What Happened?
Focusing on a strategy know as Hot-Spot policing has helped New York City simultaneously cut the number of prisoners and reduce crime, saving the City an estimated $1.5 billion annually.
So What?
According to a recent article in the New York Times, NYC went against the grain of the rest of the country over the past 25 years, reducing the number of prisoners and cutting crime by 75 percent.
Bad Policy
Since the 1980s, when major changes in incarceration policy began, the prison population has grown so large that the US now houses one-fifth of the world’s prisoners. That costs taxpayers $75 billion annually.
New Angle
In the 1990s, New York introduced computerized crime mapping as a tool to enable police to focus on hot-spot policing. This type of system is based on the concept that a small percentage of criminals commit a large share of crimes in even fewer geographic hot spots. From the NYTimes article, “In city after city, researchers found that half of crimes occur within about 5 percent of an urban area — a few buildings, intersections and blocks, often near transit stops and businesses like convenience stores, bars and nightclubs.”
Since that time, prison populations have decreased, along with the police force, which also has been reduced by 15 percent.
The hot-spot theory has been tested in other cities and proven to be a valuable method of crime prevention.
Additional Benefits
Early converts to the hot spot strategy were hard to come by. But the two main purveyors of the theory, who won the equivalent of the Nobel prize for criminology, were able to prove that not only did crime rates go down, but it also did not move to another area.
The results of lower prison populations also are putting forth an entirely new debate on the benefits of incarcerating fewer people. Two economists recently calculated that if the nationwide prison population was cut by 25%, that savings could hire 100,000 new police officers, potentially reducing crime by 400%.