Neighborhoods and Larger Geographic Areas in Policing Police agencies typically divide their jurisdictions into large geographic divisions, districts, zones, or areas, each of which often has its own chain of command. This decentralization enables police agencies to be responsive to the particular conditions and needs of different parts of the jurisdiction, and allocation of resources is often organized by these areas. These large administrative areas are typically divided into further subunits, such as sectors, down to the smallest subareas, which are referred to as patrol beats, posts, or reporting areas. In many agencies, the police beat or patrol area represents the primary geographic assignment given to patrol officers in the field and is usually much larger than the micro places we described in Chapter 4. Police commonly define their beats and other administrative areas based on natural geographic divisions and boundaries, population density, political and neighborhood boundaries, distance and travel times (usually by vehicle), and differences in workload (i.e., calls for service and crime) throughout the jurisdiction. Similarly, community groups are also organized by geographic units that extend beyond street blocks or corners. They may encompass larger communities, political boundaries, or cultural enclaves where people live and which may have historical significance. Law enforcement leaders and officers may attend community meetings in these neighborhoods and interact with organizations and leaders within these places. Citizen requests may come from these organizations and leaders, which also makes police agencies more attuned to them. Police strategies are often devised, implemented, and evaluated within these administrative and community boundaries. These efforts represent another form of place-based policing, and their evaluations can be found in the "Neighborhood" portion/slab of our Matrix. These studies of police strategies focus on administrative areas such as police beats, neighborhoods, districts, and the like. We refer to this research loosely as neighborhood studies, although the areas in question do not always correspond to a particular neighborhood as might be defined by residents. Additionally, we also discuss jurisdiction-level studies that appear in the Matrix. Although the jurisdiction-level designation suggests no particular focus, our discussion below shows that successful jurisdiction-wide interventions often involve focusing on high-risk geographic locations and groups throughout an agency's territory of responsibility. Interventions in the "Neighborhood" and "Jurisdiction" sections of the Matrix tend to be successful. More than half (55%) of the forty- seven interventions in the "Neighborhood" section are classified as successful, and 70% have shown at least mixed indications of success (based on the composition of the Matrix as of this writing). Although few in number (seven), evaluations of jurisdiction-level interventions have also produced a high success rate (five of seven, or 71%), and all have shown at least some indications of benefits. However, an important caveat is that the neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level studies have used less rigorous methodologies, which could bias them towards finding favorable results (Weisburd, Lum, and Petrosino 2001; also see Chapter 2). Many of these evaluations were quasi- experimental and typically involved only one or small numbers of areas in the treatment and control conditions. This means that successful findings may be due to the intervention, but they could also be explained by other factors, such as the amenability of the location to the intervention. In contrast, the scientific rigor of the evidence is considerably stronger for micro place and individual-based interventions,There are understandable reasons for the lower level of methodological quality in neighborhood and jurisdiction studies. Notably, it is much less feasible to develop randomized experiments with large samples when conducting area-level studies. The larger the geographic unit of analysis, the fewer overall units there will be to compare within ajurisdiction. It may also be difcult in some cases for police to mount area-level interventions across large numbers of areas for purposes of rigorous testing. However, despite their weaker scientic base, these studies give us valuable insight into proactive, prevention-oriented innovations and activities that the police are undertaking. Further, the police value neighborhood-based approaches, and communities and police often anchor their interactions at the neighborhood or even jurisdiction level. Evidence-based policing has to be exible to these realities. Only focusing on micro approaches because of their stronger evidence base may miss out on opportunities to evaluate, improve, and further develop tactics and strategies that are often used by law enforcement to engage with communities. In the next sections, we review the evidence base for neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level interventions, highlighting what we know about their effectiveness and discussing the lessons they hold for evidence-based policing. In our