Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 74, May–June 2021, 101814
Journal of Criminal Justice

The Indianapolis harmspot policing experiment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2021.101814Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Federally-funded randomized experimental trial in collaboration with Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

  • Proactive policing of social harmspots versus traditional crime hotspots.

  • Proactive policing in harmspots may generate similar crime prevention benefits as hotspots policing.

  • There was no observed spatial or temporal displacement.

  • Pre/post community survey suggests citizens are supportive of data-driven policing , though lower among Black respondents.

  • Survey results suggest the proactive policing experiment did not exacerbate citizen concerns of data-driven policing.

Abstract

Purpose

This 100-day experiment explored the impact of a dynamic place-based policing strategy on social harm in Indianapolis. Scholars have recently called for place-based policing to consider the co-occurrence of substance abuse and mental health problems that correlate within crime hot spots. Moreover, severity is not ubiquitous across harmful events and should thus be weighted accordingly.

Methods

Harmspots and hotspots were operationalized for this experiment and both received proactive police activities. Evaluation analyses includes multivariate point processes and hawkes processes to determine experimental effects. Survey data was collected via telephone surveys, was weighted for demographic representativeness, and analyzed using Poisson regression.

Results

Results indicate proactive policing in dynamic harmspots can reduce aggregated social harm. No statistical deterrence effect was observed in crime hotspots. Proactive police activity in harmspots was associated with higher arrest rates, though not disproportionate across race and ethnicity, nor was there an effect on incidents of use of force. A two-wave pre/post community survey indicated Indianapolis citizens believe data-driven policing to be useful, though perceptions vary across demographic groups with moderate trust around computer algorithms.

Conclusion

Place-based policing strategies should consider social harm events as a method to operationalize proactive policing. Observed effects are consistent with those of hotspots policing while enabling cities to broaden the set of harms experienced by varying communities. Harmspot policing may also position municipalities to maximize social service delivery at places beyond policing.

Introduction

Recently, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a comprehensive report, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, et al., 2018), summarizing the collective evidence of various proactive policing strategies on crime and community impact. Among several conclusions and recommendations were that 1) place-based approaches yielded significant crime reduction benefits with minimal displacement and community dissatisfaction; 2) problem-solving strategies aimed at root-causes of issues generated short-term reductions; and 3) community-based programs that leverage existing community resources appear promising, though are limited by evaluations with weak designs. These various approaches to proactive policing are grounded by different logic (see (Weisburd et al., 2019)), each which demonstrates the complex and nuanced mechanisms police must consider when attempting to fashion crime prevention strategies.

Place-based proactive strategies exhibit the strongest evidence that police can reduce crime (National Academies of Sciences et al., 2018), primarily achieved through hot spots policing strategies (Braga, Turchan, Papachristos, & Hureau, 2019). What remains less certain are the methods through which police and scholars identify hot spots for effective intervention. Low levels of spatial overlap among hotspots of various crime types has been observed (Haberman, 2017), suggesting police departments may have to pick and choose offense types for optimal outcomes, or triage the fewest places with highest overall crime. Telep and Hibdon extend this operational challenge and contend hot spots policing should move beyond crime counts as “…analyses in these hot spots should be guided by additional, non-police data sources…[and]…that a reliance on crime data (incidents or calls) alone may oversimplify or distort the distribution of crime or other harmful activity” (Telep & Hibdon, 2017, p. 662).

There exists a growing recognition that placed-based policing, and policing more generally, should move beyond crime to focus on “social harm”. Ratcliffe articulates this broadened approach to policing and urges the inclusion of multiple crime types, various drug and forgery offenses, and traffic crashes to be integrated as “The inclusion of these supplementary metrics is more reflective of the multidimensional responsibilities of the police in the community” (Ratcliffe, 2015, p. 176). Moreover, recent work has shed light on the co-occurrence of substance abuse, mental health, and physical health problems pervasive within crime hot spots (Goldberg, White, & Weisburd, 2019; White & Goldberg, 2018; White & Weisburd, 2018; Wood, 2020). Furthermore, recent research also suggests that micro-places for police intervention can measure “harm” as opposed to event counts. Harm is an event-weighted calculation of severity which more accurately captures the seriousness of issues facing micro-places as well as enables police to identify different harms plaguing different geographies (Ratcliffe, 2015; L. Sherman, Neyroud, & Neyroud, 2016; Weinborn, Ariel, Sherman, & O'Dwyer, 2017).

