police officer research paper topic

• Contract Law Research Topics Topics: 113
• Crime Investigation Topics Topics: 131
• Intellectual Property Topics Topics: 107
• Supreme Court Paper Topics Topics: 87
• Death Penalty Essay Topics Topics: 142
• Juvenile Delinquency Research Topics Topics: 133
• Criminal Behavior Essay Topics Topics: 71
• Capital Punishment Essay Topics Topics: 65
• Criminal Justice Paper Topics Topics: 218
• Court Topics Topics: 140
• Civil Law Topics Topics: 54
• Gun Control Paper Topics Topics: 168
• International Law Essay Topics Topics: 117
• International Relations Topics Topics: 176
• International Organizations Essay Topics Topics: 97

243 Police Research Topics + Examples

If you’re a criminal justice student, you might want to talk about or write a paper on the work of police officers and the hot issues in policing. Luckily, StudyCorgi has compiled an extensive list of police topics for you! On this page, you’ll find law enforcement essay topics, as well as questions and ideas for presentations, research papers, debates, and many more! Outstanding police essay examples are also waiting for you below!

🏆 Best Police Topics to Write About

✍️ police essay topics for college, 👍 good police research topics & essay examples, 📌 easy police essay topics, 🎓 most interesting law enforcement topics, 💡 simple law enforcement research topics, ❓ research questions about police, 🔎 law enforcement research paper topics, 🚔 controversial policing topics.

• Why I Want to Be a Police Officer
• Police Recruitment and Training
• A Police Officer’s Education and Duties
• What Is the Police Authority?
• Enhancing Police Training Program Proposal
• Conflict and Power: Police and Community Collaboration
• Police Officers Treatment Towards Civilians Based on Social Class
• Police Patrol Effectiveness Research Assessment The paper recaps debates that have arisen on the police patrol effectiveness in crime prevention, by investigating research on the said issue.
• Police Officers’ Wellness and Mental Health An increasing number of police officers are facing depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and even suicide.
• Public Role and Control of Police Citizens of democratic states have a right to exert control over the police. This claim is based on the fact that police are a part of the government.
• Laptop Computers in Police Cars: Benefits & Drawbacks This paper will investigate these problems and their prevalence with respect to the utilization of laptops in police vehicles.
• Police Professionalism and Ethics of Policing Accountability must persist given the discriminatory patterns among officers, who should be allowed room to improve as long as their good faith can be observed.
• Police Service Transformation: Research Onion The research onion depicts the research strategies and approaches that will be employed in this study. They are discussed in more detail in this paper.
• Police Corruption: Understanding and Preventing Police corruption remains one of the leading challenges, affecting law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world.
• Essay on Police Brutality in the United States Police officers are allowed to use “non-negotiable coercive force” to maintain public order and control the behavior of citizens.
• Police Officers: Qualifications and Responsibilities The police are in charge of upholding law and order, protecting the public, and stopping, spotting and looking into illegal activity, making it a dynamic occupation.
• The Police Sexual Harassment: Case Study This paper reviews a case involving sexual assault by a police officer with the view to discussing its cause, results, and what could have been done to prevent the wrongdoing.
• Textual Analysis of the Song “Police” by Suprême Ntm The purpose of this paper is to analyze the song “Police” written and performed by a French hip-hop band Suprême NTM. It is dedicated to the problem of police brutality, racism.
• The Phenomenon of “Defunding the Police” The work Defunding the Police aims to explore the meaning of “defunding the police” and arguments and counterarguments surrounding this initiative.
• Mental Health and Well-Being of Canadian Police Officers The paper presents the problem of mental health in Canadian police officers. Even before the pandemic, stress and anxiety were common among law enforcement officers.
• The Six Virtual Police Department The six departmental units include the Chief of Police, Special Operations Division, Patrols, Investigations Division, Civilian Unit, and Support Service Division.
• The Use of Force in Police: Theoretical Analysis This discussion evaluates force standards and police leadership responsibilities through the prism of deindividuation and contagion.
• About Police Chaplaincy Program The article argues for launching a police chaplain program to connect the community with the police and provide survivors with the emotional and social support they need.
• Organization Effectiveness of a Police Department The organization is a core and framework of effective performance. The organization allows the police department to ensure effective management and organization of human resources.
• Western Australia Police Communications Centre’s Change The WA Police Communications Centre is a vital organ of the regions police force. This essay seeks to analyze the challenges that affect the centre.
• Police Administration and Key Effectiveness Factors When evaluating the impact of a police force, the best indicator would be to examine repetitive police action in preventing the same types of crimes.
• “Police Solve Just 2% of All Major Crimes” by S. Baughman Baughman’s article is about the insufficiency of the work that the police do to solve severe crimes since only 2% of cases result in a conviction.
• Police Response to High Speed/Hot Pursuits Police officers have the responsibility of defending the lives of citizens by maintaining law and order, however, in attempts to avoid being arrested.
• The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officers The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is the national police force of Canada. They are responsible for policing in provinces, local communities, municipalities, and airports.
• Servant Leadership in a Police Organization The paper studies servant leadership, explicitly comparing and contrasting its traits with the major traits of a leader as outlined in the Good-to-Great book series.
• The Impact of Technology on the Police Patrol The use of complex technological systems by police officers to ensure the safety of citizens is a vital step in the development of the infrastructure of security and public order.
• Police Standards Should Be Modified There is a certain need for standards modification in the police that should be performed immediately. A particular amount of inequality exists in the departments of the police.
• Police Use-of-Force in Graham v. Connor & Tennessee v. Garner Cases A state police officer shot Garner to death as he fled the crime scene. Even though Garner was unarmed, the police officer felt he had the right to shoot him to prevent his escape.
• Benefits and Challenges of Using Drones for the Police Drones are becoming a state-of-the-art trend in policing; however, their implementation may face some difficulties regarding privacy and information security.
• Police Use of Force and Its Limits The paper aims to define what it means to be a police officer, discuss the legal use of nondeadly and deadly force, and determine the limits placed on police power.
• Leadership in the Los Angeles Police Department LAPD continues to develop and implement new and innovative programs in which its officers are trained to become good leaders.
• Policing From Above: Drone Use by the Police Drones are among the few technologies that law enforcement agencies could use to alleviate many of the challenges they face in their ordinary duties.
• All Police Officers Should Wear a Body Camera This paper suggests that the use of body cameras positively contributes to the reinforcement of procedural justice, as the prevention of unethical behavior and police brutality.
• How Does ‘Police Culture’ Influence Police Practice? Police culture is influenced by a number of social and political factors which determine its main functions and internal structure.
• Mentoring Programs in Police Departments The given proposal revolves around a one-on-one mentoring program that can be used by police departments to improve officers’ competence.
• Courtelaney Pass Police Department: Potential Problem Solutions There are four essential problems in the Courtelaney Pass police department: racial tensions, questionable investigative and enforcement practices, poor community reporting, and the lack of diversity.
• Age Influence on the Support for Police Action This paper addresses to what extent age influences the support for police action. The hypothesis is that old aged people are in support of the idea of police action.
• Police Misconduct and Its Affecting Factors Police discretion is a necessary element of the policing activity. Many situations which officers encounter on a daily basis require judgment and appropriate decision-making.
• The Wokefield Police Department’s Work in Memphis The Wokefield police department has a law enforcement mandate in Memphis. The region has experienced an upsurge in juvenile offenders, especially in the carjacking.
• Observation of Protest Against Police Brutality The event was a protest against police brutality in downtown City Hall. The event’s focal point was the ongoing issue of police brutality against Black people in the country.
• Dealing with Stress in Police Training Police officers are trained to handle stressful situations in different ways, and the approach used in their training has been a topic of debate in the recent past.
• The Houston Police Department’s Services and Challenges The Houston Police Department offers critical services in Texas and assures the people of peace and stability. The police department, however, faces several challenges.
• A Police Failure in the Uvalde Mass Shooting The mass shooting in Uvalde is a prime example of how neglect of proper policing guidelines and management strategies can cause dire results for the local community.
• The Police Department’s Ethical Challenges Policemen should not allow immoral behavior to jeopardize their responsibilities. Officers must safeguard their relationships with the local people who depend on them.
• Police Brutality and Racial Bias Considering the long history of slavery, several generations have inherited racial prejudice towards Afro-American people, who have become the subject of abuse in many fields.
• Police Management in Killeen, Texas Killeen police station workforce is made up of three different generations, including millennials, boomers, and generation X.
• Effect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine Show on Perception of Police By connecting eight seasons to various crimes, Brooklyn Nine-Nine positions the police station as an inclusive workplace that saves people’s lives and promotes dedicated workers.
• Police Brutality in the United States The existence of systemic racial bias in law enforcement leads to unequal treatment and a higher likelihood of police brutality when dealing with people of color.
• Police Brutality During COVID-19 Pandemic In the United States, there has been a perceived and observed police injustice towards minority communities, especially Blacks.
• Interactions of Local Police and Homeland Security Officials The purpose of this paper is to compare the interactions of the two agencies in lawkeeping and order by examining their structural responsibilities as captured in the state laws.
• Sociological Positivism Theory in Police Practice Sociological positivism is primarily concerned with how specific social conditions in a person’s experience might contribute to an increased proclivity for crime.
• Cultural Influences on Police Decision-Making The paper identifies cultural influences on police decision-making. There has been a deterioration in trust between the police and some social groups.
• Police Misconduct Against the Black Community Police misconduct has escalated against the Black community and other ethnic groups. Mistreatment by police officers is determined by two significant factors: race and sex.
• The Dallas Police Department Police Academy and Training Curriculum The paper states that the future of diversity hiring in law enforcement will be driven strongly by organizational structure and leadership going forward.
• Community Policing: Police Officers’ Role Orientations Community policing has shown to have multiple benefits for both local citizens and law enforcement in the activities to both prevent or respond to potential threats or disruptions.
• Aspects of Police Culture and Diversity This paper discusses the topic of police culture and diversity. In the American law enforcement system, some police departments do not appreciate diversity.
• The Secret Police in East Germany The Secret Police in East Germany, also known as the Stasi, was an organization established by military forces and ministers to exercise total control over the population.
• The Los Angeles Police Department’s Overview The Los Angeles Police Department is headed by the board of police commissioners, which comprises a five-member team appointed to oversee the department’s operation.
• Police Misconduct: New Rochelle Police Officer Case Study Officer Michael Vaccaro was driven by the desire to punish the criminal Malik Fogg; however, he used too much force.
• Motivating Police Officers to Serve and Protect The proposal focuses on the idea that Heritage PD could significantly benefit from the use of motivating factors when approaching police officer productivity.
• Police Officers’ Excessive Use of Force Although law enforcement officers are allowed to use lethal force, they should exercise that authority only when the suspect possess threat of harming others physically.
• Police Accountability and Reform The paper states that the police are experiencing a crisis that has made them under scrutiny and pressure from the public to make reforms.
• Discussion Misuse of Lies in the Police The paper discusses situations where police officers may misuse lying when dealing with mentally ill people or people in crisis.
• Improving Police Morale and Community Communication This paper’s purpose is to examine the police department on street patrol, and also to reveal the issue of mass dismissal of police officers.
• The Police in the Modern World The police in the modern world is a body endowed with certain powers and responsibilities. Its mission is to enforce the law, prevent crime, and ensure public safety.
• The San Diego Police Department’s History and Work This work describes the work of the San Diego Police Department, its brief history, and statistics about working there.
• Restructuring of Los Angeles Police Department Fiscal Budget The foundation of the paper is a breakdown of the Los Angeles Police Department budget, a proposal to reduce the budget and its effects.
• The Legality of the Scope of a Police Search The paper discusses the two court cases which demonstrate that the legality of the scope of a police search is a controversial legal question.
• Police Killing Black People in a Pandemic Police violence as a network of brutal measures is sponsored by the government that gives the police officers permission to treat black people with disdain.
• The History of Relationships Between Police and African Americans The paper describes the necessity to spread the knowledge of racism’s history and discuss it to ensure the next generations’ tolerance.
• Police Civil Liability in the Light of Monroe v. Pape People want to know that in trouble, such as, for instance, a robbery or car theft, police will come to their aid and guarantee protection.
• Collaborative Organizational Changes in Police The paper states that both Future Search and Open Space techniques are applicable and beneficial in military organizations such as the police.
• Police Officer With a Juvenile Police officers faced with a juvenile under arrest makes their decisions based on the balance of legal and situational factors relevant to the case.
• Researching and Analysis of Police Abuse The analysis of high-profile cases of police abuse allows assuming that there would not have been fatal outcomes if the officers had respected the basic rights of their victims.
• Police Misconduct in Criminal Justice Police misconduct is one of the issues involved in criminal justice, and there are various aspects and events entailing unconstitutional practices in law enforcement.
• The Influence of Police Bias on Disparity in Juvenile Crime: Methodology The issue of racial disparity in the criminal justice system remains a topical one. 64% of the charged youth are people of color.
• An Inside View of Police Officers’ Experience with Domestic Violence “An Inside View of Police Officers’ Experience with Domestic Violence” is an article authored by Horwitz et al., published in 2011.
• Internal Problems of Mississippiville’s Police Chief Hiring Process Mississippiville is in a difficult situation, including a tense social environment, in part caused by the ineffective management of the previous chief of police.
• The Civil Rights Movement: Minorities vs. Police An opposition between minorities and police appears to be a problem that started during the Civil Rights Movement and continues to modern days.
• Police Sexual Harassment Suit This paper analyzes the case of the ex-Round Lake Height’s policeman, Hossein Isbitan, who filed a Lawsuit against his boss despite other problem-solving measures at his workplace.
• Police Officer Characteristics and Evaluation Most people would prefer their police officers to be capable of making decisions and taking action, especially in tense situations where swift choices are necessary.
• Race and Police Brutality in American History Racism and police violence since the time of colonization has had intense effects on Black and Indigenous communities.
• Factors That Justify the Use of Deadly Force by Police Police shootings and killings of unarmed civilians arguably qualify as violations of the use-of-force standards that warrant the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators.
• Police Brutality: The Killing of Daunte Wright Police brutality is defined as the use of unjustified or excessive force by the police, usually against citizens. It refers to the violation of human rights by the police.
• US Police Brutality and Human Resources Connection Police brutality is one of the most pressing crisis problems in the United States, it requires additional research and immediate solutions.
• Police Discretion: Criminal Justice While in the academy and for their period of training, police are particularly skilled on how to handle various situations that they will come across.
• How Police Supervisory Styles Influence Patrol Officer Behavior The field supervisor, also identified as the patrol sergeant, directly oversees officers’ conduct, performance, appearance, and tactical operations assigned under their command.
• Discussion of Police Misconduct The paper discusses criminal justice system has developed various approaches that guarantee that police can be held accountable for their misconduct.
• Police Brutality on African Americans Police brutality against African Americans has been on the rise even after several constitutional and legal reforms made by the country to control it.
• Police Brutality Toward Black Community The black community needs help since they suffer due to police brutality, receive various kinds of injuries, and experience traumas.
• Analysis of Decision-Making Processes in Boston Police Department The paper covers the role of police in homeland and application of these systems to the Boston Police Department.
• “Learn About Being a Police Officer” by Kane Being a police officer is one of the most challenging professions because it requires dedication, determination, and sacrifice.
• Measuring Crime: Lynnfield’s Local Police Force Stop & Search Data The study aims to assess any obvious trends that may be associated with disproportionate and/or discriminatory exercise of ‘stop and search’ policy by law enforcement agencies.
• The Use of Wiretapping in Police Technology The report discusses Chapter 14 of the book “Police Technology” by Raymond E. Foster. Dr. Foster has written extensively on technical tools and gadgets for law enforcement.
• Police Selection Process: Metropolitan and New York Police Departments The Metropolitan Police Department and the New York Police Department selection process evaluates knowledge, abilities, skills, character and traits.
• The Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department: Most Pressing Issues This report outlines the main problematic issue with the functioning of the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department.
• Police Reforms Implementation: The Los Angeles Police Department 83% of the LA residents vouching for the good job of the police especially because the LAPD has desisted from using serious force since 2004.
• Ending Racial Bias and Bureaucracy Within Police Police officials may engage in bureaucratic or administrative corruption for private gain, which facilitates distrust in the efforts of law enforcement.
• Profiling Procedures in the Los Angeles Police Department The law enforcers and most commonly the police, have profiling procedures that separate certain groups of people from the majority.
• Police Shooting and Issue of Discrimination The issue of discrimination and police shootings can be resolved by observing both officers and citizens – collecting information by cameras can serve as objective material.
• Police Force Diversifying Strategies The presence of women officers and officers of color may act as a complementary stimulus, as they have an approach that could be more relatable for future personnel.
• Human Sex Trafficking and Police Technology: An Issue of the Past or Present? The paper provides an introduction that describes human sex trafficking before taking a specific approach of understanding the vice in Houston, Texas.
• “How to Fix America’s Police” by Stoughton The authors of the article suggest that the US police’s current situation could be fixed in two ways: either through state intervention or through local one.
• Police Brutality Against African Americans in America The purpose of this article is to describe the different approaches to researching the problem of police brutality against African Americans.
• Inequalities and Police Brutality Against the Black This paper aims to research racial inequality and hostile police attitudes towards the black population in the United States.
• Police Brutality Against African Americans The issue being examined refers to the problem of police brutality on African Americans. The mentioned problem is a burning one and is vividly expressed in modern society.
• The Significance of Police Discretion to the Criminal Justice System This paper is an investigation into the meaning of police discretion. It highlights the benefits of police discretion to the role of the police department.
• Report for the Chief of Police The current report contains the definition and description of the Uniform Crime Report, the data-gathering strategy used for the analysis and its rationale, and crime trends.
• Management Solution Needed for the Metropolitan Police Service The dangers of getting the balance right between security, easy access, and reduction of risk are to be the main focus of the response to the tasks.
• Organizational Change in Police Departments: A Theory-Based Analysis When examining the case of implementing Compstat systems in police districts the first to consider is the positive appeals of such as system.
• Interview With Chief of Police Mr. William Evans I had a rare chance of interviewing the Chief of Police for Hinds Community College Mr. William Evans in his office on Wednesday 19 November, 2014 at 5 p.m.
• Racist Actions of the American Police Force in “The Black and the Blue” by Matthew Horace In the book “The Black and the Blue,” Matthew Horace gives testimony from behind the blue wall of secrecy and paints a society where police molest citizens.
• Police Brutality and Impunity for Police Violence The overall purpose of this paper is to explore the topic of police brutality and police impunity as it is discussed in modern studies.
• Police Brutality Against African Americans and Media Portrayal Police brutality toward the African-American population of the United States is an issue that has received nationwide publicity in recent years.
• Investigation of the Chicago Police Department This paper will analyze some of the critical issues found in the investigation of the Chicago police department by the United States Department of Justice.
• Police Violence Against African Americans in the USA The statistic shows that the violence from law enforcement officials causes thousands of deaths of black men in the USA.
• How the Police Use Facial Recognition? Some law enforcement officers, especially in Florida, do not trust the application of technique as a warrant of arrest.
• Rodney King’s Police Brutality Case: What Went Wrong Rodney’s case remains a historic example of police brutality. The interplay of several factors might have led to the acquittals of the officers in the first trial.
• “The Black Officer Who Detained George Floyd Had Pledged To Fix the Police”: A Story of Alex Kueng “The Black Officer Who Detained George Floyd Had Pledged to Fix the Police” article allows concluding that the police system cannot be reformed from within.
• Metropolitan Police Service: Identity Management Solution Within the context of Metropolitan Police Service case study, the research underlines the need for such institution to ensure production of a viable management system.
• Role of Police Agencies in Law Enforcement The police have hardly had any authority to control the most of the white color crimes. In addition, lack of expertise among the police also contributed to this problem.
• Police Corruption in California The analysis of the information proves that police corruption in California depends on the work and social environment of police officers.
• Racial Profiling of Minority Groups by the Police in the United States This research paper will address racial profiling of minority groups by the police in the US through the analysis of background, theories, and concepts.
• Chesterfield County Police Department: Hiring Process This paper will explore the applicable requirements of the Chesterfield County Police Department for the position of an entry-level law enforcement officer.
• Beyond “Police Brutality”: Racist State Violence and the University of California – Article Review The article highlights the issues with police attitudes toward the application of seemingly extreme measures to non-violent perpetrators.
• Police Misconduct and the Misuse of Force Police misconduct is a vital concern as it affects the functioning of society and might cause much harm to individuals.
• The Issue of Police Injustice in the United States In March 2020, a tragic event led to the death of a black emergency medical technician, B. Taylor. According to descriptions, police were investigating a drug case and suspected her.
• Health Safety in the Police Department It is especially important to provide a healthy working environment for workers of a police department, as they need to continue their service even at the time of a health crisis.
• American Society Police Brutality Causes and Effects Police brutality in America is visible and accompanied by racial discrimination and creates negative consequences for society because it imposes trust issues.
• Police Brutality: The Rodney King Case The case of Rodney King is a demonstration of police brutality in the United States. This paper will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the incident, explaining it in detail.
• Sexual Assault Female Victims Avoid Reporting to Police Among the most under-reported crimes in the United States, one of the leading roles is occupied by sexual assault. Sixty-five percent of female victims avoid reporting to police.
• Evaluating Budget Documents of Police Department The paper will analyze the budget which was presented by the police department indicating both the estimates and the adjusted figures.
• Professional Ethics: Police Department The science of ethics attempts to give humanity the answers to the existential question of what is moral and what is not.
• National Association of Police Organizations This paper focuses on the performance of the National Association of Police Organizations, including its purposes and contribution to the United States’ law enforcement community.
• Forensic Psychology in the Police Subspecialty Forensic psychological officers have crucial roles in the running of the police departments. This is because law enforcement chores are entitled to many challenges.
• Forensic Psychology for Police Recruitment and Screening The quest for competitive and effective police officers led to the introduction of some measures to help in the recruitment of individuals.
• Procedural Justice in Contacts with The Police Analysis The paper examines the relational model of authority that indicates the procedural justice role in the public evaluation of and support for the police.
• Testing Food Service Employees: Policy Assessment Mary Mallon, or Typhoid Mary as she was called, worked as a cook and was reputed to have caused infections of Typhoid fever in 47 people and caused the death of 3.
• Motivation & Control: The Police Supervisor’s Dilemma It is universally acknowledged that the effectiveness of the work is toughly connected with a consistent organizational structure and subordinate system.
• Police Supervisor’s Dilemma: Control and Motivation The level of control needed in a police institution is related to the capability of officers to construct an inspiring environment.
• Community Policing Assignment: A History of Police Work in the Criminal Justice System Community policing led to the introduction of a system where the police officers and members of the community get a closer relationship.
• Dismal City Police Department: “Do More With Less” The approach of community policing as well as the strategies used and its implementation vary widely depending on the requirements and the reactions of communities.
• UK Police Are Changing Their Attitude to Racial Issues The increased number of black and Asian police officers influenced positively the way suspects from minority ethnic groups were handled
• Police Brutality: Analysis of the Problem Police brutality is directed towards racial minorities and poor immigrants who cannot protect their rights in the courtroom and have no money to file a law case against officers.
• Criminal Justice Ethics: Police Corruption & Drug Sales The growth of police corruption instances involving drug sales is relatively easy to explain. The financial rewards offered by the sales of illegal drugs are enormous.
• Police or Custodial Brutality in the United States The aspect of police or custodial brutality is the subject matter of the study. This has become a serious problem in the administration of law, order, and human justice in the USA.
• US Police Challenges Today: Police Discretion Police discretion is essential to the success of an officer and the public. Discretion means judgment, and for law officers, this can be the difference between life and death.
• Police-Community Relations: Leadership Project Police-community relations are essential in curbing crime because the community has got vast knowledge in relation to the crime being practiced in the community.
• Assessing Role of Technology in Police Crime Mapping The role of technology in police operations has become pivotal because it aids our law enforcement agencies to do their tasks easier and less time-consuming.
• Police Brutality and Mental Health of African Americas The authors hypothesize that the effect of experiencing blackness has a twofold impact on the young African Americans’ mental health
• America as a Superpower and the World’s Police The international policing role and strategy of the United States during the Cold War has become even more necessary in this period of terrorism and instability.
• The Report on the Courtelaney Pass Police Department The situational report on the Courtelaney Pass police department presents a number of important issues that should be addressed by the police administration.
• Police Liability Issue and Consequences of Illegal Actions The issue of the liability of police officers and their degree of responsibility for certain actions is the topic that is discussed in the media periodically and causes a great public response.
• Addressing the Gulf Coast Police Department Understaffing Despite the best efforts of recruiters, police departments all over the US are understaffed. The present paper analyzes the reasons for GCPD’s problems and offers measures to address these issues.
• Police Attitudes and Professionalism: Interview The interviewee chosen for this assignment is a 34-year old white married male, currently working as a full-time police officer in the Miami Police Department.
• New Orleans Police Department’s Ethics and Leadership
• Local Police Response to Terrorism
• Police Work: Public Expectations and Myths
• Are African Americans More Harassed by Police?
• Undercover Police Investigations in Drug-Related Crimes
• Dallas Tragic Events: The Shooting of Police Officers by a Perpetrator
• Driving and Police Stop in Dramatic Interpretation
• Police Administrators and Their Ethical Responsibility
• Police Brutality Increasing: Support for Black Males
• Police Injustice Towards African-Americans
• Police Unions’ Development in the US
• Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sexual Harassment Class Action
• Police Officer Murder, Trial and Punishment
• Myths of Policing: Police Work’ Expectation
• Police’s Brutality Towards African American Males
• Chesterfield County Police Department Structure
• Racial Profiling: Trust, Ethics, Police Legitimacy
• Police Brutality Toward African-American Males
• Police Detective Career: Information and Issues
• Criminal Profiling and Police Corruption
• Liability Issues for Police Departments
• Police Work’ Concepts and Operationalization
• Police Administration: Structures, Processes and Behavior
• Police Reform in Florida
• Police Shooting of Richard Cabot in Pittsburgh
• Police Violence and Subterfuge Cases
• Police Brutality: Reasons and Countermeasures
• The Issue of Police Brutality in Community
• The Rise of Police Brutality against African-American Males
• Are Illegal Police Quotas Still Affecting American Citizens?
• What Is the Name of American Police?
• What Are the Four Types of Police System?
• Are Women More Effective Police Officers?
• What Are Young Adults’ Perception of Police?
• What Are Some Nicknames for the Police?
• Which Country Has the Best Police System?
• Which Country Has the Largest Police Force in the World?
• When Did Police Brutality Start?
• Can the Police Reduce Crime?
• Are Police Allowed to Punch You in the UK?
• Which Countries Have Police Brutality?
• What Causes Police Corruption?
• What Is Excessive Force by Police?
• Which Indian State Has Most Powerful Police?
• What Is the Highest-Paid Job in the Police?
• How Does the Los Angeles Police Department Represent the City?
• How Can We Overcome Police Brutality?
• What Does Three Stars on a Police Uniform Mean?
• Should Police Officers Wear Cameras?
• Should the Police Have More Power?
• Do Police Officers Salute Military?
• Why Were the Police Unable to Catch Jack the Ripper?
• Which Country Has Private Police?
• How Many Police Are There in the UK?
• Are Body Cameras Fighting Police Misconduct?
• When Does Police Discretion Cross Boundaries?
• What Is the Issue of Police Brutality?
• How Does Police Brutality Violate Civil Rights?
• What Human Rights Are Being Violated by Police?
• Police use of force: trends, policies, and effects on public trust.
• How do police-worn body cameras affect officer accountability and transparency?
• Challenges and benefits of technology use in modern police.
• De-escalation techniques in police and their effects on reducing violent encounters.
• How does law enforcement address human trafficking?
• Police corruption and misconduct: causes, consequences, and prevention.
• Law enforcement challenges in investigating digital offenses.
• The effects of the militarization of police on civil liberties.
• The impact between the use of body-worn cameras and police use of force.
• The influence of implicit bias on police decision-making.
• Defunding the police: should funds be reallocated from law enforcement to social services?
• Are “stop-and-frisk” police practices constitutional?
• Facial recognition technology use by police: balancing public safety and privacy.
• Should no-knock warrants be banned?
• Do police unions promote the abuse of power?
• Is it possible to escape racial bias in predictive policing algorithms?
• The school-to-prison pipeline: do police officers belong in schools?
• Should drug testing for police officers be mandatory?
• Should the use of chokeholds and neck restraints in law enforcement be banned?
• Is anti-bias training for police officers effective in reducing violent police conduct?

