Focused deterrence leans on the idea that most crime is committed by a few, highly criminal individuals. Thus, a focused deterrence strategy used by the police is a program that targets individuals with extensive criminal records for an intervention in an effort to reduce their criminal behavior.

One example of a focused deterrence strategy is Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) in Chicago, where former gun felons were asked to attend "offender notification forums" when released from prison. At these forums, individuals from Chicago Police Department, ATF, the States Attorney's Office reminded participants what would happen if they used a gun and were caught (extra severe punishment) but also provided participants with resources to stay off the streets (i.e., job leads, training, mental health and educational services) (see Wallace et al, 2016). Results showed that attending an offender notification forum drastically reduced a participant's likelihood of going back to prison, specifically for new gun crimes. Scholars have shown that focused deterrence strategies reduced crime in neighborhoods where forums occurred, as well as in the surrounding neighborhoods (Braga, Weisburd, and Turchan, 2019).

In short, focused deterrence strategies are a promising way of reducing crime that is tough to stop (i.e., like gun, gang, and drug violence).

References

Braga, A. A., Weisburd, D., & Turchan, B. (2019). Focused deterrence strategies effects on crime: A systematic review.Campbell Systematic Reviews,15(3), e1051.

Wallace, D., Papachristos, A. V., Meares, T., & Fagan, J. (2016). Desistance and legitimacy: The impact of offender notification meetings on recidivism among high risk offenders.Justice Quarterly,33(7), 1237-1264.

Envision you are a police chief of a large city and are interested in seeing if the focused deterrence strategies you have employed in your city are working to reduce crime. Crime data is finally in and is displayed in the table below.

	Crime Was Reduced	Crime Was Not Reduced	TOTAL
Neighborhood Received Focused Deterrence	75	15	90
Neighborhood Did Not Receive Focused Deterrence	5	25	30
TOTAL	80	40	120

• Discuss which two probabilities would you like to see in order to understand if focused deterrence worked in your city. Why are those two probabilities important to you to understand if focused deterrence is working
• Next, calculate those two probabilities and report what you found (you do not need to show your work, but you do need to describe the probability, such as the probability of A and B, and show your result).
• Finally, given that you now have calculated those probabilities, what do you conclude about the effectiveness (i.e., did it appear to work) of focused deterrence in your city?