discussion below, we group neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level strategies into two groups: community policing strategies, which have featured prominently in area- level policing studies, and other types of strategies. Community Policing Community policing became a very prominent law enforcement philosophy in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and it has been the subject of numerous evaluation studies. We discussed the denition of community policing briey in Chapter 4 and reiterate here that it generally involves police agencies, including and involving community groups and citizens in co-producing safety, crime prevention, and solutions to local concerns. More specically, Skogan (2006) describes three core and densely interrelated elements of community policing: (i) citizen involvement in identifying and addressing public safety concerns; (ii) the decentralization of decision-making to develop responses to locally defined problems; and (iii) problem-solving. Community policing is often hard to implement and to evaluate because it is a philosophy rather than a specic set of programs (Mastrofski 2006; Mastrofski, Willis, and Kochel 2007). Moreover, what is defined as community policing also varies over time and across police agencies (Eck and Rosenbaum 1994; Greene and Mastrofski 1998). Early research on community policing focused on tactics such as foot patrol, neighborhood watch, and community meetings or newsletters that emphasized greater communication and interaction between police and citizens. However, the advent of problem-oriented policing (see Goldstein 1979; 1990) and advocacy efforts by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services of the U.S. Department of Justice expanded the denition to include problem-solving eorts, particularly those done in collaboration with other elements of the community (i.e., citizens' groups, business, and other government agencies) (see discussion by Gill, Weisburd, Telep et al. 2014). Thus, in practice, community policing efforts have often included tactics such as foot patrol, neighborhood watch, community meetings or newsletters, eorts to reduce social and physical disorder, conict resolution, and various types of problem-solving efforts. Community policing has also encompassed efforts to build collective efcacy and empowerment in communities (see Sampson 2011) and oen involves _police working with an array of citizen and government By its nature, community policing is a proactive, crime prevention approach to policing. As the National Research Council report on Fairness and Eecriveness in Policing asserted, \"community policing may be seen as reaction to the standard models of policing. . .. While the standard model of policing has relied primarily on the resources of the police and its traditional law enforcement powers, community policing suggests a reliance on a more community-based crime control that draws not only on the resources of the police but also on the resources of the public." (National Research Council 2004, 233). As a proactive crime prevention approach, community policing tries to address and mitigate community problems (crime or otherwise), and in turn, build social resilience, collective ecacy, and empowerment to strengthen the infrastructure for the co-production of safety and crime prevention. These ideas draw from a variety of program theories about the crime prevention mechanisms at work in community policing. For example, with neighborhood watch or policecitizen patrols, increased guardianship may create a deterrent effect. Guardianship may also be the result of building collective efficacy in neighborhoods so that citizens feel empowered to apply informal social controls to risky behavior, suspicious incidents, or unsupervised youth. Skogan discussed community policing as playing an important role in reducing fear, which can lower the chances of citizen withdrawal and isolation, two factors that when left unchecked may lead to further crime and disorder (see Skogan 1986; 1990). Others suggest that community-oriented policing may facilitate problem-oriented policing, which offers tailored approaches to specic concerns (see, e.g., Goldstein 1990; Scott 2000), a process which has been found to be effective in crime prevention (Weisburd, Telep, Hinkle et al. 2010). Here, the community plays a role in identifying and explaining problems, as well as suggesting responses to them. Because of community policing's emphasis on both neighborhood-level processes of social control and police relationships with the community as a whole, these interventions have most commonly been implemented and evaluated in neighborhoods or administrative areas that approximate meaningful neighborhoods (though as we discussed in Chapter 4, these notions also have relevance to the control of crime problems at micro places). Before examining community policing studies in the Matrix, three prior reviews of the crime control impacts of community policing are worth mentioning. In the first comprehensive review of community policing evaluations, Sherman and Eck (2002) reviewed twenty-three studies of community policing strategies including neighborhood watch, community