Cite this post

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2021, September 9). 243 Police Research Topics + Examples. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/police-essay-topics/

"243 Police Research Topics + Examples." StudyCorgi , 9 Sept. 2021, studycorgi.com/ideas/police-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . (2021) '243 Police Research Topics + Examples'. 9 September.

1. StudyCorgi . "243 Police Research Topics + Examples." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/police-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "243 Police Research Topics + Examples." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/police-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "243 Police Research Topics + Examples." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/police-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Police were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on June 24, 2024 .

Police Topics for Research Papers

Erin schreiner.

The field of law enforcement provides a number of interesting topics worthy of exploration. If you plan to write a research paper that relates to this subject, selecting a topic that is current and engaging to you can prove a wise choice. Before you make your final topic decisions, consider some of the exciting options at your disposal and select the one about which you can find the most interesting information and that personally appeals to you most.

Explore this article

• Universal Precautions and the Police Force
• The Use of Tasers
• Communication Tools in Police Work
• The Effectiveness of Non-Motorized Officers
• Professional Development in Law Enforcement

1 Universal Precautions and the Police Force

Police work presents many dangers, one of which is the danger of contracting a disease through contact with human bodily fluids. Focus your research paper on the topic of universal precautions that officers can use to prevent disease contraction. Research the current universal precaution practices associated with police work as well as alternative options that could prove even more effective in keeping officers safe. Reference statistics in your resulting paper, using these numbers to prove the danger of disease contraction and the effectiveness of universal precautions or other prevention methods.

2 The Use of Tasers

Tasers are a relatively new tool in the police arsenal, and one that is often met with controversy. Gather information on tasers, their effectiveness and the dangers associated with taser use for your research paper. In your report, outline the benefits and weaknesses of using tasers, and discuss the precautions that police officers must take to use these tasers in a safe and effective fashion.

3 Communication Tools in Police Work

Communication is key to successful police work. Explore the tools of communication that police have at their disposal for your research paper. In your paper, discuss how each of these tools is used currently. Also, explore the potential changes to communication tools on the horizon, and explain how these changes could have an impact on the ease with which police can communicate necessary information.

4 The Effectiveness of Non-Motorized Officers

While many police officers cruise the town in squad cars, some have no motorized transportation at their disposal. Research these non-motorized officers, including foot patrolmen, bicycle-riding officers and even mounted police. Discuss situations in which these officers could be preferable to those who depend upon motorized transportation. Also, explore ways in which the effectiveness of these officers could be enhanced.

5 Professional Development in Law Enforcement

The field of law enforcement is an ever-changing one. For your research paper, explore the ways in which police officers are kept up to date on changes in the law enforcement field. Explore whether or not professional development is requisite for officers in your area, as well as how professional development is implemented. Also, discuss how this process could be improved upon to ensure that officers have the information they need to do their duties to the utmost effectiveness.

• 1 Police One: Law Enforcement Topics

About the Author

Erin Schreiner is a freelance writer and teacher who holds a bachelor's degree from Bowling Green State University. She has been actively freelancing since 2008. Schreiner previously worked for a London-based freelance firm. Her work appears on eHow, Trails.com and RedEnvelope. She currently teaches writing to middle school students in Ohio and works on her writing craft regularly.

Related Articles

Law Enforcement Research Paper Topics

What Are the Three Types of Police Patrols?

The Most Dangerous Air Force Jobs

What are Facts on the Cause of Police Brutality?

Career as a CN Rail Police Officer

Topics for a Nursing Research Paper

Science Research Paper Topic Ideas

Correctional Officer Testing

What Are the Branches of Homeland Security?

How to Make a Citizen's Arrest in Oklahoma

The Methods of Extinguishing Fires

The Use of Computers in Police Departments

Environmental and Industrial Use of Bacillus Subtilis

Business Research Paper Topics

Wildlife Speech Topics

What Was Nixon Accused Of?

How to Write a Paper on Strengths & Weaknesses

How to Find Past Information on a Resident at an Old...

Research Paper Topics About Animals

Tools or Equipment Needed for a Police Officer

Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. Whether you’re studying times tables or applying to college, Classroom has the answers.

• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Copyright Policy
• Manage Preferences

© 2020 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Media, All Rights Reserved. Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. See disclaimer .

Police1 Research Center

Find the latest information about research conducted by law enforcement organizations and academic institutions such as the National Police Foundation, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), among other organizations focused on officer wellness, intelligence-led policing and LEO safety issues. Research recently shared includes ‘resistance-related injuries’ among officers, the experience of minority applicants during the police recruitment process, and preventing vehicle crashes and injuries among officers.

• Data shatters the small-town myth about law enforcement safety
• Police1 asked: How satisfied are police officers with their careers?
• Police1 asked: Does public perception of law enforcement impact officers’ morale?
• What officers said were the biggest challenges of 2023
• What do we really know about police suicide?

A Police Officer’s Guide to Academic Research

• © 2023
• Anne Eason 0

University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

• Uniquely tailors discussion of research and academic skills to a higher education police audience
• Accessibly written by experts in the field with unique professional experience
• Provides a thorough understanding of the importance of evidence-based research in operational settings

859 Accesses

1 Citations

1 Altmetric

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

About this book

This book highlights how the practical skills of the police officer can be transferred into the realm of academic research and support them in becoming part of the evidence-based policing movement. It starts by exploring the professionalisation of the police service through higher education accreditation and the different methodologies of social research practice. Using operational comparisons and a little humour, it guides the reader through the swamp of concepts and processes, such as ethical approval, research paradigms and data gathering and analysis. It then takes them on a journey of reflection and reflexivity, challenging their own perspective on policing and working within the wider criminal justice sector and how they can make a valuable contribution to the development of policing practice.