In sum, place-based police interventions are effective in reducing crime and there is currently a movement to enhance methods used to identify intervention micro-places. This movement suggests that events should be weighted with respect to severity, or impact on society, and that such event types should extend beyond traditional crime counts to include incidents that reflect harms experienced by different communities. To date, there has yet to be an empirical test of a dynamic proactive place-based policing intervention that leverages a broader set of social harm incidents, each weighted by severity. These harms include criminal events, self-harm, and potential harm from racially biased policing. The current study reports the findings of a federally-funded experiment in Indianapolis which sought to engage these specific questions. Lastly, the present study reports community perceptions of data-driven analytics that guide police activity.

Section snippets

Place-based policing interventions and the movement to social harm

Place-based policing strategies leverage the empirical reality that large portions of crime are concentrated within small geographic bandwidths across urban landscapes (Weisburd, 2015). As approximately 50% of crime occurs within 5% of a city geography, police can then identify focal areas for proactive activities, service delivery, and enforcement (Weisburd, 2018). Hot spots policing is the primary vehicle through which crime concentration at place is translated to a policing strategy. In

Study objectives

Our harmspot policing experiment has six primary objectives. We operationalize dynamic hot spot policing with a broadened set of events consistent with recent movements for police to consider social harm as opposed to just crime. Strong evidence suggests hotspots policing generates significant short-term crime reductions, however we seek to observe if these crime prevention benefits can be achieved when identifying intervention micro-places using social harm events and weighting as well as

Experimental methods

Indianapolis, Indiana served as the study location, which is the largest city in the state, the state capital, and a consolidated city-county municipality. Although Marion County and Indianapolis share city-county boundaries, the cities of Beech Grove, Lawrence, Southport, and Speedway are independent municipalities with their own police departments also located within Marion County and thus fall outside of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's (IMPD) jurisdiction. As of July 2019,

Community survey methodology

To capture citizen perceptions of data-driven policing in Indianapolis, pre- and post-experiment survey waves were administered. The pre-experiment survey was conducted in the month preceding, and the post-survey in the week immediately following, the field trial. Surveys were conducted via phone using live callers and computer assisted telephone interviewing software. Phone number sample was sourced randomly from Dynata and comprised of Indianapolis city residents only. Both cellular and

Results

In Table 4 we show the estimated coefficients for the regression corresponding to Eq. (4). Here we find that the effect of proactive activities in treatment harmspots is significant at the p = .0295 level, whereas the effect of an activity in a control hotspot is not statistically significant. To quantify the effect of a single activity in a harmspot, we add the coefficients β + δ =  − 38.6. Given the average proactive activity lasted 10.4 min, this result can be interpreted as a lowering of

Community survey results

In Fig. 3 we display results from the first survey question asking respondents to consider the statement “the police should use data analytics to predict where crime is most likely to happen” and then respond with strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, or strongly agree. Here we find that the majority of respondents either somewhat or strongly agree that police should use data analytics to predict crime, an attitude that is consistent across racial/ethnic subgroups of the

Discussion

Over the course of a 100 day field trial during the summer of 2019, the IMPD engaged in dynamic harmspot and hotspot policing. Officers utilized a web application to guide proactive activities that included vehicle and foot patrols, high-visibility positioning of marked cars for traffic enforcement, community education of data-driven policing at micro-places, and enhanced awareness of local substance abuse services. Our experiment focused on six primary objectives, and these guide our

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NSF grants SCC-1737585 and ATD-1737996. We sincerely thank the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department for their commitment to this project, and their service to the community. Specifically at IMPD, we thank Chief Randal Taylor, Deputy Chief Kendale Adams, former Chief Bryan Roach, and the entire Command Staff for their support of this project. We also thank Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services, and specifically Chief of IT and Informatics Tom Arkins. We

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