meetings, door-to-door contacts, police storefronts (substations in the community), increasing information ow to citizens, and legitimacy policing. They concluded that some community policing efforts were promising, such as those that increased community participation in priority setting or door-to-door visits by the police. However, other efforts that had no clear crime risk-factor focus did not seem to have strong research support. Similarly, the narrative review of community policing studies by the National Research Council (2004) referred to above concluded that broad-based community policing programs generally do not reduce crime but do seem to improve other important outcomes such as citizen views of the police (see also Weisburd and Eck 2004). Any observed crime prevention impacts are more directly associated with specic strategiessuch as distinct problem-oriented policing initiativesimplemented within community policing programs. Most recently, a Campbell Collaboration systematic review, sponsored by the United Kingdom's National Policing Improvement Agency, examined a variety of crime, disorder, and other community outcomes from twenty-ve community policing studies (Gill et al. 2014). This review, which was based on a statistical meta-analysis that combined data across studies to estimate average eect sizes, concluded that community policing programs generate positive effects on citizen satisfaction, perceptions of disorder, and police legitimacy, but are nanarall'r \"mitt-(l in Man}.- akilhu +n rm-Inna (II-:mn nr mmn Fam- AF (Irimn generally limited in their ability to reduce crime, or even fear of crime. Thus, reviews of studies of community policing across more than two decades seem to have consistently produced similar results. Community policing efforts produce numerous benefits that may indirectly contribute to crime prevention through greater community satisfaction or by facilitating problem solving, collaboration, and cooperation with the police. However, the direct impact of community policing on crime prevention and control remains dubious. Similar patterns can be seen in our Matrix. It should be noted that in the Matrix we use a slightly more restrictive selection criteria than have other community policing reviews. Nevertheless, there are roughly twenty studies in the neighborhood section of the Matrix that could qualify as community policing studies under a broad conceptualization of the term. Some of these interventions include: organizing residents and increasing community involvement to set priorities and determine responses to specific problems (Connell, Miggans and McGloin 2008; Giacomazzi 1995; Lindsay and McGillis 1986; Mazerolle, Adams, Budz et al. 2003; Tuffin, Morris, and Poole 2006); general increases in contacts with citizens, including door-to-door contacts, business checks, newsletters, and/or storefronts (Mazerolle et al. 2003; Pate, Lavrakas, Wycoff et al. 1985a; Pate, Skogan, Wycoff et al. 1985b; Wyckoff, Pate, Skogan et al. 1985); neighborhood watch (Bennett 1990) and other police efforts to organize community block groups (Pate, McPherson, and Silloway 1987); and community policing approaches that combine many of these strategies (Skogan, Harnett, and Lovig 1995). Other studies that might be characterized as community policing highlight foot patrol (Police Foundation 1981; Trojanowicz 1986); enforcement and clean-up initiatives targeting disorder, often in combination with other measures like foot patrol, community contacts, and projects to address physical deterioration (Pate et al. 1985a; 1985b); community programs to improve property marking through door-to-door visits (Laycock 1991); and multi-agency initiatives emphasizing a range of enforcement and prevention measures (Koper, Hoffmaster, Luna et al. 2010; also see Koper, Woods, and Isom 2016). In general, the results of these studies have been mixed, with some programs showing significant effects on crime and others not. However, one pattern that can be discerned from these studies is that community policing programs seem to produce better results when they place a strong and systematic emphasis on police-community contacts and addressing neighborhood problems in collaboration with community members. A good example of this is the Chicago Alternative Policing program (CAPS) evaluated by Skogan and colleagues (1995). The CAPS program reorganized policing around small geographical areas in which officers assigned to beat teams (who were also free from responding to 911 calls) identified and dealt with a broad range of neighborhood problems in partnership with neighborhood residents and community organizations. These officers met with members of the community on a regular basis at beat meetings and developed plans for tackling neighborhood problems. A prioritizing system was also developed for coordinating the delivery of municipal services to support these local problem-solving efforts. An early evaluation of CAPS suggested that it reduced robberies and burglaries and had other positive effects on citizens' perceptions of their neighborhoods and the police. (In a similar vein, see, e.g., Connell, Miggans, and McGloin 2008; Mazerolle et al. 2003; Pate et al. 