Similar content being viewed by others

Doing Research on, for and with Police in Canada and Switzerland: Practical and Methodological Insights

Police Research and Public Health

• Criminology
• Criminal Justice
• Professionalization
• Research method
• Evidence-based research
• Police force

Table of contents (7 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

• Anne Eason, Kieran McCartan

A Climate of Change

• Jack Greig-Midlane, Michael Harris

The Three R’s—Reading, ’Riting, and Research

• Iain Sirrell

Research Methodologies: Research Who?

• Anne Eason, Veronika Clegg

Ethics and Considering the Risks of Desensitisation

• Kieran McCartan

Looking in the Mirror

Conclusion—putting it all together, back matter, editors and affiliations, about the editor, bibliographic information.

Book Title : A Police Officer’s Guide to Academic Research

Editors : Anne Eason

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19286-9

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Law and Criminology , Law and Criminology (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-19285-2 Published: 02 January 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-19286-9 Published: 01 January 2023

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIV, 118

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations

Topics : Policing , Research Methodology , Crime and Society

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Presentations made painless

• Get Premium

123 Police Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Police officers play a crucial role in maintaining law and order in society. Their job involves protecting citizens, preventing crime, and enforcing laws. As such, police officers must possess a wide range of skills and knowledge to effectively carry out their duties. One way to help police officers develop these skills is through essay writing. Writing essays on various law enforcement topics can help officers improve their critical thinking and communication skills. To help police officers get started, here are 123 essay topic ideas and examples:

• The role of police officers in society
• The history of policing in the United States
• Community policing strategies
• The importance of diversity in law enforcement
• The impact of technology on policing
• Police discretion and its role in law enforcement
• The use of force by police officers
• Police training and education requirements
• Police accountability and transparency
• The challenges of policing in a multicultural society
• The role of police unions in law enforcement
• The ethics of undercover police work
• The impact of social media on policing
• The relationship between police officers and the media
• The history of police corruption
• The impact of police militarization on communities
• The role of police officers in responding to mental health crises
• The use of body cameras by police officers
• The role of police officers in preventing domestic violence
• The impact of drug legalization on law enforcement
• The challenges of policing in rural communities
• The impact of immigration enforcement on police-community relations
• The role of police officers in school safety
• The impact of gang violence on policing
• The challenges of policing in high-crime neighborhoods
• The impact of mass incarceration on policing
• The role of police officers in responding to mass shootings
• The impact of police militarization on civil liberties
• The challenges of policing in a post-9/11 world
• The role of police officers in responding to natural disasters
• The impact of police shootings on community trust
• The challenges of policing in a digital age
• The role of police officers in preventing human trafficking
• The impact of police body cameras on officer behavior
• The challenges of policing in a politically divided society
• The role of police officers in responding to hate crimes
• The impact of police misconduct on community relations
• The challenges of policing in a post-Ferguson world
• The future of policing in America

In conclusion, writing essays on various law enforcement topics can help police officers develop their critical thinking and communication skills. By exploring these essay topic ideas and examples, officers can gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing law enforcement today.

Want to research companies faster?

Instantly access industry insights

Let PitchGrade do this for me

Leverage powerful AI research capabilities

We will create your text and designs for you. Sit back and relax while we do the work.

Explore More Content

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service

© 2024 Pitchgrade

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

• Research, Science, and Policing

Expectations that policing will be evidence-based and scientific have increased significantly in recent years. [1] The logic behind this trend is undeniable – no government agency should use practices that are ineffective, and police in particular should adopt strategies, tactics, and policies that achieve the most good and cause the least harm.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) established its Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) Agencies program to help law enforcement agencies meet these growing expectations. [2] The program’s objective is to help agencies become more effective through better use of data, analysis, research, and evidence. Science does not have all the answers, however. Police leaders have to balance research and data with experience and professional judgment. [3]

Overcoming Bad Habits

Designing police practices on a solid foundation of research makes sense for many reasons, especially if one considers the alternative. If policing is done a certain way because “we’ve always done it that way,” it is likely that changing times have rendered that approach ineffective, even if it was working well at one time. If practices are based on someone’s opinion about what works, there is a good chance that selective perception, limited personal experience, and bias (conscious or unconscious) are contaminating decisions that should promote the public good. If a police agency is satisfied to do things just because others do it, the agency is probably settling for mediocrity.

Limits of Science

But research and science have their limits, some technical and others more philosophical. For example, a randomized controlled trial (RCT), called by some the gold standard of research design, maximizes internal validity, which is the confidence we have in its findings. By its very nature, though, the extent to which the findings of a RCT are generalizable to other settings (external validity) is unknown. This helps explain why arrest for misdemeanor domestic assault was the most effective of three options for reducing subsequent assaults in Minneapolis, but not in other jurisdictions. [4]

It is also important to remember that science never “proves” anything. Rather, it tests theories (formal explanations about how something works) by confirming or disconfirming null hypotheses, a fancy way of saying that all scientific knowledge is tentative. Even principles and “facts” that are relatively well-established are periodically subjected to further testing, and often debunked. Research on eyewitness identification, for example, led to revised practices and model policies for conducting in-person and photo lineups. [5] Double-blind procedures are now the industry standard and sequential presentation seems to have advantages over simultaneous, but further studies are sure to challenge whatever becomes the new status quo.

A more philosophical issue arises because policing is a function of a government that is “of the people,” not “of science.” We choose to have guilt or innocence decided by a judge or jury, not a computer algorithm. Scientists might someday develop a brain scanning technology that can accurately detect deception, but whether and how police are allowed to use that technology will be determined by public opinion, politics, and judicial interpretation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, not by research.

Applying Science and Research

Several considerations are essential for the proper application of science and research in police administration. One is constant appreciation for the multi-dimensional “bottom line” of policing. [6] A study may determine that one strategy is more effective than another at reducing crime, but police must also consider its effects on fear of crime, public trust, efficient use of resources, and equitable use of force and authority, not to mention key values such as legality, transparency, and accountability. Researchers have the luxury of focusing their studies on one isolated outcome, but law enforcement executives have to juggle multiple outcomes, all of which matter.

A mistake that police leaders should avoid is over-interpreting a study’s results. For example, a widely accepted conclusion from 1980s response time studies was that rapid response did not matter. More accurately, however, the studies found that an immediate response to cold crimes had little benefit, whereas quick reaction to crimes in progress was actually quite productive. [7]

Two other factors that police should weigh when considering the implications of research are context and purpose. Several studies have found foot patrol to be effective, [8] but its applicability for the Wyoming Highway Patrol or even the typical suburban department might be limited. Hot spots patrol is regarded as an evidence-based crime reduction practice, [9] but if an agency is trying to reduce identity theft or acquaintance rape, some other approach is probably needed.

Striking a Balance

Not surprisingly, law enforcement needs to follow the middle way. Building and testing a scientific knowledge base for policing is a high priority that will pay huge dividends in increased effectiveness and better public service. At the same time, all concerned need to recognize that police policies and practices are inevitably influenced by law, values, politics, and public opinion. One of the responsibilities of police leaders is drawing on wisdom and experience to make their agencies as rational and scientific as possible, given the multitude of challenges and considerations that inevitably constrain real world decision-making.

Action Items

• Stay abreast of CrimeSolutions, [10] the Campbell Collaboration, [11] the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction, [12] and other sources of evidence-based police practices.
• Carefully assess relevant studies to determine their applicability to your jurisdiction.
• Beware of confirmation bias, which is the tendency to value studies that confirm what you already believe and reject studies that challenge your beliefs.
• When necessary, conduct studies in your own agency to answer key questions about what works best in your context. [13]
• Don’t be afraid of tinkering and trial and error. Measuring performance, trying something a little different, and then measuring again is the path to continuous improvement. Most programs and practices don’t work perfectly right away, and even if they do, they will likely need tweaking over time as conditions change. [14]
• Always remember the multi-dimensional bottom line of policing – a practice that achieves one outcome but has negative effects on others is a practice ripe for improvement.

About the Authors

Gary Cordner is a former police officer, police chief, professor, and CALEA commissioner. He is also past editor of the American Journal of Police and Police Quarterly . Along with Geoff Alpert, he is a Chief Research Advisor for the LEADS Agencies program.

Geoff Alpert is a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina. As Chief Research Advisors, he and Gary Cordner help administer the LEADS Agencies program.

[note 1] Cynthia Lum and Christopher S. Koper, Evidence-Based Policing: Translating Research Into Practice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[note 2] See NIJ’s Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science Scholars Program for Law Enforcement Officers .

[note 3] Jenny Fleming and Rod Rhodes, “Experience Is Not a Dirty Word,” Policy & Politics Journal Blog (2017), https://policyandpoliticsblog.com/2017/06/20/experience-is-not-a-dirty-word/.

[note 4] Christopher D. Maxwell, Joel H. Garner, and Jeffrey A. Fagan, “ The Effects of Arrest on Intimate Partner Violence: New Evidence From the Spouse Assault Replication Program ,” Research in Brief , National Institute of Justice (2001).

[note 5] See Eyewitness Identification .

[note 6] Mark H. Moore and Anthony Braga, “The ‘Bottom Line’ of Policing: What Citizens Should Value (and Measure!) in Police Performance,” Police Executive Research Forum (2003), http://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Free_Online_Documents/Police_Evaluation/the%20bottom%20line%20of%20policing%202003.pdf.

[note 7] William Spelman and Dale K. Brown, Calling the Police: Citizen Reporting of Serious Crime (Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 1981).

[note 8] See http://www.jratcliffe.net/blog/tag/foot-patrol/.

[note 9] See http://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/what-works-in-policing/research-evidence-review/hot-spots-policing/.

[note 10] See https://crimesolutions.ojp.gov/.

[note 11] See https://www.campbellcollaboration.org/about-campbell/coordinating-groups/crime-and-justice.html.

[note 12] See http://whatworks.college.police.uk/Pages/default.aspx.

[note 13] Ian Hesketh and Les Graham, “Theory or not Theory? That is the Question,” Australian Policing: A Journal of Professional Practice and Research 9 no.1 (2017): 10-12. http://www.cwaustral.com.au/emag/1707/aipol-volume-9-number-17/.

[note 14] Nick Tilley and Gloria Laycock, “Engineering a Safer Society,” Public Safety Leadership 4 (2016), http://www.aipm.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Research-Focus-Vol-4-Iss-2-Engineering.pdf.

Cite this Article

Read more about:, related publications.

• Open access
• Published: 12 December 2022

Unpacking the police patrol shift: observations and complications of “electronically” riding along with police

• Rylan Simpson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3214-3797 1 &
• Nick Bell 2  

Crime Science volume  11 , Article number:  15 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

3603 Accesses

5 Citations

5 Altmetric

Metrics details

As frontline responders, patrol officers exist at the core of policing. Little remains known, however, about the specific and nuanced work of contemporary patrol officers and their shift characteristics. Drawing upon computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data for a random sample of 60 patrol shifts, we empirically analyse the activities of patrol officers working in a Canadian police agency. Our analyses reveal several interesting findings regarding the activities of patrol officers, the nature and prevalence of calls for service attended by such officers, and the temporal patterns of different patrol shifts. We discuss our results with respect to both criminological research as well as policing practice. We also highlight the complications and implications of using electronic police records to empirically study officer activity.

Introduction

As a core pillar of the criminal justice system, the police have existed at the forefront of scholarly and public attention for decades. Given the implications of their work, such interest is well-justified. From a scholarly perspective, the police are highly visible representatives of the criminal justice system and related to both social and crime control. From a practical perspective, the police impact the lives of people and the safety of communities. Not all entities within the policing institution, however, are equally implicated in these matters. Most salient among these discussions are the patrol officers: the uniformed, public-facing, and frontline personnel responsible for conducting the voluminous, street-level work of police. Yet, despite this importance, the nuance of patrol work has arguably received less empirical attention than some related topics, such as the structure of police organisations and the effects of police on crime. Considering the diverse role of police (e.g., Bittner, 1967 ; Lum et al., 2021 ; Thacher, 2022 ; Wilson, 1968 ), it is critical that research tackles the pressing questions of what patrol officers do, when, and for how long to then inform related conversations about their work.

To contribute to this aim, we draw upon computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data for a random sample of 60 patrol shifts to explore the practices of patrol officers working in a Canadian police agency. Our observations present a more mundane and nuanced depiction of policing than sometimes presented in public narratives. Handling calls for service, most of which are classified as low priority and not crime-related, comprises only a modest proportion of officers’ time on patrol. Other activities include being available to handle calls for service, working from headquarters, engaging in meal breaks, and completing administrative and other operational tasks. Given the reliance of modern police on electronic data to map and assess their practices, our use of these data to observe patrol officers exhibits wide, international relevance. We discuss such relevance in light of its practical considerations and methodological implications.

The role of the patrol officer

Patrol officers are the backbone of police. They comprise the largest proportion of all officers in many police agencies. As frontline responders, they are directly responsible for responding to calls for service, including emergencies and non-emergencies, and investigating crime. In less direct capacities, they are tasked with representing the institution through their uniformed presence, preventing crime, and engaging in the additional tasks of police, like managing fear, providing social service referrals, and confirming the welfare of people. The consequences of the work of patrol officers is significant. Nearly all public-police interactions and crime investigations start at the patrol-level, and the activities and decisions of even the most junior patrol officer exhibit the potential to shape the trajectory of an entire event and the outcomes for all affected people. The ability for patrol officers to effectively balance their responsibilities, including for reactive and proactive policing, can also impact a whole sleuth of policing outcomes, from response times to crime rates to clearance rates.

Research has long argued that much police work does not regard crime, but rather social order and peacekeeping functions (e.g., Bittner, 1967 ; Wilson, 1968 ). Consistent with this argument, recent research that explored police calls for service from across the United States found that “traffic-related problems, everyday disputes, worries of suspicious behaviors, disorders, disturbances, and general requests for help and assurance” comprised the majority of calls for which officers are dispatched (Lum et al., 2021 , p. 17; also see Simpson & Orosco, 2021 ). If patrol officers are handling these calls, then it would suggest that their work is diverse as a function of these diverse requests. But patrol work is not only about handling calls for service.

Many crime control efforts are directly implicated in the work of patrol officers. For example, hot spot policing, of which has been the subject of enormous scholarly attention (Braga et al., 2019 ), most often involves patrol officers spending time patrolling high crime areas referred to as “hot spots.” As one case in point, Koper ( 1995 ) argued that the optimal length for patrol stops is 11 to 15 min (also see Telep et al., 2014 ). Other kinds of proactive police work, including traffic-related enforcement, also typically falls upon the shoulders of patrol officers, who sometimes engage in traffic stops when not handling calls for service (Wu & Lum, 2020 ). A similar logic can be presented for proactive drug- and weapons-related enforcement as well, which frequently manifest in the form of officer-initiated stops (White & Fradella, 2016 ).

Exploring the effects of these different activities falls outside the scope of this article. However, the fact that patrol officers, whose work can be fluid and dynamic, are often tasked with engaging in these activities as well as handling calls for service implies that they must manage their time in a way that allows for competing demands to be addressed. This is especially the case when performance metrics for patrol officers include both reactive and proactive policing outputs. As generalists, patrol officers must not only exhibit some competency in most areas, but also must be available to complete many different tasks.

Measuring the work of patrol officers

Assessing the activities of patrol officers is no easy feat. Although much patrol work is public, insofar that it is frequently conducted in public spaces and in the purview of members of the public, it is not necessarily accessible, at least from an empirical perspective. To fully understand the work of patrol officers, one must observe the work of such officers: not just at a single call for service, not just for a few hours, but for an extended period of time and at different times.

Researchers tackling patrol-related questions have largely employed two approaches. First, is the ethnographic or field study approach that has placed researchers in the seat of patrol cars (e.g., Famega et al., 2005 ; Parks et al., 1999 ; Sierra-Arevalo, 2021 ; Todak & James, 2018 ). By physically riding along Footnote 1 with police, researchers are able to manually observe the work of patrol officers and its intricacies in tremendous detail. Second, is the secondary data approach that has situated researchers at the epicentre of police records (e.g., Simpson & Hipp, 2019 ; Webster, 1970 ; Wu & Lum, 2017 ). By post hoc assessing the activities of patrol officers via secondary data, researchers are able to assess patterns in public demands on police as well as the activities of officers. For example, researchers can assess the frequency of different call-types and their dispositions as well as the number of some proactive activities conducted by patrol officers.

Like all research methods, each of these approaches presents benefits and weaknesses. Whereas field research may provide a richer and more holistic assessment of the practical work of patrol officers, it can be time-intensive and costly, which can limit the number of shifts that can be reasonably observed. It can also present the risk of reactivity, whereby officers change their activity as a function of being monitored. Whereas secondary data analyses offer a greater ability to compile larger volumes of data over longer periods of time, at lesser costs, and without concerns about reactivity, secondary data generally do not offer a comparable depth of information about individual officers or their shifts. Because of data limitations, including privacy concerns if the data are publicly available, these typically quantitative examinations are frequently conducted in the abstract: researchers are often forced to study macro-level trends as opposed to more micro-level behaviours. For example, researchers may quantify the number of traffic stops conducted or types of calls for service attended during a day/week/month/year, but may not be able to disentangle how many stops were conducted and how many calls were attended by how many different individual officers and in the context of which specific shifts.

