Police intelligence and modern crime-fighting approaches in law enforcement

Police Intelligence: Rapidly Changing the Way Police Organizations Fight Crime

Since the professional era of policing, the traditional role of the police officer in the United States has primarily been that of crime fighter. Law enforcement officers detect and arrest offenders to keep the public safe and until relatively recently, the job was pretty straightforward. The officer would walk his beat, talking to the community and acting to reassure them. If a crime occurred, the officer would react by attempting to catch the offenders after the crime had occurred. An officer's discretion dictated whether an arrest would be made or not. In the first half of the twentieth century the effectiveness and conduct of police were highly variable, and not only from city to city, but within the various precincts, neighbourhoods and beats that made up a particular city. American law enforcement agencies of this time period could be characterized as decentralized, muddled, and self-ruled (Johnson, 1981). This paper discussed the fighting crimes and role of police in context of modern crimes and how police fight crimes. The author discussed the history of policing and how new models Model emerged and how is it working.i.e. 'COMPSTAT' and Intelligence-led Policing and recently the Data-driven approach to crime and traffic safety

Police Intelligence: Rapidly changing the way police organizations fight crime

History of Modern Policing & Professional Crime-Fighting Model

Early History

Early law enforcement history and evolution in America was based on concepts taken from the first modern police agency in London in 1829 and imitated by the first American police agencies established in Boston and New York in the 1840's (Steverson,2008). English Prime Minister Robert Peel created the London Metropolitan Police while acting as the British home secretary in 1829. Peel's reforms as home secretary and later prime minister created a police force that used preventative policing in its earliest form (Johnson, 1981). The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 created new rules by which police would act and would later become known as the Peelian Principles (Germann, Day, & Gallati, 1976; Ramsay, A.A.W, 1969). The Peelian Principles included the ideas that police effectiveness will be measured by lower crime rates, information about criminal activity should be shared with the public, police will be adequately dispersed both geographically and temporally, and that good record keeping is important for the7deployment of police and resources where they are the most needed (Germann, et al., 1976; Ramsay, A.A.W, 1969).

These innovations would be adopted in America, but they quickly were tailored to American cultural and social conditions and soon became nearly unrecognizable from their English originators. In the urban areas of the American Northeast, neighbourhoods grew around ethnic enclaves and reflected the socioeconomic status and ethnicity of these inhabitants (Steverson, 2008). Crime and fear were rampant in these neighbourhoods and American police responded by adopting a uniformed presence to deter criminals, arming themselves against an armed populace, and using force against force (Johnson, 1981).This was in direct contrast to English police who were unarmed and used great restraint in using physical force. American police learned to use the law to serve their own interests and used great personal discretion in their decision making, often with great moral ambiguity. This lead to conditions of distrust and hatred among the populace and bred a fear of police that existed well into the next century.

After the advent of radio dispatch and fully motorized departments in the 1930's, modern policing was born and the era of police professionalism and the professional crime fighting model took hold. Based on principals espoused by the reformers August Vollmer and Orlando W. Wilson, the fundamental attributes of this new method of policing called for police to be college educated, free from political control, and paramilitary in nature (Johnson, 1981). This period also saw the creation of centralized command structures and the use of modern technology and methods. This crime fighting model called for officers to cruise their beats in random patterns looking for wrongdoers, allowing for speedy response to calls for service, and promoted reactive criminal investigation without any discretionary decision making by the officers.

But the professional crime-fighting model had its drawbacks. The tactic of unsystematic motorized patrols, quick response times to calls, and the emergence of 911as an on-demand deployment strategy produced an incident-driven style of policing that resulted in agencies whose main purpose was to respond to calls for service. The duty of the public in this model was reduced to one of initiators of police services. Furthermore, the total motorization of police patrols detached officers from the community and the citizens that they served. The only time that an officer would have any interaction would be after a crime had been committed, when the officer was expected to take some kind of law enforcement action. The limiting of interaction to only negative encounters led to a relationship of intimidation and hostility between police and the community.

In the 1960's, large upheavals in American society were experienced that forced police to transform the ways in which they responded to crime. Public attitudes towards police and the function of the police had changed and law enforcement was forced to adapt to these changes. New research showed that actual crime fighting was a very small part of the daily activities of officers (Steverson, 2008). More often, police were performing other functions not relating to crime, such as resolving disputes, providing emergency services, and otherwise maintaining order. It was found that random patrols were resulting in very few arrests and that most arrests were the result of citizen-initiated complaints. Studies such as the Kansas City Experiment found that preventative patrols not only did not reduce crime, but also had little or no impact on public perceptions of police and citizens' fear of crime (Brown, Dieckman, Kelling, & Pate, 1974). These findings led to more questioning of the crime-fighting model as the best way of policing and stopping crime.