1985b; Tuffin et al. 2006.) Nonetheless, it remains challenging to reach definitive conclusions about the crime prevention effects of community policing. To begin with, studies of community policing suffer from design weaknesses due to a number of causes. Agencies often implement interventions before an evaluation plan can be properly designed, and evaluation is likely a low priority in implementing many community-orientedbefore an evaluation plan can be properly designed, and evaluation is Likely a low priority in implementing many community-oriented policing strategies. Also, community policing encompasses a variety of activities, which are sometimes vague, philosophical, or indirectly linked with actions. Interventions can also include multiple and unevenly resourced components, which means that identifying, measuring, and tracking the mechanisms of prevention that contributed to an effect is difcult. Further complicating evaluations of community policing is the size of the unit of analysis. Hot spots studies indicate that police can create deterrent effects when matching crime prevention resources to the precise geographic locations that need them. Community policing, on the other hand, tends to be implemented in larger areas and neighborhoods that have places with and without crime. This might dilute the dosage of intervention at the micro places most needing it. At the same time, substantial effects in targeted hot spots might be harder to measure at the community level. Neighborhood- and area-level studies also tend to have weaker research designs, usually based on comparing one or a small number of treatment areas selected for the intervention to one or a small number of non-randomly selected comparison neighborhoods. Hence, even those community policing studies satisfying the methodological requirements of the Matrix are still mostly modest in methodological rigor. Notwithstanding these issues, it is again worth emphasizing that community policing strategies have important benets with regard to improving citizens1 views of police and their communities (Gill et al. 2014). Community input and reaction is an important outcome that democratic police should seek irrespective of reducing neighborhood-level crime rates (Lum and Nagin 2017). Further, community policing approaches can also be helpful in addressing crime problems at micro places, as discussed in Chapter 4. For these reasons, community policing approaches are worthwhile for police even if their crime reduction benets are limited. Further, community policing approaches may help police to develop the community trust and cooperation needed to carry out other crime prevention strategies, particularly ones that necessitate more aggressive enforcement to tackle serious crime problems like gun carrying and gun violence (e. g., McGarrell, Chermak, Weiss et al. 2001; Sherman, Shaw, and Rogan 1995). Other Area-Level Strategies In addition to community policing strategies, police carry out a variety of other neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level activities. Those strategies that have been evaluated and that appear in the Matrix have tested a variety of approaches ranging from general patrol to strategies targeting specic problems like gun violence, drugs, disorder, and driving under the inuence. A few generalizations emerge from these evaluations that are relevant to agencies trying to develop a more evidence-based approach to neighborhood-based strategies and tactics. One pattern found in the research in the Matrix is that successful neighborhood interventions often use analysis and intelligence to target high-risk locations, individuals, andfor groups within those neighborhoods. An example is Operation LASER (Los Angeles' Strategic Extraction and Restoration), a program designed to reduce crime in selected reporting districts of Los Angeles (Uchida and Swatt 2013).5 The program involved both an oender-based component that provided intelligence on chronic offenders to ofcers (for use in investigations and proactive activities) and a chronic location component that involved directed patrol and use of CCTV at hot spot locations. The intervention reduced crime by 7% per month in places that received both interventions (though districts that received only the chronic offender intervention did not have significant reductions). Other examples of targeted interventions within neighborhoods and larger areas include: - directed patrols to reduce gun carrying and gun crime focused on particular places and people within beats or larger areas in cities including Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Kansas City, Missouri (Cohen and Ludwig 2003; McGarrell et al. 2001; Sherman et al. 1995); - a district-level homicide reduction initiative in Milwaukee that involved (among other components) police efforts to better manage high- risk places, such as violent taverns and nuisance properties, and high-risk offenders on probation or parole in the community (Azrael, Braga, and O'Brien 2013); - an intervention to reduce shootings in Los Angeles by blocking streets leading to shooting hot spots within neighborhoods having high levels of gang violence (Lasley 1998); - a beat-level initiative