As part of the present research, we supplement existing literature by employing more of a hybrid approach to “electronically” ride-along with police for a random sample of 60 patrol shifts. Specifically, we pose the following questions: (1) How can CAD data be leveraged to measure the activities of patrol officers?; (2) What do CAD data suggest about the activities of patrol officers in terms of substance and time?; and (3) What are the challenges of using CAD data for research purposes and how might such challenges inform future researchers’ use of these data? As we outline below, the data that we draw upon and the analyses that we conduct are rich in volume and nuance. We also focus on the shift as our unit of analysis. By testing these questions at this unit using these data, we are able to provide a comprehensive snapshot of patrol officer activity as well as highlight the methodological implications of using electronic records to study patrol work. These contributions are especially important given the salience of current debates surrounding policing and how the work of patrol officers could, should, or ought to look in an era of reform.

Methodology

The present research draws upon data from a municipal police agency in Western Canada. This agency provides policing services for a population of approximately 45,000 full-time residents. It is dispatched by a consolidated call-centre that is staffed by trained, non-sworn employees who handle police-related calls for multiple cities in the region. Its urban jurisdiction covers a variety of different geographies and land-uses and has a median household income above the national average. Its crime rate falls below the national average.

The present research explores patrol officer records electronically collected via the CAD system of the police agency under study. In lieu of analysing shift logs for all officers for all possible patrol shifts, which would be neither practical nor necessary, we analyse a random sample of 60 patrol shifts associated with 28 different officers from 2019. Footnote 2 The variation in the number of shifts per officer was the result of our below described sampling strategy and the finite number of officers assigned to the patrol section.

Standard patrol shifts at this police agency are 12 h long and subdivided by time of day. The regularly scheduled “day shift” commences at 7:00am and the regularly scheduled “night shift” commences at 7:00 pm. All patrol officers work a four shift rotation, whereby they complete two day shifts followed by two night shifts before receiving four rest days. As a function of this shift pattern, each patrol officer works across different times and days of the week each week. All officers patrol alone at this agency, with one officer per vehicle (unless training).

In order to ensure that we represented all shift times, days of the week, and months of the year in our sample, we employed a stratified random sampling strategy to select our shifts. First, we randomly sampled three weekday (i.e., Monday–Thursday) and two weekend (i.e., Friday–Sunday) dates within each month. Next, we randomly selected shift times for each identified date, ensuring that we retained at least one day shift and one night shift for both weekday and weekend dates within each month. Finally, we randomly sampled an officer for each identified shift whose electronic data we then compiled. Because our unit of analysis is the shift, we did not consider officer particulars as part of our sampling process. See Table 1 for a summary of our sample of shifts.

Shift logs and status codes

Each shift log began when the patrol officer signed into the CAD system and concluded when they signed out of the CAD system. While signed into the CAD system, all documented Footnote 3 activities of the officer were electronically recorded in the form of two-digit status codes. These status codes are generated by officers via their in-car computers and/or dispatchers via their dispatch software. For example, an officer can use their in-car computer to mark themselves at their headquarters (“HQ”). An officer can also use their in-car computer to mark themselves as conducting a foot patrol (“FP”) or roadblock (“RB”). Dispatchers, namely those working in the capacity of radio-operators, can also update status codes on behalf of officers (e.g., see Simpson, 2021 ). For example, dispatchers can mark officers as available (“IS”), engaged in a traffic or person stop (“TS” or “PS,” respectively), or providing cover for another officer (“CU”), among others.

Given that status codes reflect the type of activity that a patrol officer is engaged in at any documented point in time (at least in a rudimentary form), we can use them as a measure of officer activity. Moreover, given that updates to officers’ status codes are date- and time-stamped within the CAD system, analysing them and their textual remarks allows us to post hoc estimate the amount of time that officers spent on each activity. For example, if the shift log indicates that the officer conducted a person stop (“PS”) at 1:05 pm and then initiated a meal break (“62”) at 1:09 pm, we would estimate that the officer spent four minutes on the person stop. Similarly, if the shift log indicated that the officer initiated a roadblock (“RB”) at 11:03 pm and then became available (“IS”) at 11:43 pm, we would estimate that the officer spent 40 min at the roadblock.

In their raw form, patrol officers used a total of 23 different status codes during our sample of shifts. With that being said, many status codes are similar in substance and therefore we grouped them into broader categories that effectively captured their shared theme. For example, we grouped all status codes related to calls for service into the shared category of “calls” and all status codes related to administrative tasks into the shared category of “administration.” This resulted in a final list of eight different status code categories, which we retained for our analyses (see Table 2 ).

In addition to the date and time, status codes also provide information about the call-type of a call for service that a patrol officer has been assigned if their status code changes while electronically attached to a call. Exploring the types of calls for service that patrol officers respond is of much empirical interest, and, therefore, we use this information to estimate the prevalence and demands of different call-types. We recognise, however, that call-type classifications are not without their limitations. As argued by Simpson and Orosco ( 2021 ), calls for service data can exhibit at least some measurement error. Not only is the information initially provided by callers to dispatchers often ambiguous and nebulous, but the public’s reasons for requesting police can be complex and dynamic, making the process of classifying events into specific call-types difficult (Simpson & Orosco, 2021 ). Further complicating such process is the fact that calls can change over their lifespan as new information is brought to the attention of police, which can lead to changes in classifications over time (Simpson & Orosco, 2021 ). This applies to service-oriented requests as well. As one case in point, Pearce and Simpson ( 2022 ) observed that requests for police to conduct wellness checks are not always initially classified as the expected “Check Well-Being” call-type (a similar finding was observed by Ratcliffe ( 2021 ) for public health calls more broadly). If calls are not accurately classified and/or updated in the CAD system, then relying upon such classifications to interpret the nature of calls could present challenges.

Observations from “electronically” riding along with police

In this first section of results, we describe the activities of patrol officers and their temporal patterns. Consistent with the police agency’s mandate, the average duration of shifts in our sample (as recorded by the CAD system) was 11.5 h. The shortest shift in our sample had a duration of approximately four hours and the longest shift had a duration of roughly 15.5 h. Shorter shifts were often a function of officers’ pre-scheduled leave, including for vacation and/or administrative functions, like the need to attend court in the morning immediately following a night shift. In contrast, longer shifts were typically the result of unanticipated needs, including handling high priority calls for service at the end of the shift. Rather than use raw minutes engaged in different activities as part of our analyses, which would not account for this variation in the active amount of time on duty, we thus use percentages to assess the amount of time that officers engaged in different activities: (min activity / min shift )*100. See Fig.  1 for a depiction of activities by shift.

Percentage of patrol shift engaged in different activities (by shift)

At an aggregate level, patrol officers handled Footnote 4 354 different calls for service of 55 different call-types during our sample of shifts. Of such calls, more regarded non-crime than crime-related call-types. In fact, the most frequently occurring call-types included: “Alarm” (11%), “Suspicious Person” (7%), and “Abandoned 911” (6%). Of the calls for service in our sample, 12% were assigned the highest priority level of 1, 26% were assigned the mid-level priority of 2, and the remaining 62% were assigned the lowest priority levels of 3 or 4. These findings indicate that much patrol work may be mundane, insofar that it does not involve the kinds of action and thrill traditionally depicted in policing media (e.g., see Maurantonio, 2012 ). Across our sample, officers were electronically attached to calls for service for a total of 292 h. The average duration of calls for service from initial dispatch to closure in the CAD system Footnote 5 was 50 min.

At an individual level, patrol officers handled an average of six calls for service during each shift, with a minimum of one call and a maximum of 12 calls. However, as we discuss below, not all calls require equal investments from officers. For example, some calls are concluded faster than others because they do not result in criminal charges (e.g., for a bylaw complaint). Sometimes calls are also cancelled before officers arrive on-scene, if, for example, the problem in question resolves itself without officer attendance (e.g., for a hazardous complaint). And, other times, a suspect may not be located once an officer arrives on-scene (e.g., for a suspicious person complaint). Consistent with such logic, the amount of time that officers spent electronically attached to calls for service during their shift ranged from as low as 15 min to as high as 579 min. Moreover, calls for service which required more time frequently involved crimes, typically because they required more formal investigation and associated report writing. Within the crime context, calls related to violent crimes averaged longer durations than those related to property crimes. Although we recognise that measurement error exists in call-type classifications (as discussed earlier; Simpson & Orosco, 2021 ), and therefore they must be interpreted with some caution, differences in durations indicate that different calls for service may require different levels of investment by officers. See Table 3 for a summary of call-type demands by prevalence and duration for the top 10 most frequently occurring call-types attended by officers during our sample of shifts.

As outlined above, the raw amount of time spent handling calls for service may not always be an ideal measure of the demand of such calls on patrol officers. Given that shift durations can vary, the percentage of time spent electronically attached to calls for service during the shift may be a more helpful measure. On average, patrol officers spent approximately 45% of their shift electronically attached to calls for service on day shifts and 41% on night shifts. Of such time, most was spent while the officer was marked as on-scene at calls, although we discuss the challenges of using different status codes as they pertain specifically to call handling below. These results imply two conclusions. First, only a modest proportion of an officer’s shift appears to be spent actively handling calls for service. This infers that officers spend their remaining time on other activities. Second, some variation may exist with respect to the amount of time spent handling calls for service as a function of shift. This underscores the importance of time in understanding patrol work: riding along with police during the day may produce a different image of patrol work than riding along with police during the night.

Other activities

The observation that patrol officers generally spent less than half of their shift handling calls for service begs questions about their other activities. As shown in Table 4 , the average patrol shift is comprised of many different activities that are not specifically related to call handling.

During day shifts, patrol officers were recorded as being available, on average, for approximately 27% of their shift. Although we cannot confirm the specifics of what officers physically did during such available time (a point that we revisit later), we assume based on operational experience that much of this time was spent conducting routine preventive patrols. On average, officers conducted one traffic or person stop per day shift (with a range of zero to five stops), which comprised approximately 1% of their shift time. Officers also spent approximately 4% of their day shift engaged in administrative duties and 2% engaged in other operational activities, like conducting foot patrols, roadblocks, and/or directed enforcement. On average, officers spent approximately 13% of their day shift working at their headquarters and 8% engaged in meal breaks. Finally, officers conducted an average of 20 vehicle license plate queries via their in-car computers (a proxy for police proactivity), with a minimum of zero and a maximum of 122 queries.

During night shifts, patrol officers were recorded as being available, on average, for approximately 38% of their shift. Officers spent approximately 3% of their night shift engaged in administrative duties, 2% on other operational activities, and 8% working at their headquarters. Officers also spent approximately 6% of their night shift engaged in meal breaks. In terms of proactivity, officers conducted an average of one traffic or person stop per night shift, which comprised approximately 2% of their shift time. Officers also conducted an average of 13 vehicle license plates queries via their in-car computers during night shifts.

We observed few obvious differences between weekday and weekend shifts among our sample. For example, we found similar patterns in the number of activities during shifts, the number of calls for service handled during shifts, and the priority levels of such calls (although there were proportionally greater numbers of calls classified as the “Alarm” call-type on weekdays and the “Assist General Public” call-type on weekends). We also found similar patterns in how patrol officers spent their time during shifts, with the exception of time spent handling calls, which appeared to be greater on weekends. Finally, we found that officers conducted more license plate queries, on average, on weekends than weekdays.

Patterns of activities among shifts

As described above, the average patrol shift is comprised of many different activities. Not only do patrol officers engage in different activities during their shifts, but they also frequently engage in such activities during different parts of the shift. For example, officers always began their shifts at their headquarters. In many instances, and when call volume allowed, officers then engaged in a meal break, often in the form of coffee with their colleagues. In roughly 40% of instances, an officer’s meal break was immediately followed by their response to their first call for service of the shift. During peak hours, and following clearance of each call for service, officers normally became available for only a short period of time before being dispatched to another call. Footnote 6 However, during non-peak hours, and especially during night shifts, officers were frequently recorded as being available for prolonged periods of time before status code changes. Footnote 7 During night shifts, officers also frequently engaged in a final meal break immediately before the conclusion of their shift, typically in the form of a visit to a local cafe.

At a more micro-level, changes in patrol officers’ activities were generally consistent with the linear nature of police work. For example, officers were normally dispatched to a call for service before being marked as enroute to such call and then eventually on-scene at that call. Proactive activities, like conducting traffic or person stops, were generally followed by indication that the officer was available again for a call for service. Officers also always terminated their shift with the unavailable status code. In this way, status codes can offer an interesting alternative to observing the activities of officers, albeit with limits, without needing to physically ride-along with them and manually record their activities.

Finally, different shifts across our sample exhibited different levels of activity. Whereas some shifts had a plethora of different activities, other shifts had very few activities. Indeed, the range of activities recorded across our sample of shifts was 11 to 59 activities, with an average of 29 activities. Day shifts generally exhibited more activities than night shifts. With that being said, this variation in volume could be the result of many different factors, most of which we are unable to empirically assess as part of our research. For example, sometimes the number of activities may be a function of the officer working the shift: some patrol officers are simply more active than others and/or more accurately document their activities. Other times, the number of activities may be the result of organisational priorities. Depending upon calendaring and workflow, a shift may be dedicated almost entirely to report writing if an officer must catch-up on their work queue and/or complete overdue assignments. In other circumstances, the number of activities may be a consequence of the policing environment during that specific shift. Police activity varies as a function of people, and sometimes people proactively seek out less from the police and/or fewer people are active in the city, which in turn can limit the number of activities that officers could reasonably engage in during the shift.

Complications of “electronically” riding along with police

The shift logs produced by the CAD data provided much insight into the work of patrol officers. Such insight, however, was not without its complications. These electronic police records presented many challenges for both use and interpretation, which are relevant to past and future use of these data in research. In this second section of results, we thus describe these challenges and their relevance for the use of these data for assessing research questions of an applied nature.

First, although comprehensive, two-digit status codes alone in their raw form did not always present a nuanced picture of an officer’s activity. In some instances, additional remarks that accompanied such codes were necessary to obtain clarity. For example, an officer may accompany the on-scene status code with textual remarks about making a phone call to the complainant, which would indicate that they were metaphorically on-scene rather than physically on-scene. Officers may also use the same status codes to refer to multiple different activities, including for activities with their own status codes. For example, officers may use the status code for enforcement to describe their roadblock, which technically has its own status code. Officers may also engage in various definable activities while marked at headquarters, including report writing for previously handled calls for service, which too have their own status codes.

Second, apparent changes in patrol officer activities were sometimes the result of technological implications of different status codes rather than practical changes in officer activity. For example, if while electronically attached to a traffic-related call for service, an officer conducted a stop on the subject vehicle, and the radio-operator used the traffic stop status code to indicate such stop, then the officer would be electronically detached from the associated call for service. The shift log for such officer would therefore appear much more truncated than it was in reality: it would appear as if the officer was handling a call for service only to be cleared from such call for a traffic stop to then be again dispatched to that call following that stop, when theoretically the traffic stop was a part of the call.

Third, and relatedly, officers may sometimes conduct activities without formally changing their status code to document such activities. For example, officers may attend a colleague’s call for service without electronically attaching themselves to that call or even forget to denote themselves on-scene at their own call. This speaks to the broader issue of assessing the exact number of officers present at an event at any specific time, of which there is little ability to do using this kind of methodological approach. Relatedly, an officer may speak to a pedestrian about their concern while still recorded at the scene of an unrelated call for service. Lastly, officers may engage in activities even while listed as being available, like eating, if they believe that they could be reasonably cleared from the activity to handle a call for service if dispatched. From this perspective, it is particularly challenging to interpret the available status code because it could represent so many different practical things: “being available” is not necessarily synonymous with “doing nothing,” but potentially doing something undocumented. These complications of assessing unassigned time are consistent with the findings of Famega et al. ( 2005 ), who studied patrol officer activities in Baltimore, Maryland roughly two decades ago.

Less of a complication, but more of an interpretational side-effect, these data also provide a glimpse into the complicated work of radio-operators. Given that many status code updates are completed by radio-operators, examining the nature of status code changes provides insight into the activities of radio-operators and the diversity among their styles of dispatching (e.g., see Simpson, 2021 ). For example, under ideal circumstances, officers should have a dispatched, enroute, and on-scene status code change for each call for service that they handle. However, in many instances, this was not the case: typically because radio-operators initially dispatched officers using the status code for enroute, thereby providing no information about the temporal gap from when an officer was initially dispatched to the call and when they actually began travelling to that call. This illustrates why researchers should apply some caution when relying upon what has now sometimes become publicly available response time information for calls for service. In some cases, radio-operators also left officers electronically attached to their calls for service while such officers completed the associated reports, whereas in other cases, radio-operators electronically cleared officers from their calls in favour of a dedicated status code for report writing. These distinctions made it difficult to breakdown how much “on-scene time” was officers actively responding versus passively writing about the call for service in question.

Relatedly, radio-operators sometimes electronically cleared calls for service from the CAD system immediately after the officer departed the scene of such call, whereas other times they electronically “stacked” the call to the assigned officer so that they could be re-dispatched at a later point in their shift to complete the associated report. In these instances, the total time that the officer was electronically attached to the call varied. Moreover, in the case of the latter, the shift log made it appear that the officer was re-dispatched to the call for re-response at a later time, when in reality the second dispatch was simply so that the officer could write the associated report via their in-car computer. As noted in the preceding paragraph, this too complicated our ability to confidently assess the specific amount of time that officers spent report writing (and, hence, again our use of the term, “handling”).

