Abstract
Objectives
We investigate the potential for preventing crimes at temporary hot spots in addition to chronic hot spots. Using data on serious violent crimes from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we investigate an early warning system (EWS) for starting/stopping police deployments at temporary hot spots in coordination with constant prevention work at chronic hot spots.
Methods
We estimate chronic hot spots using kernel density smoothing. We use simple rules for detecting flare-ups of temporary hot spots, predicting their persistence, deploying police, and stopping deployments. We also consider a combination program including the hottest chronic hot spots, with EWS applied to remaining areas. Using 2000–2010 data, we run computational experiments varying the size of chronic hot spots and varying rule thresholds to tune the EWS. Tradeoff curves with percentage of crimes exposed to prevention versus percentage area of the city with crime prevention workload provide tools for coordinating chronic and temporary hot spot programs.
Results
The combination program is the most efficient, equitable, and responsive program. After first allocating police prevention resources to the hottest chronic hot spots, the marginal benefits of adding more chronic hot spot area is not as high as adding temporary hot spots. Chronic hot spots are limited to large commercial and adjoining residential areas. Temporary hot spots are widely scattered throughout Pittsburgh.
Conclusions
Temporary hot spots exist outside of chronic hot spots and are targets for prevention as supplements to chronic hot spots. A combination program targeting both chronic and temporary hot spots is recommended.
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Notes
The status of hot spot policing in Pittsburgh over 2000–2010 was confirmed by reading annual reports of the Pittsburgh Police Bureau and from interviews of commanders of the two zones with the highest violent crime rates. Authority to use hot spot programs rests with the six zone commanders, and they used saturation patrols in only two locations for short periods. A 2012 master’s student project in the Heinz College of Carnegie Mellon University designed chronic hot spots using the methods provided in this paper for one of the commanders, who has since implemented the design. In the early 1990s, one Pittsburgh neighborhood, Homewood, famously had intensive hot spot policing for an entire summer, supported by a DMAP crime mapping project (Olligschlaeger 1998) but that kind of effort was not repeated in the study period.
This estimate was provided by Commander Brackney of the Pittsburgh Police Bureau through personal communication. In contrast, one estimate in the literature (Famega et al. 2005) is that up to 75 % of patrol officers’ time is not spent answering calls, so other cities may have higher average times available for hot spot patrol than Pittsburgh.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Professors Al Blumstein, John Eck, Daniel Neill, Jerry Ratcliffe, and David Weisburd for their suggestions on our earlier research leading to the current paper. We also wish to thank Acting Chief Regina McDonald, Commander RaShall Brackney, and Detective Deborah Gilkey of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police for assistance with the crime data used in this paper and their insights into crime patterns in Pittsburgh. Finally, we owe our gratitude to the referees and editors for their many insightful suggestions.
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Gorr, W.L., Lee, Y. Early Warning System for Temporary Crime Hot Spots. J Quant Criminol 31, 25–47 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-014-9223-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-014-9223-8