in Houston that focused patrols and other activities in hot spots (Caeti 1999); and - interventions to reduce violence in numerous cities through federal programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods and the Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative that focus a variety of enforcement, prosecution, and preventive interventions on high-risk groups and places (McGarrell, Corsaro, Hipple et al. 2010; McGarrell, Corsaro, Melde et al. 2012; Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan 2007). By the same token, several of the pulling levers and focused deterrence studies discussed in Chapter 5 (and mostly included in the "Groups" slab of the Matrix) have documented jurisdiction-level impacts resulting from interventions with high-risk groups, notably violent gangs. Finally, it is also worth reiterating that many successful community policing programs involve addressing problems within neighborhood areas (e.g., Skogan et al. 1995). In practice, this may often necessitate interventions with very specific micro places and people in a neighborhood, though these may typically go undocumented. Another characteristic of successful neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level interventions is that they target particular problems with strategies tailored to those problems. For instance, several studies in the Matrix highlight strategies that were developed to tackle gun crime and other serious violence. In these studies, police have often worked with partner agencies using a data-driven, problem-solving framework. They have also employed a wide range of patrol, enforcement, prosecution, and/or prevention efforts targeted on high-risk places and groups as well as other problems and conditions believed to contribute to violence (e.g., Azrael et al. 2013; Bynum, Grommon, and Mccluskey 2014; Florence, Shepherd, Brennan et al. 2011; Koper et al. 2010; Lasley 1998; McGarrell et al. 2001; 2010; 2012; Papachristos et al. 2007; Sherman et al. 1995; Tita, Riley, Ridgeway et al. 2003; Uchida and Swatt 2013; White, Fyfe, Campbell et al. 2003; Villaveces, Cummings, Espetia et al. 2000). Other illustrations include a multi-jurisdictional initiative to reduce auto theft by targeting investigative operations on stolen vehicle dump sites identified through spatial and temporal analysis of vehicle thefts and recoveries (Krimmel and Mele 1998) as well as a multi-agency strategy to reduce drunk driving at a university using DUI checkpoints, media coverage, and a student-designed social marketing campaign at the university (Clapp, Johnson, Voas et al. 2005). A final point we emphasize is that many successful neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level interventions outside the community policing realm have also been multi-faceted efforts in which police worked with other partner agencies and sometimes community groups, oftenWithin a broad problem-soivmg framework. Unce again, programs to reduce gun violence and other serious violence serve as leading examples. The pulling levers, focused deterrence, and Project Safe Neighborhoods projects which have been referenced several times have commonly involved numerous criminal justice, social service, and community groups working in collaboration to coordinate and target their efforts. In Milwaukee, for instance, police took part in a homicide review commission that brought together criminal justice, social service, and public health agencies to improve responses to homicide and shooting incidents and to develop prevention strategies based on analysis of homicide data (Azrael et al. 2013). The strategy was credited with reductions in homicide in the districts where it was implemented. Similarly, as part of an information-sharing program between hospitals and police in Cardiff, Wales (United Kingdom), police used hospital emergency room data to continuously adjust police patrols (with respect to time and place), target problematic licensed premises, and inform deployment of CCTVs; the program reduced violence according to both hospital and police data (Florence et al. 2011). An illustration of another sort comes from British Columbia, where police formed multi-agency units with community services, re services, and electricity providers to provide a coordinated approach to investigating marijuana growing operations and running publicity campaigns to solicit public assistance (Malm and Tita 2006). Jurisdictions that adopted the approach experienced reductions in marijuana growing while otherjurisdictions experienced increases. Conclusion Police agencies inevitably will develop tactics and strategies that they implement at the neighborhood level or throughout a jurisdiction. Many of these strategies have evaluations which present promising ndings on their outcomes. At the same time, this evidence is only moderately convincing; often studies of neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level approaches are conducted with weaker designs, giving us less condence in their results. The reasons for this are many, ranging from the diculties of evaluating multifaceted and geographically broad interventions to the fact that many interventions are evaluated after the fact. Despite