As part of the present research, we drew upon electronic records from a random sample of 60 patrol shifts to unpack the activities of patrol officers working in a Canadian police agency. Our results provide insight into the work of patrol officers and the implications of their work from both practical and scholarly perspectives. From a practical perspective, our findings speak to the diverse and complicated role of police. Consistent with related research, we find that officers handled largely low priority calls for service that most often did not regard crime. Calls for service averaged 50 min from initial dispatch to closure in the CAD system, and officers handled an average of six calls during each shift, indicating that they spent only a modest proportion of their shift handling calls. Given that much time during the shift was unaccounted for by call activity, unpacking the other activities of officers during their shifts, like available time as well as proactive and administrative duties, was important.

In terms of documented proactivity, we found that patrol officers generally initiated few traffic or person stops. Footnote 8 Most officers also conducted few license plate queries, a form of proactivity that often precedes a traffic stop. In this way, more patrol work appears to be citizen-initiated than officer-initiated. Considering the negative consequences that can result from proactive policing (e.g., see Epp et al., 2014 ), these findings may be lauded by some. Nonetheless, we acknowledge that officers likely engaged in other forms of proactive policing that did not have specific status codes, like routine preventive patrols (e.g., see Kelling et al., 1974 ), during their shifts (particularly during their time marked as available). Footnote 9

Finally, we found some temporal patterns in officers’ activities during their shifts. These findings may provide police leaders with greater awareness about the format and ordering of activities during shifts, which may allow for better estimates of work activity as well as opportunities to consider how patrol officers could best structure their time. They may also provide practical insight into how police agencies may manage their patrol sections and define their role within society. In order to have informed conversations about policing, all stakeholders must understand the full nature of the work, demands, and responsibilities of police as currently performed.

From a scholarly perspective, our analyses provide an interesting alternative to assessing the work of patrol officers that blends the benefits of different research methods. By re-constructing patrol officers’ activities using such detailed and descriptive electronic police records at the shift-level, we were able to tease apart nuance among a large sample of shifts with a degree of precision that is atypical for secondary data analysis. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to physically ride-along with and record all patrol officers’ activities during all shifts at all times, especially in large police agencies. Yet, to understand the intricacies of the work of patrol officers, scholars and police leaders alike must know exactly what officers do during their shifts. Our approach offers a potential means to achieve such goal at a larger scale than traditionally explored. This approach may be especially attractive in light of modern police’s overwhelming reliance on CAD systems for operational policing.

We were also able to highlight the complications of using even such detailed records for research purposes. For example, patrol officers may conduct activities without formally updating their status code to document such activities or use an incorrect status code. Relatedly, even when an officer’s status code showed them as being available, they may still have engaged in otherwise definable work, which may have underestimated our measure of their workload. Certain changes in status codes also exhibited technological implications, which could have induced perceived changes in officer activities, as was the case for traffic stops. And, different styles of dispatching impacted the quality and accuracy of shift logs. Police data can present many analytical complications, and so from this perspective, we contribute to a growing body of literature that has explored the empirical use of such data (e.g., Haberman et al., 2022 ; Klinger & Bridges, 1997 ; Nesbary, 1998 ; Pearce & Simpson, 2022 ; Ratcliffe, 2021 ; Simpson & Orosco, 2021 ; Varano et al., 2009 ).

Limitations

Before proceeding to our conclusion, we highlight three limitations of our approach. First, although we analysed data from a large sample of patrol shifts, we recognise that all such shifts originated from a single police agency. For this reason, our findings may not generalise to all police agencies, including larger agencies, agencies in other geographic regions, and/or agencies which police cities with higher crime rates. Nonetheless, we note that our agency of study may be more similar to more police agencies in North America than the very large agencies that have been the focus of much historical research. Second, we did not conduct inferential analyses as part of our article. Given the novelty of our approach and the associated need to unpack our observations, we limited our scope to descriptive analyses. We acknowledge that it would be possible to use inferential analyses to test for differences among the kinds of output described in our article, which future researchers may wish to do. Third, in addition to the measurement error inherent in some status code activities, we also could not account for work completed while patrol officers were not signed into the CAD system, which could have been at the very beginning or end of their shift. Information about such activities could only have come from physical observation of the officers during these times.

As frontline responders, patrol officers exist at the core of policing. Not only do they comprise a significant proportion of agency personnel, but their public-facing work exhibits tremendous impact on all outcomes related to policing, including crime control, public satisfaction, and public perception. By “electronically” riding along with police, we shed light on the practical work of patrol officers as well as the benefits and complications of using electronic records to measure their activities. It is our hope that our work will be as helpful from a content perspective as it is a methodological one. From the latter perspective, our research provides a toolkit for researchers to use when drawing upon electronic police records to assess research questions of an applied nature. Future research should continue to study the work of patrol officers and their implications for society.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

“Riding along” refers to when a civilian accompanies a police officer in their patrol car as they conduct their policing duties. Most often such civilians are members of the general public (e.g., see Mathna & Koen, 2022 ), however, they can also be researchers in a scholarly context.

If we were to have conducted 60 physical ride-alongs, it would have required approximately 720 h of observation or roughly 20 weeks of full-time work.

As noted throughout, we were unable to assess undocumented activities due to our analytical approach.

We use the term, “handle,” when referring to the handling of calls for service given that we are unable to confidently assess active response to calls versus passive writing about calls for the technical reasons described in our article.

All handled calls for service require some amount of paperwork to be completed by patrol officers at this police agency, with more paperwork for more serious and/or criminal events. Time spent writing, though, is particularly difficult to measure because it can be captured via various status codes, including “OS,” “RW,” and “HQ.” We thus use the language, “to closure in the CAD system,” to account for this potential discrepancy, which we suspect may underestimate the total amount of time spent handling calls.

Between the hours of 1:00 pm and 4:59 pm, the amount of time spent in-service between status code changes ranged from 0–125 min, with a mean of 13 min.

Between the hours of 1:00am and 4:59am, the amount of time spent in-service between status code changes ranged from 0–280 min, with a mean of 40 min.

Policy for this police agency requires that officers announce these stops for safety purposes.

Consistent with this logic, some police agencies in the region have begun defaulting to the status code for enforcement in lieu of the status code for available under the belief that even when “available,” officers may still be conducting “enforcement” via their presence.

Bittner, E. (1967). The police on skid-row: A study of peace keeping. American Sociological Review, 32 (5), 699–715.

Article   Google Scholar  

Braga, A. A., Turchan, B. S., Papachristos, A. V., & Hureau, D. M. (2019). Hot spots policing and crime reduction: An update of an ongoing systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 15 (3), 289–311.

Epp, C. R., Maynard-Moody, S., & Haider-Markel, D. (2014). Pulled over: How police stops define race and citizenship . University of Chicago Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Famega, C. N., Frank, J., & Mazerolle, L. (2005). Managing police patrol time: The role of supervisor directives. Justice Quarterly, 22 (4), 540–559.

Haberman, C. P., Clutter, J. E., & Lee, H. (2022). A robbery is a robbery is a robbery? Exploring crime specificity in official police incident data. Police Practice and Research, 23 (4), 429–443.

Kelling, G. L., Pate, T., Dieckman, D., & Brown, C. E. (1974). The Kansas City preventive patrol experiment . Police Foundation.

Google Scholar  

Klinger, D. A., & Bridges, G. S. (1997). Measurement error in calls-for-service as an indicator of crime. Criminology, 35 (4), 705–726.

Koper, C. S. (1995). Just enough police presence: Reducing crime and disorderly behavior by optimizing patrol time in crime hot spots. Justice Quarterly, 12 (4), 649–672.

Lum, C., Koper, C. S., & Wu, X. (2021). Can we really defund the police? Police Quarterly . https://doi.org/10.1177/10986111211035002

Mathna, B. E., & Koen, M. C. (2022). Police ride-along programs: Exploring student perceptions. Police Practice and Research . https://doi.org/10.1080/15614263.2022.2105334

Maurantonio, N. (2012). Entangled webs: Forensic facticity and the construction of police work. The Communication Review, 15 (1), 1–20.

Nesbary, D. K. (1998). Handling emergency calls for service: Organizational production of crime statistics. Policing: An International Journal, 21 (4), 576–599.

Parks, R. B., Mastrofski, S. D., DeJong, C., & Gray, M. K. (1999). How officers spend their time with the community. Justice Quarterly, 16 (3), 483–518.

Pearce, J., & Simpson, R. (2022). The role of police in conducting wellness checks: Insight from a study of police data. Police Practice and Research, 23 (4), 400–413.

Ratcliffe, J. H. (2021). Policing and public health calls for service in Philadelphia. Crime Science, 10 , 5.

Sierra-Arevalo, M. (2021). American policing and the danger imperative. Law & Society Review, 55 (1), 70–103.

Simpson, R. (2021). Calling the police: Dispatchers as important interpreters and manufacturers of calls for service data. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 15 (2), 1537–1545.

Simpson, R., & Hipp, J. R. (2019). What came first: The police or the incident? Bidirectional relationships between police actions and police incidents. Policing & Society, 29 (7), 783–801.

Simpson, R., & Orosco, C. (2021). Re-assessing measurement error in police calls for service: Classifications of events by dispatchers and officers. PLoS ONE, 16 (12), e0260365.

Telep, C. W., Mitchell, R. J., & Weisburd, D. (2014). How much time should the police spend at crime hot spots? Answers from a police agency directed randomized field trial in Sacramento, California. Justice Quarterly, 31 (5), 905–933.

Thacher, D. (2022). Shrinking the police footprint. Criminal Justice Ethics, 41 (1), 62–85.

Todak, N., & James, L. (2018). A systematic social observation study of police de-escalation tactics. Police Quarterly, 21 (4), 509–543.

Varano, S., Schafer, J., Cancino, J., & Swatt, M. (2009). Constructing crime: Neighborhood characteristics and police recording behavior. Journal of Criminal Justice, 37 , 553–563.

Webster, J. A. (1970). Police task and time study. The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 61 (1), 94–100.

White, M. D., & Fradella, H. F. (2016). Stop and frisk: The use and abuse of a controversial policing tactic . New York University Press.

Wilson, J. (1968). Varieties of police behavior: The management of law and order in eight communities . Harvard University Press.

Wu, X., & Lum, C. (2017). Measuring the spatial and temporal patterns of police proactivity. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 33 (4), 915–934.

Wu, X., & Lum, C. (2020). The practice of proactive traffic stops. Policing: An International Journal, 43 (2), 229–246.

Download references

Acknowledgements

No outside funding was used to support this work.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

Rylan Simpson

Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Authors' information

Rylan Simpson, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. His research interests include policing, perceptions of police, police organisations, theories of crime, and social psychology. He approaches his research using a variety of different methodologies, including experimental and quantitative analyses. He has recently published his work in Criminology & Public Policy, PLoS ONE, Journal of Experimental Criminology , Justice Evaluation Journal, Women & Criminal Justice, and Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. He has participated in approximately 1,300 h of police ride-alongs in Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom as well as worked as a police dispatcher in British Columbia since 2012.

Nick Bell is an Inspector with the West Vancouver Police Department. He currently oversees the Administration Division. Nick is also a sessional instructor at the Justice Institute of British Columbia and the Director of Education for the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing. Nick is working on his Ph.D. in Applied Criminology at the University of Huddersfield, researching perceptions of safety and security. Nick has been involved in a number of research projects internally, externally, and with academics.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rylan Simpson .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The second author is intimately connected with the police agency and data analysed as part of this research. With that being said, neither author has any financial interest in this research.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Simpson, R., Bell, N. Unpacking the police patrol shift: observations and complications of “electronically” riding along with police. Crime Sci 11 , 15 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-022-00178-9

Download citation

Received : 03 March 2022

Accepted : 26 November 2022

Published : 12 December 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-022-00178-9

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Computer-aided dispatch
• Evidence-based policing
• Patrol officer
• Police data
• Police deployment
• Proactivity
• Role of police

Crime Science

ISSN: 2193-7680

• General enquiries: [email protected]

87 Police Brutality Topics and Essay Examples

🏆 best police brutality topics for essays, 📌 most interesting police brutality essay topics, 👍 good research topics about police brutality, ❓ research questions about police brutality.

• Police Deviance For the sake of this paper, the scope of this paper will only examine the code of conduct in reference to the relationship between the police force and the society.
• Police Brutality: Causes and Solutions If the criminal is armed and firing at the police, the use of force is acceptable. However, when the actions of the police are disproportionate to the committed crimes, the necessity of such measures is […]
• Police Brutality: Graham vs. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 In this essay, a summary of the Graham and Connor case and the decision of the court will be introduced. In case this suggestion is correct, Connor appears as a police officer who failed to […]
• Impact of Police Brutality on the Society in the United States The issue of racism is one that has led to police brutality that has been witnessed in the American society for a long time.
• Excessive Force and Deviance, Police Brutality The events highlighting racial injustice could positively influence our society, maintaining an appropriate level of awareness regarding the issues encountered by African-Americans and prompting a change in police behaviors.
• History of Police Brutality: The Murder of George Floyd Police officers strive to maintain order and ensure adherence to the laws of the state. The standards observed the right to democracy and addressed the need for representation.
• Body-Worn Cameras Against Police Brutality in New York There is often a legal foundation to such a privileged position; the laws control the oppressed class and mitigate threats to the power of the ruling class.
• Police Brutality: Social Issue This paper explores the issue of police brutality and seeks to shed light on the perceptions of the public, especially the black minority.
• Social Psychology: Police Brutality The first group of solutions to the problem of police brutality includes technical measures, such as the use of body cameras and dashboard cameras. Finally, another potential solution to police brutality is the diversification of […]
• Technology Influences on Police Brutality Modern platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to inform and educate more people about the nature of police brutality.
• Police Brutality: Dissoi Logoi Argumentation Under the influence of societal views, the majority of the representatives of the general public tend to perceive police officers as a safeguarding force that gathers individuals who perform their duties to ensure that the […]
• Police Brutality in the USA This paper aims to discuss the types of police brutality, the particularities of psychological harm inflicted by the police, and its consequences for the population affected by these forms of violence.
• Public Administration Issue: Police Brutality The trend is ongoing and is not expected to end any time soon because of the social structure and the culture that does not value the contributions of minorities and people of color.
• Police Misconduct Actually, prosecutors are always reluctant to try these victims in the court of law for the following reasons; police officers, in most cases, are protected by the prosecutors.
• Police Misconduct: What Can Be Done? Police officers are the individuals charged with the task of maintaining law and order and ensuring the security of the population.
• Excessive Force by the Police On the other hand, the media reported on the severity of misconduct by police officers and cited the Blue code of silence as the key setback against the fight against police torture.
• Police in Law Enforcement Misconduct This creates a rift between the community and the police leading to further misconduct in the process of enforcing the law.
• The Incidents Involving Police Brutality
• The Infringement of Natural Human Rights Because of Police Brutality in the United States
• Police Brutality and Its Effects on the United States
• The Flaws of Police Officers and the Issue of Police Brutality on an Individual
• The Suffering and Fight of African-Americans Against Police Brutality
• The Image Serving as a Reminder of Police Brutality
• The Negative Effects of Police Brutality
• The Changing Patterns of Racism and Police Brutality in the United States
• Police Brutality and the Death of Freddie Gray
• The Issue of Police Brutality and Injustice in the Story of Kalief Browder
• The Relation Between Police Brutality and Race in the United States of America
• Police Brutality and Racism Against African Americans
• The High Prevalence of Police Brutality Towards African America
• The US Government Faces Different Challenges with Police Brutality
• The Truth About Police Brutality Against Minorities
• The Importance of Body Cameras for Solving the Problem of Police Brutality
• Protesting Protest Against Police Brutality
• The Solutions to the Issue of Police Brutality in the United States
• Racism: Police Brutality and Racial Profiling
• Prejudice, Police Brutality, Racism: The Three Things We Are Trying to Get Rid Off
• Problems Caused by Police Brutality
• Police Misconduct and Police Brutality
• The Issue of Police Brutality Against People of Color in the United States
• The Issue of Police Brutality Against the Colored People in the United States
• The Effects of Violence on Police Brutality
• The Deaths Caused by Hurricane Katrina and Police Brutality in America
• Social Media Activism, Centered on Police Brutality
• The Effects of Police Brutality on the Relationship
• The Long Problem of Police Brutality in the United States
• The Police Brutality Against Minorities
• Race, Police Brutality, Crime, Education and Poverty
• The Issue of Police Brutality in the United States and the Solutions to Curb Police Misconduct
• The Influence of the Media and Social Class in Police Brutality
• The Dangers of Racial Profiling and Police Brutality
• The Effects of Police Brutality on Minority Communities
• The Effects of Police Brutality and Racism English
• The Drug Trade as the Cause of Police Brutality in Brazil
• Police Brutality and Their Power Caught on Video by Bystanders
• How to Deal with the Problem of Police Brutality in the United States?
• What is the Relations Police Brutality and Its Contributors?
• How Repressive Laws and Police Brutality Against Mexican Americans Stigmatized the Race as a Whole?
• How Race and Ethnicity Affects Police Brutality Term?
• Police Brutality Ends Here?
• What Does the Media Cover up the Police Brutality?
• How Does Police Brutality on Children Affect How Society?
• Does Police Brutality Distort the Way People View Law Enforcement?
• How Can We Help Prevent Police Brutality?
• How to Stop Police Brutality Against Minority’s?
• Has Been Police Brutality Alive for Too Many Years?
• Has Police Brutality Increased Throughout the United?
• What Is Wrong with Police?
• How Police Corruption Remains a Tainted Reminder of Police Brutality in the US?
• Does Police Brutality Affect the Mental Health of Black Youth?
• Why Isn’t Outrage over Police Brutality Enough?
• Are the Police Taking Advantage of People by Using Police Brutality?
• Has Been Police Brutality Around for Decades?
• Should There Be Direct Laws Against Police Brutality?
• Can You Trust the Law?
• What Is the Police Brutality Effect on African American Males?
• When the Police Duty to Protect Fails Police Brutality?
• Religious Profiling and Police Brutality: How They Affect Operations?
• What Are the Effects of Police Brutality?
• Police Brutality: What’s Really Going on?
• What is the New York City Police Brutality?
• How Does the Body Camera Increase Police Brutality?
• The Causes of Police Brutality in America: Is It Due to Police Behavior?
• When Excessive Force Becomes Police Brutality Sociology?
• What is the Link Between Police Brutality and the Law Enforcement Officers?
• Corruption Ideas
• Gun Control Titles
• Racial Profiling Essay Topics
• Economic Inequality Questions
• Government Regulation Titles
• Accountability Titles
• Prejudice Essay Topics
• Constitution Research Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, November 30). 87 Police Brutality Topics and Essay Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/police-brutality-essay-examples/

"87 Police Brutality Topics and Essay Examples." IvyPanda , 30 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/police-brutality-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '87 Police Brutality Topics and Essay Examples'. 30 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "87 Police Brutality Topics and Essay Examples." November 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/police-brutality-essay-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "87 Police Brutality Topics and Essay Examples." November 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/police-brutality-essay-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "87 Police Brutality Topics and Essay Examples." November 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/police-brutality-essay-examples/.

Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (2018)

Chapter: 8 conclusions and implications for policy and research, 8 conclusions and implications for policy and research.

Proactive policing is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. In this report, the committee used the term “proactive policing” to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Specifically, the elements of proactivity include an emphasis on prevention, mobilizing resources based on police initiative, and targeting the broader underlying forces at work that may be driving crime and disorder. This contrasts with the standard model of policing, which involves an emphasis on reacting to particular crime events after they have occurred, mobilizing resources based on requests coming from outside the police organization, and focusing on the particulars of a given criminal incident.

Proactive policing in this report is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. This report has documented that proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of approaches that have spread across the landscape of policing.

The United States has once again been confronted by a crisis of confidence in policing. Instances of perceived or actual police misconduct have given rise to nationwide protests against unfair and abusive police practices. Although this report was not intended to respond directly to the crisis of confidence in policing that can be seen in the United States today, it is nevertheless important to consider how proactive policing strategies may bear upon this crisis. It is not enough to simply identify “what works” for reducing crime and disorder; it is also critical to consider issues such as how proactive policing affects the legality of policing, the evaluation of the police in communities, potential abuses of police authority, and the equitable application of police services in the everyday lives of citizens.

Proactive policing has taken a number of different forms over the past two decades, and these variants often overlap in practice. The four broad approaches to proactive policing described in this report are place-based interventions, problem-solving interventions, person-focused interventions, and community-based interventions (see Table 2-1 in Chapter 2 ). Place-based interventions capitalize on the growing research base that shows that crime is concentrated at specific places within a city as a means of more efficiently allocating police resources to reduce crime. Its main applications have been directed at microgeographic hot spots. Person-based interventions also capitalize on the concentration of crimes to proactively prevent crime, but in this case it is concentration among a subset of offenders. Person-based interventions focus on high-rate criminals who have been identified as committing a large proportion of the crime in a community. Problem-solving innovations focus on specific problems that are viewed as contributing to crime incidence and that can be ameliorated by the police. In this case, a systematic approach to solve problems is used to prevent future crime. Finally, community-based interventions emphasize the role of the community in doing something about crime problems. Community approaches look to strengthen collective efficacy in the community or to strengthen the bonds between the police and the community, as a way of enhancing informal social controls and increasing cooperation with the police, with the goal of preventing crime.

In this concluding chapter, the committee summarizes the main findings for each of the four areas on which the report has focused: law and legality, crime control, community impacts, and racial disparities and racially biased behavior. For each area, we list the main conclusions reached (the conclusions are numbered according to the report chapter in which they were developed) and then provide a final, summary discussion of the findings. We then turn to the broader policy implications of the report as a whole. Finally, we offer suggestions for filling research gaps in order to strengthen the knowledge base regarding proactive policing and its impacts.

LAW AND LEGALITY

CONCLUSION 3-1 Factual findings from court proceedings, federal investigations into police departments, and ethnographic and theoretical arguments support the hypothesis that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase violations of the Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection Clause; proactive policing strategies may also affect the Fourth Amendment status of policing conduct. However, there is not enough direct empirical evidence on the relationship between particular policing strategies and constitutional violations to draw any conclusions about the likelihood that particular proactive strategies increase or decrease constitutional violations.

CONCLUSION 3-2 Even when proactive strategies do not violate or encourage constitutional violations, they may undermine legal values, such as privacy, equality, and accountability. Empirical studies to date have not assessed these implications.

However effective a policing practice may be in preventing crime, it is impermissible if it violates the law. The most important legal constraints on proactive policing are the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause (of the Fourteenth Amendment), and related statutory provisions.

Although proactive policing strategies do not inherently violate the Fourth Amendment, any proactive strategy could lead to Fourth Amendment violations to the degree that it is implemented by having officers engage in stops, searches, and arrests that violate constitutional standards. This risk is especially relevant for stop, question, and frisk (SQF); broken windows policing; and hot spots policing interventions if they use an aggressive practice of searches and seizures to deter criminal activity.

In addition, in conjunction with existing Fourth Amendment doctrine, proactive policing strategies may limit the effective strength or scope of constitutional protection or reduce the availability of constitutional remedies. For example, when departments identify “high crime areas” pursuant to place-based proactive policing strategies, courts may allow stops by officers of individuals within those areas that are based on less individualized behavior than they would require without the “high crime” designation. In this way, geographically oriented proactive policing may lead otherwise identical citizen-police encounters to be treated differently under the law.

The Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal and impartial treatment of citizens by government actors. It governs all policies, decisions, and acts taken by police officers and departments, including those in furtherance

of proactive policing strategies. As a result, Equal Protection claims may arise with respect to any proactive policing strategy to the degree that it discriminates against individuals based on their race, religion, or national origin, among other characteristics. Since most policing policies today do not expressly target racial or ethnic groups, most Equal Protection challenges require proving discriminatory purpose in addition to discriminatory effect in order to establish a constitutional violation.

Specific proactive policing strategies such as SQF and “zero tolerance” versions of broken windows policing have been linked to violations of both the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause by courts in private litigation and by the U.S. Department of Justice in its investigations of police departments. Ethnographic studies and theoretical arguments further support the idea that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection violations. However, empirical evidence is insufficient—using the accepted standards of causality in social science—to support any conclusion about whether proactive policing strategies systematically promote or reduce constitutional violations. In order to establish a causal link, studies would ideally determine the incidence of problematic behavior by police under a proactive policy and compare that to the incidence of the same behavior in otherwise similar circumstances in which a proactive policy is not in place.

However, even when proactive strategies do not lead to constitutional violations, they may raise concerns about deeper legal values such as privacy, equality, autonomy, accountability, and transparency. Even procedural justice policing and community-oriented policing, neither of which are likely to violate legal constraints on policing (and, to the extent that procedural justice operates as intended, may make violations of law less likely), may, respectively, undermine the transparency about the status of police-citizen interactions and alter the structure of decision making and accountability in police organizations.

CRIME AND DISORDER

The available scientific evidence suggests that certain proactive policing strategies are successful in reducing crime and disorder. This important conclusion provides support for a growing interest among American police in innovating to develop effective crime prevention strategies. At the same time, there is substantial heterogeneity in the effectiveness of different proactive policing interventions in reducing crime and disorder. For some types of proactive policing, the evidence consistently points to effectiveness, but for others the evidence is inconclusive. Evidence in many cases is

restricted to localized crime prevention impacts, such as specific places, or to specific individuals. There is relatively little evidence-based knowledge about whether and to what extent the approaches examined in this report will have crime prevention benefits at the larger jurisdictional level (e.g., a city as a whole, or even large administrative areas such as precincts within a city) or across all offenders. One key problem that needs to be examined in this regard, but which has not been studied so far, is the degree to which specific policing programs create “opportunity costs” in terms of the allocation of police or policing resources in other domains. Furthermore, the crime prevention outcomes that are observed are mostly observed in the short term, and the evidence seldom addresses long-term crime-prevention outcomes.

It is important to note here that, in practice, police departments typically implement crime-reduction programs that include elements typical of several prevention strategies, as those strategies are defined for this report (see Chapter 2 ). Given this hybridization of tactics in practice, the committee’s review of the evidence was often hindered by the overlapping character of the real-world proactive policing interventions evaluated in many of the published research studies.

Place-Based Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-1 The available research evidence strongly suggests that hot spots policing strategies produce short-term crime-reduction effects without simply displacing crime into areas immediately surrounding targeted locations. Hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion of crime-control benefits into immediately adjacent areas. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of hot spots policing strategies on crime and on possible jurisdictional outcomes.

CONCLUSION 4-2 At present, there are insufficient rigorous empirical studies on predictive policing to support a firm conclusion for or against either the efficacy of crime prediction software or the effectiveness of any associated police operational tactics. It also remains difficult to distinguish a predictive policing approach from hot spots policing at small geographic areas.

CONCLUSION 4-3 The results from studies examining the introduction of closed circuit television camera schemes are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime places for passive monitoring approaches.

CONCLUSION 4-4 There are insufficient studies to draw conclusions regarding the impact of the proactive use of closed circuit television on crime and disorder reduction.

Policing has always had a geographic or place-based component, especially in how patrol resources are allocated for emergency response systems. However, over the past three decades scholars and the police have begun to recognize that crime is highly concentrated at specific places. Following this recognition, a series of place-based strategies have been developed in policing. In contrast to the focus of the standard model of policing, proactive place-based policing calls for a refocusing of policing on very small, “microgeographic” units of analysis, often termed “crime hot spots.” A number of rigorous evaluations of hot spots policing programs, including a series of randomized controlled trials, have been conducted.

The available research evidence suggests that hot spots policing interventions generate statistically significant short-term crime-reduction impacts without simply displacing crime into areas immediately surrounding the targeted locations. Instead, hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion-of-crime-control benefit into immediately adjacent areas. While the evidence base is strong for the benefits of hot spots policing in ameliorating local crime problems, there are no rigorous field studies of whether and to what extent this strategy will have jurisdictionwide impacts.

Predictive policing also takes a place-based approach, but it focuses greater concern on predicting the future occurrence of crimes in time and place. It relies upon sophisticated computer algorithms to predict changing patterns of future crime, often promising to be able to identify the exact locations where crimes of specific types are likely to occur next. While this approach has potential to enhance place-based crime prevention approaches, there are at present insufficient rigorous empirical studies to draw any firm conclusions about either the efficacy of crime prediction software or the effectiveness of any associated police operational tactics. Moreover, it remains difficult to distinguish the police actions used in a predictive policing approach from hot spots policing at small geographic areas.

Another technology relevant to improving police capacity for proactive intervention at specific places is closed circuit television (CCTV), which can be used either passively or proactively. The results from studies examining the introduction of CCTV camera schemes are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime places for passive monitoring approaches. Again, the committee did not find evidence that would allow us to estimate whether CCTV implemented as a jurisdictionwide strategy would have meaningful impacts on crime in that jurisdiction. As far as the proactive use of CCTV is concerned, there

are insufficient studies to draw conclusions regarding the impact of this strategy on crime and disorder.

Problem-Solving Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-5 There is a small group of rigorous studies of problem-oriented policing. Overall, these consistently show that problem-oriented policing programs lead to short-term reductions in crime. These studies do not address possible jurisdictional impacts of problem-oriented policing and generally do not assess the long-term impacts of these strategies on crime and disorder.

CONCLUSION 4-6 A small but rigorous body of evidence suggests that third party policing generates short-term reductions in crime and disorder; there is more limited evidence of long-term impacts. However, little is known about possible jurisdictional outcomes.

Problem-solving strategies such as problem-oriented policing and third party policing use an approach that seeks to identify causes of problems that engender crime incidents and draws upon innovative solutions to those problems to assess whether the solutions are effective. Problem-oriented policing uses a basic iterative process of problem identification, analysis, response, assessment, and adjustment of the response (often called the SARA [scanning, analysis, response, and assessment] model). This approach provides a framework for uncovering the complex mechanisms at play in crime problems and for developing tailored interventions to address the underlying conditions that cause crime problems in specific situations. Despite its popularity as a crime-prevention strategy, there are surprisingly few rigorous program evaluations of problem-oriented policing.

Much of the available evaluation evidence consists of non-experimental analyses that find strong associations between problem-oriented interventions and crime reduction. Program evaluations also suggest that it is difficult for police officers to fully implement problem-oriented policing. Many problem-oriented policing projects are characterized by weak problem analysis and a lack of non-enforcement responses to targeted problems. Nevertheless, even these limited applications of problem-oriented policing have been shown by rigorous evaluations to generate statistically significant short-term crime prevention impacts.

Third party policing draws upon the insights of problem solving, but also leverages “third parties” who are believed to offer significant new resources for preventing crime and disorder. Using civil ordinances and civil courts or the resources of private agencies, police departments engaged in third party policing recognize that much social control is exercised by

institutions other than the police (e.g., public housing agencies, property owners, parents, health and building inspectors, and business owners) and that crime can be managed through coordination with agencies and in ways other than enforcement responses under the criminal law. Though there are only a small number of program evaluations, the impact of third party policing interventions on crime and disorder has been assessed using randomized controlled trials and rigorous quasi-experimental designs. The available evidence suggests that third party policing generates statistically significant crime- and disorder-reduction effects. Related programs that employ Business Improvement Districts also show crime-prevention outcomes with long-term impacts, though research designs have been less rigorous in establishing causality.

Person-Focused Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-7 Evaluations of focused deterrence programs show consistent crime control impacts in reducing gang violence, street crime driven by disorderly drug markets, and repeat individual offending. The available evaluation literature suggests both short-term and long-term areawide impacts of focused deterrence programs on crime.

CONCLUSION 4-8 Evidence regarding the crime-reduction impact of stop, question, and frisk when implemented as a general, citywide crime-control strategy is mixed.

CONCLUSION 4-9 Evaluations of focused uses of stop, question, and frisk (SQF) (combined with other self-initiated enforcement activities by officers), targeting places with violence or serious gun crimes and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders, consistently report short-term crime-reduction effects; jurisdictional impacts, when estimated, are modest. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of focused uses of SQF on crime.

In the standard model of policing, the primary goal of police was to identify and arrest offenders after crimes had been committed. But beginning in the early 1970s, research evidence began to suggest that the police could be more effective if they focused on a relatively small number of chronic offenders. These studies led to innovations in policing based on the logic that crime prevention outcomes could be enhanced by focusing policing efforts on the small number of offenders who account for a large proportion of crime.

Offender-focused deterrence strategies, also known as “pulling levers,” attempt to deter crime among a particular offending population and are

often implemented in combination with problem-solving tactics. Offender-focused deterrence allows police to increase the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment in innovative ways. These strategies seek to change offender behavior by understanding the underlying crime-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring crime problems and by implementing a blended strategy of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions.

A growing number of quasi-experimental evaluations suggest that focused deterrence programs generate statistically significant crime-reduction impacts. Robust crime-control impacts have been reported by controlled evaluations testing the effectiveness of focused deterrence programs in reducing gang violence and street crime driven by disorderly drug markets and by non-experimental studies that examine repeat individual offending. It is noteworthy that the size of the effects observed are large, though the committee observed that many of the largest impacts are in studies with evaluation designs that are less rigorous. The committee did not identify any randomized experiments in this program area. Nonetheless, many of the quasi-experiments have study designs that create highly credible equivalence between their treatment and comparison conditions, which supports interpreting their results as evidence of causation.

While SQF has long been a law enforcement tool of policing, the landmark 1968 Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio provided a set of standard criteria that facilitated its use as a strategy for crime control. According to that decision, police may stop a person based upon a “reasonable suspicion” that that person may commit or is in the process of committing a crime; if a separate “reasonable suspicion” that the person is armed exists, the police may conduct a frisk of the stopped individual. While this standard means that Terry stops could not be legally applied without reference to the behavior of the individual being stopped, interpretation of that behavior gave significant leeway to the police. As a proactive policing strategy, departments often employ SQF more expansively and to promote forward-looking, preventive ends.

