Police agencies live under the constant threat of being too successful. This statement is a bit pretentious and a lofty goal that is difficult to achieve. But let’s face it; crime problems fuel police agency budgets. When crime problems emerge and can be articulated, police executives demand more resources to respond. When police achieve measured and sustained crime reductions, it becomes more difficult for departments to justify the need for more officers, technology, or other resources.
Police agencies live under the constant threat of being too successful.
Successful policing is often taken for granted when crime counts are low – even if police activities were initially credited with reducing crime. Unfortunately, a disconnect between inputs and outcomes of policing occurs when measures of police productivity are reliant on the persistence of the crime incidents that police departments aim to prevent. Such is the case when productivity measures depend on people to be stopped, ticketed or arrested for crimes already committed rather than on more sustainable and benign measures, such as police officers’ efforts associated with reducing crime risks, or other actions taken to mitigate spatial or situational attractors of illegal behavior at risky places.
Police actions have an important role to play in affecting crime risks. They can deter offenders, embolden victims, and assist in the hardening of targets. These products can have the overall impact of reducing crime occurrence. But we must separate what we would see as crime prevention and response from risk reduction strategies. A risk reduction strategy requires that police identify the environmental conditions in which crime is likely to appear. This diagnosis can be ascertained from existing free resources, such as risk terrain modeling. Police can then propose strategies to address these conditions and interrupt the interactions that lead to illegal behavior settings and new crimes. Alternatively, police dealings with people at crime hot spots may have the effect of deterring criminals or even reducing crime counts at these areas in the short-term. But, despite this, the underlying spatial factors that attract and generate problems in these areas do not go away. So, three things can happen: crime disappears, it displaces, or it subsides to reemerge later. This is “good” for justifying police budgets, but it's a burden on police departments in pursuit of the mission to prevent crime with sustained oomph.
Sparrow (2015) wrote a provocative article about measuring performance in a modern police organization. He argues that reported crime rates will always be important indicators for police departments. However, substantial and recurrent reductions in crime figures are only possible when crime problems have first grown out of control. A sole reliance on the metric of crime reduction, Sparrow explained (p. 5), would “utterly fail” to reflect the very best performance in crime control practices when police actions are successful at keeping crime rates low and nipping emerging crime problems as they bud. Beyond looking at crime rate changes, a risk reduction approach to solving crime problems suggests success from interventions when factors other than merely crime counts improve. Risk-based policing has dual objectives: One to reduce crime counts and the other to reduce the influences of known risk factors. Risk-based policing allows police leaders to demonstrate to elected officials and budget-makers how what police are doing works to reduce crime and why the crime rates are lower because of their efforts.
While risk-based policing can accommodate the ideas of situational crime prevention in targeting certain locations for intervention, the ideals extend beyond a focus on opportunities for crime or the “crime triangle”, and, instead, target all aspects of the context that raises the risk that crime will occur. This opens the door to a broad array of police productivity and success measures that do not demand the illegal behaviors to continue, or crime incidents to be reported, in order for police to validate or justify their own value and continued budget-item existence.
Risk terrain modeling, for instance, provides an approach to understanding crime occurrence by identifying the relative influences of factors that contribute to it; risk terrain maps inform decisions about which places can be targeted to reduce these risks. This is inherent in risk-based policing, which considers the effects of guardianship, victim characteristics, locations, precipitators, exposures, and offenders in a risk narrative that is contextually dynamic. Iterative risk terrain models and reconsiderations of risk narratives make risk reduction activities transparent, measurable and testable. In this way, risk-based policing enables police departments to be appropriately credited with success and judged against the probable consequences of alternative or non-existent engagements in the communities they serve and protect.
risk-based policing enables police departments to be appropriately credited with success and judged against the probable consequences of alternative or non-existent engagements in the communities they serve and protect.
Cultural shifts within police departments away from ‘crime fighting’ and toward ‘risk management’ costs very little financially. Coupled with sustainable investments in human capital, smart data, continuing education, and current technology, risk-based policing can go a long way to help agencies fight and prevent crime, and then to credit their actions with success in a way that is obviously clear and sustainable. Recent uses of risk terrain modeling in various practical settings suggest that police departments are able to incorporate risk management into their analytical and cultural frameworks with real success. More departments should follow their lead, and city councils should support their efforts.