazen, Steven L. Byers, Cole Anderson, and Andy Archuleta

Public safety plays a critical role in the economic vitality of a community. Increasing population, attracting new businesses, generating a workforce, and bolstering the ability to attract tourism are all directly related to real and perceived safety challenges. If people are not safe, they cannot learn, work, or enjoy their communities. Ultimately, high crime rates result in a failure to thrive. It’s no secret that Colorado has been hit with a crime wave. Skyrocketing crime rates, fentanyl deaths, and the number one rank in the country when it comes to auto thefts, are all factors that have put Colorado’s economic future at risk and made Coloradans less safe. The question this report poses is: why has Colorado become less safe? A comparison of policing and crime rates in the two largest cities in Colorado, Denver and Colorado Springs, uncovers distinctly different trends in policing and police resources that have produced differing outcomes. For example, in Denver, the crime rate increased by 32% from 2010 to 2022 while the number of uniformed police officers decreased by 15.1%. A crime case is cleared when it has been solved and the clearance rates for violent crime in Denver have dropped 18.6% at a time when the crime rate is increasing. In Colorado Springs, the crime rate decreased by 15.9% and the number of uniformed police officers rose 5.7% from 2010 to 2022. Clearance rates for violent crime increased by 9.7% while the crime rate decreased. The criminal justice system includes police who investigate crime, district attorneys who prosecute offenders, and the Department of Corrections, which keeps offenders off of the streets and facilitates the reformation and re-entry of offenders. Each of these parts plays an important and unique role in keeping Coloradans safe and is represented by one side of the “crime triangle.” Much like a triangle, when one side collapses, the system collapses.

Greenwood Village, CO: Common Sense Institute (CSI) , 2023. 38p.

By David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang and Priyanka Goonetilleke

Police “stop-and-frisks” of pedestrians and motorists have become an increasingly controversial tactic, given low average rates of contraband discovery, incidents of abuse, and evidence of racial disparity. Study of the tactic by economists has been much influenced by Knowles, Persico, and Todd (2001; hereafter, KPT) who first suggested the use of a “hit rate” (contraband discovery rate per frisk) test to distinguish racial prejudice from statistical discrimination in highway searches by police officers. Models used by KPT and almost all subsequent literature (e.g., Anwar and Fang 2006) on the subject imply diminishing marginal returns to frisks. That is, if frisks decrease substantially, the rate of contraband discovery should rise, ceteris paribus. This is the first paper to test this assumption empirically using arguably exogenous variations in frisk rates (cf. Feigenberg and Miller 2022). 1 We study the period around the nationwide protests that followed the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, after which police frisks dropped tremendously and rapidly. Using extremely granular data from Chicago, we find that hit rates increased as police frisks plunged, in line with the predictions of KPT.

AEA Papers and Proceedings 2022, 112: 178–183 ,2022. 7p.

By David Weisburd, David B. Wilson, Kevin Petersen, Cody W. Telep

The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (KCPPE) was seen by its developers to have produced “consistent evidence of the lack of effects of any consequence on crime,” a conclusion that was to have a strong impact on assumptions about police patrol for almost half a century. We identified the original official crime data from the KCPPE, and reanalyzed outcomes focusing on a comparison of the “proactive” versus “control” beats (“reactive beats” were criticized because of violations of treatment integrity); examining broad categories of crime (to increase statistical power); and using count regression models. Our findings are not unequivocal, but point to modest impacts of police patrol on crime in police beats.

Policy Implications: Our findings suggest that lessons drawn for half a century from the KCPPE need to be revisited. The KCPPE does not show that police patrol in large areas has no influence on crime, and this finding is consistent with several more recent studies. At the same time, we note that the effects of patrol in the KCPPE using our analysis strategy, and those found in other studies of preventive patrol in larger areas, are about half that found in hot spots policing studies. This suggests that police agencies ideally should invest in focused hot spots policing initiatives. However, absent an ability to manage such initiatives, or the crime analysis capabilities to identify crime hot spots routinely, simpler preventive patrol schemes to utilize uncommitted patrol time can be seen as potentially effective in preventing crime.

Criminology and Public Policy,  2023: 1-18

By Chris Giacomantonio

This book critically examines coordination work between police officers and agencies. Police work requires constant interaction between police forces and units within those forces, yet the process by which police work with one another is not well understood by sociologists or practitioners. At the same time, the increasing inter-dependence between police forces raises a wide set of questions about how police should act and how they can be held accountable when locally-based police officers work in or with multiple jurisdictions. This rearrangement of resources creates important issues of governance, which this book addresses through an inductive account of policing in practice.Policing Integration builds on extensive fieldwork in a multi-jurisdictional environment in Canada alongs.

Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 218p.

By National Police Agency

An overview of the history, organization, administration and policing functions of the police of Japan. Covers traffic police, security police, cyber security, police science, international cooperation. Includes statistics on arrests, crimes known and clear, traffic violations.

National Police Agency. Tokyo. Japan. 2001. 70p

By Henk Elffers, Marlijn Peeters, Jasper van der Kemp & Guillaume Beijers

In three neighborhoods in the city of Amstelveen, the Netherlands, an experiment with near repeat patrolling after a burglary was implemented, during the 4th quarter of 2011. After a burglary had been reported to the police, two uniformed police officers were patrolling in a radius of 250 meter during two days from 7 am-11 pm. Though the near repeat patrols did influence the near repeat pattern of burglary in the experimental areas, crime rates in the experimental areas did not become more favorable, compared to those in a control area in the same city. It is suggested that the experiment, though asking for a considerable amount of officers' time, was not large enough to be able to demonstrate positive effects, which then implies that effects are at best small, if not absent. The report is a short resumé in English of an earlier publication in Dutch.

Amsterdam: Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement NSCR , 2018. 9p.