Non-experimental analyses of SQF broadly applied across a jurisdiction show mixed findings. However, a separate body of controlled evaluation research (including randomized experiments) that examines the effectiveness of SQF and other self-initiated enforcement activities by officers in targeting places with serious gun crime problems and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders consistently reports statistically significant short-term crime reductions.

Community-Based Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-10 Existing studies do not identify a consistent crime-prevention benefit for community-oriented policing programs. However, many of these studies are characterized by weak evaluation designs.

CONCLUSION 4-11 At present, there are an insufficient number of rigorous empirical studies on procedural justice policing to draw a firm conclusion about its effectiveness in reducing crime and disorder.

CONCLUSION 4-12 Broken windows policing interventions that use aggressive tactics for increasing misdemeanor arrests to control disorder generate small to null impacts on crime.

CONCLUSION 4-13 Evaluations of broken windows interventions that use place-based, problem-solving practices to reduce social and physical disorder have reported consistent short-term crime-reduction impacts. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of these kinds of broken windows strategies on crime or on possible jurisdictional outcomes.

The committee also reviewed the crime-prevention impacts of interventions using a community-based crime prevention approach. Such strategies include community-oriented policing, broken windows policing, and procedural justice policing. The logic models informing these community-based strategies seek to enlist and mobilize people who are not police in the processes of policing. In this case, however, the focus is generally not on specific actors such as business or property owners (as in the case of third party policing) but on the community more generally. In some cases, community-based strategies rely on enhancing “collective efficacy,” which is a community’s ability to engage in collective action to do something about crime (e.g., community-oriented policing and broken windows policing). In other cases, community-based models seek to change community members’ evaluations of the legitimacy of police actions (e.g., procedural justice policing) with the goal of increasing cooperation between the police and the public or encouraging law-abiding behavior. These goals are often intertwined in a real-world policing program.

As a proactive crime-prevention strategy, community-oriented policing tries to address and mitigate community problems (crime or otherwise) and, in turn, to build social resilience, collective efficacy, and empowerment to strengthen the infrastructure for the coproduction of safety and crime prevention. Community-oriented policing involves three core processes

and structures: (1) citizen involvement in identifying and addressing public safety concerns; (2) the decentralization of decision making to develop responses to locally defined problems; and (3) problem solving. Problem solving and decentralization acquire a community-oriented policing character when these process elements are embedded in the community engagement (often called “partnership”) element.

Although the committee identified a large number of studies of community-oriented policing programs, many of these programs were implemented in tandem with tactics typical of other approaches, such as problem solving. This was not surprising, given that basic definitions of community policing used by police departments often included problem solving as a key programmatic element. The studies also varied in their outcomes, reflecting the broad range of tactics and practices that are included in community-oriented policing programs, and many of the studies were characterized by weak evaluation designs. With these caveats, the committee did not identify a consistent crime prevention benefit for community-oriented policing programs.

Procedural justice policing seeks to impress upon citizens and the wider community that the police exercise their authority in legitimate ways. When citizens accord legitimacy to police activity, according to this logic model, they are more inclined to defer to police authority in instances of citizen-police interaction and to collaborate with police in the future, even to the extent of being more inclined not to violate the law. There is currently only a very small evidence base from which to support conclusions about the impact of procedural justice policing on crime prevention. Existing research does not support a conclusion that procedural justice policing impacts crime or disorder outcomes. At the same time, because the evidence base is small, the committee also cannot conclude that such strategies are ineffective.

Broken windows policing shares with community-oriented policing a concern for community welfare and envisions a role for police in finding ways to strengthen community structures and processes that provide a degree of immunity from disorder and crime in neighborhoods. Unlike the community-oriented policing strategy, it does not emphasize the coproductive collaborations of police and community as a mode of intervention; rather, it focuses on what police should do to establish conditions that allow “natural” community entities to flourish and promote neighborhood order and social/economic vitality. Implementations of broken windows interventions vary from informal enforcement tactics (warnings, rousting disorderly people) to formal or more intrusive ones (arrests, citations, stop and frisk), all of which are intended either to disrupt the forces of disorder before they overwhelm a neighborhood’s capacity for order maintenance

or to restore afflicted neighborhoods to a level where intrinsic community sources of order can manage it.

The impacts of broken windows policing are mixed across evaluations, again complicating the ability of the committee to draw strong inferences. However, the available program evaluations suggest that aggressive, misdemeanor arrest–based approaches to control disorder generate small to null impacts on crime. In contrast, controlled evaluations of place-based approaches that use problem-solving interventions to reduce social and physical disorder provide evidence of consistent crime-reduction impacts.

COMMUNITY IMPACTS

There is broad recognition that a positive community relationship with the police has value in its own right, irrespective of any influence it may have on crime or disorder. Democratic theories assert that the police, as an arm of government, are to serve the community and should be accountable to it in ways that elicit public approval and consent. Given this premise and the recent conflicts between the police and the public, the committee thought it very important to assess the impacts of proactive policing on issues, such as fear of crime, collective efficacy, and community evaluation of police legitimacy.

Place-Based, Problem-Solving, and Person-Focused Interventions

CONCLUSION 5-1 Existing research suggests that place-based policing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community outcomes. At the same time, such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures. There is a virtual absence of evidence on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of place-based policing on community outcomes.

CONCLUSION 5-2 Studies show consistent small-to-moderate, positive impacts of problem-solving interventions on short-term community satisfaction with the police. There is little evidence available on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of problem-solving strategies on community outcomes.

CONCLUSION 5-3 There is little consistency found in the impacts of problem-solving policing on perceived disorder, quality of life, fear of crime, and police legitimacy, except for the near-absence of backfire effects. The lack of backfire effects suggests that the risk is low of harmful community effects from tactics typical of problem-solving strategies.

CONCLUSION 5-4 Studies evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes have a number of design limitations that prevent causal inferences to be drawn about program effects. However, the studies of citizens’ personal experiences with person-focused strategies do show marked negative associations between exposure to stop, question, and frisk and proactive traffic enforcement approaches and community outcomes. The long-term and jurisdictionwide community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies remain untested.

Place-based, person-focused, and problem-solving interventions are distinct from community-based proactive strategies in that they do not directly seek to engage the public to enhance legitimacy evaluations and cooperation. In this context, the concerns regarding community outcomes for these approaches have often focused not on whether they improve community attitudes toward the police but rather on whether the focus on crime control leads inevitably to declines in positive community attitudes. Community-based strategies, in contrast, specifically seek to reduce fear, increase trust and willingness to intervene in community problems, and increase trust and confidence in the police.

A body of research evaluating the impact of place-based strategies on community attitudes is only now emerging; this research includes both quasi-experimental and experimental studies. However, the consistency of the findings suggests that place-based proactive policing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community attitudes. At the same time, the evidence suggests that such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures. Moreover, existing studies have generally examined the broader community and not specific individuals who are the focus of place-based interventions at crime hot spots. As noted below, more aggressive policing tactics that are focused on individuals may have negative outcomes on those who have contact with the police. Existing studies also generally measure short-term changes, which may not be sensitive to communities that become the focus of long-term implementation of place-based policing. Finally, there has not been measurement of the impacts of place-based approaches on the broader community, extending beyond the specific focus of interventions.

The research literature on community impacts of problem-solving interventions is larger. Although much of the literature relies on quasi-experimental designs, a few well-implemented randomized experiments also provide information on community outcomes. Studies show consistent positive short-term impacts of problem-solving strategies on community satisfaction with the police. At the same time, however, the research base lacks estimates of larger jurisdictional impacts of these strategies.

Because problem-solving strategies are so often implemented in tandem with tactics typical of community-based policing (i.e., community engagement), it is difficult to determine what role the problem-solving aspect plays in community outcomes, compared to the impact of the community engagement element. Although this fact makes it difficult to draw strong conclusions about “what” is impacting community attitudes, as we note below, it may be that implementing multiple approaches in tandem can also have more positive outcomes for police agencies.

While there is evidence that problem-solving approaches increase community satisfaction with the police, we found little consistency in problem-solving policing’s impacts on perceived disorder/quality of life, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. However, the near-absence of backfire (i.e., undesired negative) effects in the evaluations of problem-solving strategies suggests that the risk of harmful community effects from problem-solving strategies is low. As with place-based approaches, community outcomes generally do not examine people who have direct contact with the police, and measurement of impacts is local as opposed to jurisdictional.

The body of research evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes is relatively small, even in comparison with the evidence base on problem-solving and place-based strategies; the long-term community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies also remain untested. These studies involve qualitative or correlational designs that make it difficult to draw causal inferences about typical impacts of these strategies. Correlational studies do find strong negative associations between exposure to the strategy and the attitudes and orientations of individuals who are the subjects of aggressive law enforcement interventions (SQF and proactive traffic enforcement). Moreover, a number of ethnographic and survey-based studies have found negative outcomes, especially for Black and other non-White youth who are continually exposed to SQFs. The studies that measure the impact on the larger community show a more complicated and unclear pattern of outcomes.

Community-Based Interventions

CONCLUSION 6-1 Community-oriented policing leads to modest improvements in the public’s view of policing and the police in the short term. (Very few studies of community-oriented policing have traced its long-term effects on community outcomes or its jurisdictionwide consequences.) These improvements occur with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects on community attitudes. Hence, the deployment of community-oriented policing

as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects for modest gains at little risk of negative consequences.

CONCLUSION 6-2 Due to the small number of studies, mixed findings, and methodological limitations, no conclusion can be drawn about the impact of community-oriented policing on collective efficacy and citizen cooperative behavior.

CONCLUSION 6-3 The committee is not able to draw a conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime or collective efficacy. This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed.

CONCLUSION 6-4 In general, studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly and positively associated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy and cooperation with the police. However, the research base is currently insufficient to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing causally influences either perceived legitimacy or cooperation.

CONCLUSION 6-5 Although the application of procedural justice concepts to policing is relatively new, there are more extensive literatures on procedural justice in social psychology, in management, and with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and results in those areas suggest that the application of procedural justice concepts to policing has promise and that further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such strategies in those other domains can be replicated in the domain of policing.

The available empirical research on community-oriented policing’s community effects focuses on citizen perceptions of police performance (in terms of what they do and the consequences for community disorder), satisfaction with police, and perceived police legitimacy. The evidence suggests that community-oriented policing leads to modest improvements in the community’s view of policing and the police in the short term. This occurs with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and perceived legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects from the intervention on community attitudes. Therefore, the deployment of community-oriented policing as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects of modest gains at little risk of negative consequences.

Broken windows policing is often evaluated directly in terms of its short-term crime control impacts. We have emphasized in this report that the logic model for broken windows policing seeks to alter the community’s levels of fear and collective efficacy as a method of enhancing community social controls and reducing crime in the long run. While this is a key element of the broken windows policing model, the committee’s review of the evidence found that these outcomes have seldom been examined. The evidence was insufficient to draw any conclusions regarding the impact of broken windows policing on community social controls. Studies of the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime do not support the model’s claim that such programs will reduce levels of fear in the community, at least in the short run.

While there is a rapidly growing body of research on the community impacts of procedural justice policing, it is difficult to draw causal inferences from these studies. In general, the studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly correlated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy. The extant research base on the impacts of procedural justice proactive policing strategies on perceived legitimacy and cooperation was insufficient for the committee to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing will improve community evaluations of police legitimacy or increase cooperation with the police.

Although this committee finding may appear at odds with a growing movement to encourage procedurally just behavior among the police, the committee thinks it is important to stress that a finding that there is insufficient evidence to support the expected outcomes of procedural justice policing is not the same as a finding that such outcomes do not exist. Moreover, although the application of procedural justice to policing is relatively new, there is a more extensive evidence base on procedural justice in social psychology and organizational management, as well as on procedural justice with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and results in those areas suggest meaningful impacts of procedural justice on the legitimacy of institutions and authorities involved. Thus, the application of procedural justice ideas to policing has promise, although further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such implementations in other social contexts can be replicated in the arena of policing.

RACIAL BIAS AND DISPARITIES

CONCLUSION 7-1 There are likely to be large racial disparities in the volume and nature of police–citizen encounters when police target high-risk people or high-risk places, as is common in many proactive policing programs.

CONCLUSION 7-2 Existing evidence does not establish conclusively whether, and to what extent, the racial disparities associated with concentrated person-focused and place-based enforcement are indicators of statistical prediction, racial animus, implicit bias, or other causes. However, the history of racial injustice in the United States, in particular in the area of criminal justice and policing, as well as ethnographic research that has identified disparate impacts of policing on non-White communities, makes the investigation of the causes of racial disparities a key research and policy concern.

Concerns about racial bias loom especially large in discussions of policing. The interest of this report was to assess whether and to what extent proactive policing affects racial disparities in police–citizen encounters and racial bias in police behavior. Recent high-profile incidents of police shootings and abusive police–citizen interaction caught on camera have raised questions regarding basic fairness, racial discrimination, and the excessive use of force of all forms against non-Whites, and especially Blacks, in the United States. In considering these incidents, the committee stresses that the origins of policing in the United States are intimately interwoven with the nation’s history of racial prejudice. Although in recent decades police have often made a strong effort to address racially biased behaviors, wide disparities remain in the extent to which non-White people and White people are stopped or arrested by police. Moreover, as our discussion of constitutional violations in Chapter 3 notes, the U.S. Department of Justice has identified continued racial disparities and biased behavior in policing in a number of major American police agencies.

As social norms have evolved to make overt expressions of bigotry less acceptable, psychologists have developed tools to measure more subtle factors underlying biased behavior. A series of studies suggest that negative racial attitudes may influence police behavior—although there is no direct research on proactive policing. There is a further growing body of research identifying how these psychological mechanisms may affect behavior and what types of situations, policies, or practices may exacerbate or ameliorate racially biased behaviors. In a number of studies, social psychologists have found that race may affect decision making, especially under situations where time is short and such decisions need to be made quickly. More broadly, social psychologists have identified dispositional (i.e., individual characteristics) and situational and environmental factors that are associated with higher levels of racially biased behavior.

Proactive strategies often facilitate increased officer contact with residents (particularly in high-crime areas), involve contacts that are often enforcement-oriented and uninvited, and may allow greater officer discretion compared to standard policing models. These elements align with

broad categories of possible risk factors for biased behavior by police officers. For example, when contacts involve stops or arrests, police may be put in situations where they have to “think fast” and react quickly. Social psychologists have argued that such situations may be particularly prone to the emergence of what they define as implicit biases.

Relative to the research on the impact of proactive policing policies on crime, there is very little field research exploring the potential role that racially biased behavior plays in proactive policing. There is even less research on the ways that race may shape police policy or color the consequences of police encounters with residents. These research gaps leave police departments and communities concerned with bias in police behavior without an evidence base from which to make informed decisions. Because of these gaps, the committee was unable to draw any concrete conclusions about the role of biased behavior in proactive policing. Consequently, research on these topics is urgently needed both so that the field may better understand potential negative consequences of proactive policing and so that communities and police departments may be better equipped to align police behaviors with values of equity and justice.

Inferring the role of racial animus, statistical prediction, or other dispositional and situational risk factors in contributing to observed racial disparities is a challenging question for research. Although focused policing approaches may reduce overall levels of police intrusion, we also detailed in Chapter 7 the very large disparities in the stops and arrests of non-White, and especially Black Americans, and we noted that concentrating enforcement efforts in high-crime areas and on highly active individual offenders may lead to racial disparities in police–citizen interactions. Although these disparities are often much reduced when taking into account population benchmarks such as official criminality, the committee also noted that studies that seek to benchmark citizen–police interactions against simple population counts or broad, publicly available measures of criminal activity do not yield conclusive information regarding the potential for racially biased behavior in proactive policing efforts. Identifying an appropriate benchmark would require detailed information on the geography and nature of the proactive strategy, as well as localized knowledge of the relative importance of the problem. Such benchmarks are not currently available. The absence of such benchmarks makes it difficult to distinguish between accurate statistical prediction and racial profiling.

Some of the most illuminating evidence on the potential impact of proactive policing and increased citizen–police contacts on racial outcomes relates to the use of SQF in New York City. This research seeks to model the probabilities that police suspicion of criminal possession of a weapon turns out to be justified, given the information available to officers when deciding whether to stop someone. This work finds substantial racial and

ethnic disparities in the distribution of these probabilities, suggesting that police in New York City apply lower thresholds of suspicion to blacks and Hispanics. We do not know whether this pattern exists in other settings.

Per the charge to the committee, this report reviewed a relatively narrow area of intersection between race and policing. This focus, though, is nested in a broader societal framework of possible disparities and biased behaviors across a whole array of social contexts. These can affect proactive policing in, for example, the distribution of crime in society and the extent of exposure of specific groups to police surveillance and enforcement. However, it was beyond the scope of this study to review them systematically in the context of the committee’s work.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

In its review of the evidence, the committee tried to identify the most credible evidence on whether particular types of proactive policing strategies have been shown to affect legality, crime, communities, racial disparities, and racially biased behavior. A strategy is said to have “impact” if it affects outcomes compared with what they would have been at that same time and place in the absence of the implementation of a specific strategy. The strongest evidence often derives from randomized field trials and natural experiments in the field, typically implemented through a change in the activities of a police department structured so as to create a credibly comparable control condition with which to compare the “treatment” condition. However, as we have emphasized throughout the report, other methodological approaches can also provide rigorous evidence for the types of outcomes that we have examined. In turn, ethnographic studies have provided important information for the committee in understanding the processes that lead to such outcomes. Nonetheless, the emphasis in many sections of our report is on the “internal validity” of the evaluation: how strong is the evidence that a particular treatment implemented in a particular place caused the observed impact? And this assessment of validity has important implications for the strength of policy recommendations that we can draw from our review.

