What Happened?
Portland’s City Council approved a $699,464 federal grant awarded to the city’s Police Bureau to conduct a hot spot policing program. The grant was provided through the U.S. Department of Justice.
Goal
The Portland Police Bureau will send officers to patrol different locations throughout the city for 15 minutes, and then rotate to another spot. Over the past three years, the city has identified 20 hot spots in Portland where crime volume and emergency phone calls are significant. The bureau already conducted 15,000 hot spot patrols over the summer. The grant from the U.S. Department of Justice will help the bureau analyze the results, Oregon Live reported.
The bureau is looking to see if the presence of a police officer in hot spot areas – even for a short period of time and less frequently – will reduce crime rates and emergency call volume. The study will also:
- Track locations of criminal activity outside the hot spots to see if the targeted patrols result in incidents occurring in new spots
- Monitor criminal activity during off-peak crimes to see if the patrols are still effective
- Determine if the hot spot patrols will impact police response times to emergency calls
- Gauge how officers feel about the hot spot patrol practice
The Portland Police Bureau will work with Portland State University criminal justice professors and the Sacramento police to analyze the results.
Sacramento Example
The Sacramento police will provide first-hand insight, as the department was one of the first to experiment with hot spot policing in 2011. The police department identified 42 hot spot areas and conducted a study on the efficacy of hot spot patrolling. The Sacramento Police Department found:
- 25 percent decline in incidents in hot spots
- No increase in response times to service calls
- No evidence of crime displacement
- Significant jumps in officers acting proactively in hot spots
The Sacramento study adopted the 15-minute hot spot patrol theory from Minneapolis, which discovered in a 1995 study the optimal amount of time to send officers into hot spots was between 12 and 16 minutes.
How It Works
According to the National Institute of Justice, there is no specific formula for identifying hot spot areas in a community. Communities typically combine statistics with officer experience to pinpoint areas where hot spot policing should occur.
In the past few years, hot spot policing has generated more interest thanks to the availability of new technologies that can conduct spatial analyses of criminal activity and crime analysts to assist police departments in identifying trends.
Once hot spots have been identified, police departments can implement a variety of strategies including:
- Order maintenance and drug enforcement crackdowns
- Increased gun searches and seizures
- Zero tolerance policing
Police departments can focus on community- or problem-oriented policing tactics. Police-oriented strategies typically involve police-led efforts to change conditions in hot spot areas that lead to crime. Community-oriented policing is more traditional in nature and focuses on deterrence and increased risk of apprehension to reduce crime.
Funds for Safety
Gov1 has reported on a variety of federal funds police departments can apply for to reduce crime and poverty.