James McGuire - Evidence-Based Policing and Community Crime Prevention

The series publishes books focused and developed across three domains. The first is understanding and explaining violence and aggression. Books in this domain address such subject matter as genetics, physiology, neurobiology, cultural evolution, biobehavioral, learning, cognitive, psychoanalytic, sociological and other explanations of violence. The second domain focuses on prevention and treatment for individuals and couples. Examples of books in this domain include cognitive behavioral, behavioral, counseling, psychopharmacological, psychosocial, couples, and family therapy approaches. They also explore extant treatment packages for individually focused treatments (e.g., mindfulness, cognitive analytic therapies). Within this domain, books focus on meeting the information needs of clinicians and professionals who work in youth facilities, emergency rooms, special education, criminal justice, and therapy settings. Finally, books in the third domain address prevention and treatment for groups and society, including topical focus on early intervention programs, school violence prevention programs, policing strategies, juvenile facility reform as well as socio-legal and ethical issues. Books in this series serve as must-have resources for researchers, academics, and upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in clinical child and school psychology, public health, criminology/criminal justice, developmental psychology, psychotherapy/counseling, psychiatry, social work, educational policy and politics, health psychology, nursing, and behavioral therapy/rehabilitation.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15332

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Researchers, academics, and practitioners in many fields now readily embrace the concepts and principles of evidence-based practice. It might seem obvious that what professionals do in any area of applied work should be based on a sound body of knowledge derived from well-conducted research. But until not long ago, that was not the customary way to proceed, and even after proposals to do so were made, there was (and there continues to be) some resistance to following this route.

The movement towards adoption of a more scientifically grounded approach is widely understood to have begun in medicine, with the criticisms made by the British epidemiologist Archie Cochrane (1972) seen as pivotal in alerting medical doctors to the need for systematically accumulated research. This led to the foundation of the now worldwide Cochrane Collaboration (Chalmers et al., 1992). Parallel developments later arose in other disciplines, notably the Campbell Collaboration addressing the numerous unresolved issues in education, social work, criminal justice, and elsewhere.

It may have been inevitable, and perhaps it was only a matter of time before this innovation would reach policing. Equally, however, a case can be made that it had already emerged independently there. In 197273, a pioneering experiment was carried out in Kansas City, Missouri, to test the relative effectiveness of different levels of police car patrol (Kelling et al., 1974). Over a 12-month period, 15 police patrol beats, covering 32 square miles of the city, were matched on a number of crime-related variables and allocated to one of three conditions. In one set of areas (reactive) there was no preventive patrol and police entered them only in response to calls for assistance. By contrast, in the second (proactive) group, visible patrol was increased to two to three times its usual level. In the third (control) set, the normal level of patrol was maintained.

This study, the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment, has been described as a landmark of policing research (Braga, 2001). At the time, three-quarters (75%) of officers surveyed considered that patrol was the most important function of the police department. However, data analysis found no significant differences between the three patrol conditions in the level of crime, in citizens attitudes toward police services, in their fear of crime, in police response times, or public satisfaction with them. The researchers concluded that routine preventive patrol in marked police cars has little value in preventing crime or making citizens feel safe (Kelling et al., 1974, p.vii).

Other studies concerned with police foot patrol have obtained similar findings, for example in Newark, New Jersey (Kelling, 1981), with no observable effect on crime, and a mixed pattern of effects on perceptions of police. Patrol has since been shown to have some positive effects, however, if directed at high crime locations (hot spots) (Sherman & Weisburd, 1995).

It is important to note that discovering that some taken-for-granted police procedures are not reliably effective does not in itself provide an argument for reducing police resources. It could, on the contrary, suggest that policing benefits from more extensive community contacts a step that might entail higher investment in personnel. To rephrase a motto often heard in Britain when police numbers are discussed, we may well need more bobbies, but not necessarily on the beat unless there are clear indicators for the direction of this.