these challenges in the evidence, the research can provide agencies with some guidance. Successful neighborhood strategies are those that try to focus on high-risk places and people within the larger geographic area, are targeted and tailored to address specic problems, and involve stakeholders who can help successfully implement the intervention. In earlier chapters, we argued that police should anchor their crime prevention efforts around micro hot spots, specic problems, and high-risk groups of oHenders. However, we do not see this as being inconsistent with strategies that give attention to larger areas like neighborhoods. In practice, police can use these approaches in tandem. The most optimal crime prevention approaches may prove to be ones that integrate a focus on micro places and high-risk groups within the broader social context of larger neighborhoods and areas (e. g., see our discussion in Chapter 4 of reorienting beat patrols around micro hot spots); indeed, several studies in the neighborhood and jurisdiction sections of the Matrix support the utility of such integrated approaches. Managing hot spots and high-risk groups thereby helps police with managing crime within the broader community. On a related note, we caution readers about using the Matrix to compare the success rates of interventions focusing on micro places and larger areas as a way of assessing the relative merits of these approaches. The neighborhood- and jurisdiction-level studies in the Matrix were done with less rigorous research designs on average, which can bias them towards nding more favorable results (Weisburd et al. mc_- .__.... .... .. "J v- """""'"'D \". -_...... - ._.__-... ..- m-.. rr-"'"-"" _..... __-D......-_...... ._...J._-....__._.._ -_._. ..-.....__.. ... __ -._.._... were done with less rigorous research designs on average, which can bias them towards nding more favorable results (Weisburd et al. 2001). However, future evaluation research might give more attention to the comparative benets of focusing activities on places of different size, addressing a number of questions raised by Koper (2014). For example, are police more likely to reduce crime when they emphasize micro places? Do they tend to prevent larger numbers of crimes or perform more eciently as measured by metrics like crimes prevented per ocerhour expended?'S Also, are police more or less likely to receive effective cooperation from community partners or to encounter community resistance when their efforts are targeted on micro places? A related issue is the need for research demonstrating that interventions targeting micro hot spots can produce crime reductions discernible over larger areas like neighborhoods and patrol beats (as they should in theory if they are not displacing crime to other locations). Additional research should also demonstrate how police can incorporate policing of micro hot spots into everyday operations, including routine patrol (Koper 1995; Sherman and Weisburd 1995; Telep, Mitchell, and Weisburd 2014) and even detective work (Koper, Egge, and Lum 2015a; Lum, Telep, Koper et al. 2012, 86), that are often organized around larger areas. Attention to the broader community context around micro hot spots may also improve law enforcement's understanding of the problems that need to be addressed at those locations. The occurrence of crime at micro hot spots can often be linked to social features and happenings of nearby places, and particular crime problems at micro places can extend across multiple street segments (Weisburd, Groff, and Yang 2012). Studies of offenders1 travel patterns also suggest that many crimes committed at high-risk blocks are likely to have been committed by offenders who currently live or previously lived nearby, if not on the blocks (e. g, see reviews in Eck and Weisburd 1995 and Gabor and Gottheil 1984; also see Bernasco 2010; Weisburd et al. 2012). Understanding these broader neighborhood patterns can thus prove important in understanding the dynamics of micro hot spots and developing interventions to reduce crime at those locations. Attending to the areas surrounding hot spots might also help police to detect and prevent geographic displacement by forcing offenders to travel farther to commit offenses (Bowers et al. 2011, 33). Finally, engaging with neighborhood and community groups may help police to develop community capacity and support that is helpful in identifying and addressing more specic problem places, groups, and conditions within neighborhoods (e.g., Skogan et al. 1995). Nurturing policecommunity relationships and collaboration at the neighborhood level may thus facilitate police efforts to control high-risk places and groups within those neighborhoods. As we emphasized in Chapter 1, it is important to understand that an evidence-based policing approach does not require an eitheror scenario with research. Studies on neighborhood crime prevention, micro-crime places, and individuals are just pieces of a larger framework of incorporating research into an agency's overall strategic plan. Neighborhood-based research is not only useful in its own right, but can also inform the implementation of offender-focused and micro place approaches