Professional Police Model

The earliest nationally adopted American policing model was that of the professional crime fighter. In the 1920's and 30's, the police professionalism model gradually began to take hold in America due in large part to reformers such as August Vollmer, Orlando W. Wilson and William H. Parker, who recognized that while the average citizen knew very little about the police, they did know about crime, especially when they were the victims (Robinson, 1972). These men saw that the image of the policeman had to be reinvented, and to do this they created the professional police model, using college-educated officers and patrol vehicles equipped with radios to target crime and offenders by reacting to calls for service (Johnson, 1981; Steverson, 2008).

Community Policing Model

By the 1960's, police had again become increasingly alienated from the public. This tumultuous period saw the police fighting riots, growing crime rates, and social problems associated with drugs and poverty in inner-city neighbourhoods. The old, professional police model was ill equipped to deal with these issues and the era of the community policing model began to take hold (Angell, 1971; Germann, 1969).Researchers began studying the methods that police were using and came to the conclusion that the strategies of preventative patrols and reactive investigations were ineffective means of crime control (Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown, 1974).

It was during this same time period, that researcher's began to question what motivated criminals to engage in deviant behaviours. This analysis of the criminal decision making process came to be known as Rational Choice Theory, the essential points being that human behaviour is rational, that choices are calculated through a cost-benefit analysis, and that, all choices being equal, a criminal will evaluate the risk factors (getting caught, the potential seriousness of the punishment) against the expected gain (Clarke and Cornish, 1983; Siegel, 1992).

Other research, such as Cohen and Felson's landmark 1979 study on Routine Activity Theory (RAT) concentrated on the analysis of crime trends and the circumstances that lead to crime rather than the offenders who committed crime. RAT states that for a crime to occur there must be three conditions present: an appropriate target, a lack of suitable guardian to prevent the crime from happening, and the presence9of a motivated offender to take advantage of the first two conditions (Cohen and Felson,1979). According to RAT, crime is a normal social phenomena and only requires the convergence spatially and temporally of the above three conditions. Most crime is not perpetrated by "super predators" committing violent acts, but by opportunists who take advantage of availability and lack of guardianship. By using careful analysis of the environmental factors and conditions that lead to crime, organizations can target these factors and remove one or more of them from the equation. If even one of the three conditions of crime is removed, then the crime cycle is disrupted (Clarke & Felson, 2008; Felson, 2002; Wortley & Mazerolle, 2008).

The 1980's brought further questioning of established police practices and the Broken Windows theory put forth by Wilson and Kelling (1982) gave further support to the ineffectiveness of the professional police model. Broken Windows suggested that crime was bred by public perceptions of their community. If the community is allowed to deteriorate by allowing even small crimes to go unpunished, then more serious crime will follow. Wilson and Kelling championed a return to the older model of policing in which foot patrols became common and petty crimes such as loitering, vandalism, and vagrancy would not be tolerated. Broken Windows theory continued to evolve and eventually became known as community policing.

Community policing attempted a return to crime prevention instead of crime reaction by encouraging officers to become a part of the communities in which they worked. Police agencies tried to reduce the fear of crime by reintroducing foot patrols and the creation of neighbourhood substations to give police a notable presence within the community (Trojanowicz, & Bucqueroux, 1990). At the same time, initiatives were introduced that would target problem areas within their jurisdictions by the reallocation of police resources and community-oriented problem solving (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994; Zhao, He, & Lovrich, 2003; Zhao & Thurman, 1997).

Comp stat

Comp stat was introduced in 1994 by William J. Bratton, the police chief of the NYPD (Bratton, 1998). At the time, New York City was experiencing record crime and disorder and Bratton sought to reduce crime and improve the quality of life in New York, as well as to make changes in a police organization that was notoriously resistant to change. To accomplish this daunting task, Bratton had to attack the symptoms of the NYPD's dysfunctionality, including lackadaisical attitudes among its officers and leaders, and the lack of timely and accurate data about crime and public safety issues as they were happening. Compstat was meant to accumulate and mine the data and resources available to the department and then to track these statistics and allocate its resources in the most appropriate and efficient means possible. At the same time, Bratton wanted to make his department leaders accountable for their divisions and precincts and report in weekly Compstat meetings on how they were addressing crime in their areas. Compstat seemed to be a success, crime in New York went down, and Bratton and Compstat were given much of the credit. Over the next fifteen years, Compstat grew and came to be synonymous with strategic, problem-solving policing using statistics and crime data in conjunction with electronic mapping software to show where crime is occurring geographically. It is now being implemented by many agencies across the U.S.in varying incarnations of the original model (McDonald, 2002; Weisburd, Mastrofski, Greenspan, & Willis, 2004).

Intelligence-Led Policing

The evolution of the crime fighting model has continued as new ideas and methods are discovered and put into practice. Today, the problem-oriented or intelligence-led approach to policing has gained prominence. Problem-oriented policing (POP), a term first coined by Herman Goldstein (1990), refers to using research and analysis to identify problems facing police organizations and then implementing intelligent responses to these problems and then evaluating the effectiveness of the response (Clarke & Eck, 2005; Clarke & Schultze, 2005). Though problem analysis includes data analysis and crime mapping to see where crime occurs and to identify trends and patterns, it also attempts to go deeper and examine the underlying societal conditions that are causing crime (Eck, 2004). It is not meant to be a static type of cookie-cutter response to crime, but to evolve and adapt to changing problems and situations as needed (Boba, 2003).

Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety

DDACTS uses ideas taken from the community policing model and the POP model to create an analysis-driven model to target crime in a proactive way (Ratcliffe, 2008; Sherman, et al.; Weisburd, 2008). The theory behind DDACTS is that traffic enforcement increases law enforcement visibility and therefore increases the perceived risk among offenders that they may be arrested (National Institute of Justice, 2009).Previous studies have found that high-visibility traffic enforcement is an effective way to control illegal drug markets and gun violence in high-crime areas (McGarrell, Chernak, & Weiss, 2002; Weiss & Morckel, 2007). In Dayton, Ohio and Kansas City, Kansas, researchers found that when officers assigned to routine patrol increased the number of12traffic stops that they made during discretionary time, there was a statistically significant drop in the number of arrests made for drugs and weapons (Weiss & Freels, 1996; Sherman & Rogan, 1995; Sherman, Shaw, & Rogan, 1995). In the Kansas City experiment, officers were specially trained in how to search vehicles for weapons, and during the six-month experiment, gun seizures increased by 65% in the target beat. At the same time, gun crimes decreased by 50%.

The key to implementing the DDACTS model is the collection of data and the mapping of that data. Global Information Systems (GIS) is a mapping technology that was first developed in the 1990's and became a key component of Compstat and is now becoming widely used nationally by both large and small agencies (Bueermann, Markovic, and Smith, 2006; Chainey & Ratcliffe, 2005). GIS is used from the initial stages of data collection, recording and collecting crime and accident activity, identifying hot spots, and then in the monitoring stages to measure the success of operations (Braga, 2008; Cameron, Chainey, Eck, Leitner, & Wilson, 2005). Furthermore, Ratcliffe and others have used aoristic analysis to determine temporal hot spots of crime based on geographer Harvey Miller's measurement theory for time geography which is a key element to determine the best times to target crime and accident hot spots (Miller, 2004; Ratcliff, 2000; Ratcliffe, 2002, Ratcliffe, 2004; Ratcliffe & McCullagh, 1998).

Richard Mayne's vision of policing was one of prevention, and the creators of DDACTS are attempting a return to this objective. DDACTS is an ambitious project that uses elements of directed patrols and community policing, routine activity theory and rational choice theory, environmental criminology and crime analysis, and also Compstat and problem-based policing. What it does is combine all of these elements with the new technology of GIS to attempt to fight crime through what is really an idea as old as organized policing itself, proactively. The purpose of this study will be to test how successfully DDACTS fulfils its mission as a deterrent to crime and its value to traffic enforcement.

Conclusion

To understand intelligence-led policing and the data-driven approach to enforcement, one must look at the methods and evolution of policing and the various models of policing that have been used. Richard Mayne, the head of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829 declared that "the primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime: the next that of detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed (Mayne, 1829)." Somehow, in the 180 years since Mayne made that statement, the goal of policing has been reversed to make the detection and punishment of offenders the prime objective, with crime prevention coming in a very distant second.