We want to emphasize that even a well-designed experimental trial implemented with fidelity may yield biased effect estimates if the outcomes data are not reliable. Most of the studies of crime outcomes examined in this report used crime data collected by the police department that is responsible for implementing the program. With the exception of homicide and perhaps motor-vehicle theft, the police only know of a fraction of all serious crimes. Less than one-half of robberies, aggravated assaults, and burglaries are reported to the police, and of course, reporting is a precondition for inclusion in the departmental statistics. That fact does not

negate the usefulness of these data in measuring impact, but it does compel consideration of whether the intervention is likely to affect the likelihood that a crime will be reported to and recorded by the police. For example, if a community-based policing intervention has the effects of both reducing crime and increasing the percentage of crimes reported to the police, the result might be that the latter will mask the former and obscure the crime-reduction effect. We note this possibility as a potential challenge to the internal validity of even well-designed and faithfully implemented experimental interventions, if they rely solely on police data.

Data that are collected by researchers may also have serious weaknesses. In some of the community surveys reviewed in this report, response rates were exceptionally low. A number of studies that we examined also used laboratory data; the laboratory environment allows a great deal of control over the research process but can be criticized as artificial and as a poor indicator of what actually happens in the field in policing.

More generally, we want to point to three specific limitations when it comes to the usefulness of this review in informing policy choice. First, the literature that we reviewed typically lacks much information on the magnitudes of the effects of the strategies evaluated. A clear demonstration that the “treatment effect” is greater than would be expected by chance—that is, that the estimated effect is statistically significantly different from zero—helps establish that the program “worked” but not that it was “worthwhile” from a policy perspective. A more complete evaluation would require a comparison of the estimated magnitude of the effect with an estimate of the costs of the program. How many serious crimes were prevented by the candidate program for every $100,000 worth of resources devoted to it, and what are the effects of removing that $100,000 from what it would otherwise have been used for? For a police chief or city mayor, resources are limited and must be accounted for in making well-informed choices about policing practice. This problem becomes even more difficult when one is trying to calculate costs and benefits for such outcomes as community satisfaction or perceived legitimacy. The literature rarely provides such a cost-effectiveness analysis, and hence this committee cannot provide policy proscriptions that would give specific advice about the costs or cost savings.

Second, and closely related, is that the evaluation evidence, because it typically does not account for cost, may actually provide a misleading impression of whether a program “worked”—whether in reducing crime or improving community attitudes for the entire jurisdiction—as opposed to having an effect only for the segment of the city represented by the treatment group. As we have noted throughout the report, most evaluations provide a local estimate of program impacts. They do not report how the program affected the jurisdiction overall. Absent such reports, or at least

evidence-grounded estimates of jurisdiction-level impact, it is very difficult to provide guidance to police executives about how redeployment of resources will impact overall trends across a city. Since most of the evaluations we reviewed assess local impacts only, we often do not know what the impacts of a program will be on the broader community when a program is broadly applied, as opposed to when it is implemented on a small scale.

Third, a police chief who is considering adopting a particular innovation may be able to make a prediction about whether it will reduce crime or improve community attitudes, based on evaluations of one or more similar programs, but that prediction must always be hedged by the constraint that making inferences about “here and now” based on “there and then” is a tricky business. A well-known example comes from the “coerced abstinence” program for drug-involved convicts known as HOPE. The program originated and was carefully evaluated in courts in Honolulu, Hawaii, where it appeared very effective. It has been replicated a number of times on the mainland United States, with at best mixed results. The variability in results may reflect differences in the quality of implementation by the law enforcement agencies, the modal type of drug of abuse (which differs among jurisdictions), or other factors. 1 To the extent that programmatic effects are moderated by the characteristics of the target population and the implementing agency, then importing a program that appears promising into another setting can lead to disappointment. The uncertainties created by this “external validity” problem for evaluating field trials cannot be readily quantified. A common-sense view is that a single evaluation is not enough to establish a strong case for adoption in a different time and place and that understanding potential modifiers of the effects is important for evidence-based policy.

However, while acknowledging these caveats, the committee thinks that we can provide broad policy guidance regarding what the science of policing is today and how that might affect the choices that police executives make. Waiting until the evidence base is fully developed to draw from science in policy making is not only unrealistic—it also means that practitioners will not benefit from what is known already. Our report provides important knowledge for policing, knowledge that can help inform the debate about what the police should be doing. Nonetheless, as we have noted, there are important limitations in how existing knowledge can be used, and those limitations should be considered when drawing upon the science in this report.

A number of identifiable policing strategies provide evidence of consistent short-term crime-prevention benefits at the local level. These in-

___________________

1 For a discussion of HOPE, see the special issue of Criminology & Public Policy (November 2016), Volume 15, Issue 4.

clude hot spots policing, problem-oriented policing, third party policing, SQF targeted to violent and gun-crime hot spots, focused deterrence, and problem-solving efforts incorporated in broken windows policing. What these approaches have in common is their effort to more tightly specify and focus police activities. Police executives who implement such strategies are drawing upon evidence-based approaches. At the same time, the ability to generalize from existing evaluations to the broader array of at least larger American cities is sometimes limited by the limited number and scope of studies that are available, though in the case of hot spots policing a larger number of studies across diverse contexts have been carried out. We also find that these strategies, with the important exception of SQF, do not lead to negative community outcomes. With the caveats noted above, it appears that crime-prevention outcomes can be obtained without this type of unintended negative consequence. Albeit preliminary, this finding reinforces the policy relevance of these evidence-based approaches.

At the same time, the results of our review suggest that police executives should not view certain proactive policing approaches as evidence based, at least at this time. For instance, SQF indiscriminately focused across a jurisdiction or broken windows policing programs relying on a generalized approach to misdemeanor arrests (“zero tolerance”) have not shown evidence of effectiveness. This caveat, combined with research evidence that documents negative individual outcomes for people who are the subject of aggressive police enforcement efforts, even in the absence of clear causal interpretation, should lead police executives to exercise caution in adopting generalized, aggressive enforcement tactics. Moreover, our review of the constitutional basis for focusing police resources on people or places suggests that issues of legality are particularly relevant in the case of such strategies. Even in the case of focused programs for which there is evidence of crime-control success, when aggressive approaches such as SQF are employed, police executives must consider and actively try to prevent potential negative outcomes on the community and on legality, and they should cooperate with researchers attempting to quantify and evaluate these issues. This means not only that police executives should proceed with caution in adopting such strategies but also that agencies that are already applying them broadly and without careful focus should consider scaling down present efforts.

The committee’s findings regarding community-based strategies raise important questions about whether such approaches will yield crime-prevention benefits. Many scholars and policy makers have sought to argue that community-oriented policing and procedural justice policing will yield not only better relations with the public but also greater crime control. We do not find consistent evidence for this proposition, and police executives

should be accordingly wary of implementing community-based strategies primarily as a crime-control approach.

The committee also concluded that community-oriented policing programs were likely to improve evaluations of the police, albeit modestly. Accordingly, if the policy goal of an agency is to improve its relationship with the communities it serves, then community-oriented policing is a promising strategy choice, although we are unable to offer a judgment on whether the benefits are sufficient to justify the expected costs. Our review of policing programs with a community-based approach also suggests that police executives may want to consider applying multiple strategies as a more general agency approach. The difficulty of distinguishing the effects of community-based and problem-solving approaches that are often implemented together has been noted numerous times in this report. However, we also think that better outcomes may be obtained when programs are hybridized across the approaches defined in this report. If, for example, an agency seeks to improve both crime prevention and community satisfaction with the police, it seems reasonable to combine practices typical of community-oriented policing with evidence-based crime-prevention practices typical of strategies such as hot spots policing or problem-oriented policing. This has already been done in problem-solving approaches that emphasize community engagement, where these dual benefits have been observed.

Existing studies do not provide evidence of crime prevention effectiveness in the case of proactive procedural justice policing. Accordingly, the committee believes that caution should be used in advocating for such approaches on the ground that they will reduce crime. At the same time, studies reviewed by the committee did not find that procedural justice policing has the expected positive community outcomes. Does this mean that police should not encourage procedural justice policing programs? We think that this would be a serious mistake for two reasons. The first is simply that procedural justice reflects the behavior of police that is appropriate in a democratic society. Procedural justice encourages democratic policing even if it may not change citizen attitudes. The second reason relates to the state of research in this area. While it is a mistake to draw strong conclusions that procedural justice policing will improve community members’ evaluations of police legitimacy or cooperation with the police, it is equally wrong to draw the conclusion that it will not do so. Again, the evidence base here is too sparse to support either position.

RESEARCH GAPS

While there is a large body of evaluation research in policing today, as contrasted with two or three decades ago, the committee identified a

number of key gaps in what is known about proactive policing. Filling such gaps in the evidence base is critical for developing the type of knowledge that, as we noted earlier, is necessary to inform policy decisions for policing. Policing in the United States represents a large commitment of public resources; it is estimated to cost federal, state, and local governments more than $125 billion per year ( Kyckelhahn, 2015 ). Given that investment, the extent of the research gaps on proactive policing is surprising. For the police to take advantage of the revolution in police practices that proactive policing represents, they will need the help of the federal government and private foundations in answering a host of questions regarding effectiveness, community outcomes, legality, and racially biased behavior. The committee also noted an imbalance in the evidence base across the areas of the committee’s charge. While far from complete, there is a large body of credible causal evidence on the impact of proactive policing on crime rates. However, social science research of a similar form on other equally important outcomes of policing is only beginning to occur.

We think it also important to note at the outset that more research needs to be focused on the standard model of policing. The 2004 National Research Council report, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence , argued that there was little evidence supporting such standard police practices as random police patrol across large areas, follow-up investigations, and rapid response to citizen calls for service. However, a number of new studies have been carried out since the 2004 study, and this recent research suggests that the view of the standard model of policing in that report may need to be reassessed (see, e.g., Chaflin and McCrary, 2017 ; Evans and Owens, 2007 ; Cook, 2015 ). In order to estimate the benefits of proactive policing efforts, more information is needed on whether standard policing practices are generating crime-prevention benefits, as well as sustaining and perhaps improving the community’s trust in and regard for the police.

Improving the Quality of Data and Research on Proactive Policing

Drawing conclusions about the efficacy of proactive policing strategies or about policing innovations more broadly is complicated by the absence of comprehensive data on police behavior in the field. Just because a policy has been formally adopted does not mean that officers on the beat behave according to the tenets of that policy. The impact of the adoption of a policy on any outcome is, essentially, a combination of the actual impact of a police agency adopting, for example, a place-based intervention, and the probability that officers actually implement this intervention as they engage in targeted patrol in particular places. Identifying ways to measure what police officers actually do is, therefore, a central problem for evaluat-

ing the impact of proactive policing strategies on crime, communities, and the legality of officer behavior.

To be useful for evaluating the impact of a proactive policing strategy on what officers do in the field, it is necessary for the data to, at minimum, measure officer behavior both before and after the policy change. Ideally, the data would span multiple agencies, thereby allowing for a more credible analysis of what officers might have done in the absence of the policy change. There have been some examples of efforts by governments to proactively develop such data sources. Such efforts include the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection project, the Police Data Initiative in the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) in the U.S. Department of Justice, and the proactive efforts in California to require local agencies to report information on all stops to that state’s Office of the Attorney General (CA AB 953). 2 Similarly, there are a number of academic and nonprofit efforts to augment police data collection efforts and thereby provide enhanced analytic capacity, such as the Center for Policing Equity’s National Justice Database and the Stanford Open Policing Project. 3 Substantially more effort needs to be devoted to collecting reliable data on how proactive policing is carried out in the field. 4 Without the routine collection of such data, it is not possible to assess the prevalence and incidence of proactive policing or to characterize the content of such strategies.

The committee also noted more general weaknesses in existing studies that limit the conclusions that can be drawn. One important limitation is that proactive policing interventions often overlap in terms of the strategies represented by the elements of the intervention. For example, many place-based policing interventions include elements of a problem-solving approach, as do many community-based programs. While we recognize that the police and program developers are focused on crime prevention and not on identifying the specific components of a program that have impact, the mixing of elements from different approaches makes it extremely difficult to draw strong conclusions about which element(s) in a program had a crime-prevention impact. Therefore, it is very important in future research to develop study designs that allow identification of the specific mechanisms that produce impacts.

2 See https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB953 [November 2016].

3 See http://mashable.com/2017/02/23/google-racial-justice-commitment/#8KbrqmHvKkqjhttp://observer.com/2016/02/traffic-stops-database/ [November 2016].

4 Interesting new opportunities for such data collection have been taken advantage of by researchers. For example, S. Weisburd (2016) used GPS data on exactly where police cars are in Dallas, Texas, at small intervals of time to draw inferences about the effectiveness of police patrol in small areas.

More generally, it is important for evaluations to focus on the underlying logic models that are proposed to account for (or promise) program impacts. Broken windows policing, for example, was conceived as a method for increasing community social controls in the long run. However, very few studies of broken windows policing actually examine how police activities in reducing disorder will impact such long-term attitudes. This is true for many of the proactive policing strategies examined in this report. Research funding agencies should require the incorporation of tests of the validity of underlying logic models in their study solicitations.

The focus on short-run, rather than long-run, impacts also pervades the evaluation of crime incidence, which is the most researched outcome the committee examined. Seldom do researchers look at program impacts extending for more than a year after program initiation, and only a handful of the studies identified by the committee look at crime prevention in the long run. While research indicates that many proactive practices seem to create a crime-reduction effect in the short term, the long-term impacts of these programs also should be an important focus of study. And whereas most of the available research that measures community effects does so over a relatively short term (a year or less), it is likely that community effects—especially those involving people who have little or no direct contact with the police—require much longer to register. Some research suggests that community effects are dynamic, but that research has generally not examined effects over several years. For all these reasons, more research is needed that tracks the effects of proactive policing over several years.

With regard to the types of research conducted, more implementation and process evaluations are needed to better understand the challenges of getting programs and policies translated into police practice, as well as to better understand the actual practices that are being evaluated in terms of community outcomes. The standardization of measures of implementation and dosage for specific strategies will improve the capacity of systematic reviews of these studies to interpret an array of findings. In turn, in many areas there is a need for more rigorous evaluation designs—and especially the development of well-implemented randomized trials.

In looking at the studies reviewed in this report, the committee notes that most are concentrated in large, urban jurisdictions. Smaller, suburban, and rural jurisdictions are understudied, but they should be included in the mix of funded evaluations. Community dynamics in such jurisdictions may vary in ways not revealed in the studies of larger communities. Evaluations should also control for the larger organizational context in which policing programs operate. Little is known about how the structure of a department and, for example, its management style affects its ability to develop and sustain proactive policing programs that reduce crime while enhancing the legitimacy and legality of police officers’ actions. Further research is also

needed on how these outcomes are affected by police oversight and accountability mechanisms, including review boards, lawsuits, data disclosure requirements, and the standardized collection of data on officer activities (as recommended above).

Finally, the committee notes the absence of rigorous research on training of police. Training has been shown to change behavior in other settings, particularly management. Police training programs for proactive policing are recent, and there is very little evidence at this time about their long-term effects. Several recent studies suggest that training programs can influence officers’ attitudes toward, and behavior within, communities. Studies need to examine the impact of training on police officers’ orientations and behaviors. Expanding the Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies, and in particular identifying which agencies hire graduates, as opposed to simply how many agencies, is a possible first step that would facilitate linking officer training to actual field outcomes. It is especially important for future research to evaluate which training approaches and methods prove most effective for imparting the necessary will and skill required to implement a given proactive strategy well.

Proactive Policing and the Law

There is less research on how proactive policies influence the legality of officer behavior than on how those policies affect crime or community perceptions of crime. One of the hurdles is the absence of a clear measure of what, exactly, constitutes legal behavior on an officer’s part. Research on how to quantify the legality of police officer behavior in a way that is consistent with the law and lends itself to causal analysis is a necessary first step. Because of the complex issues involved, such research is likely to be most productive if conducted by members of the legal, social science, and police leadership communities in collaboration.

Researchers studying the impacts of proactive policies on citizen lawbreaking, using experimental or quasi-experimental designs and administrative data, also should identify the relevant legal standards for officer behavior and include measures of officer behavior that are affected by these standards as one of their assessed outcomes. Ethnographic, qualitative, and mixed methods social science research, as well as legal scholarship, should inform how quantitative researchers conceptualize these measures. Given that officer law-breaking is as important, if not more so, in a general evaluation of such policies as undesirable behavior on the part of citizens, researchers who have access to administrative data that measure and make reliable legal judgments about officer behavior, including data collected by body-worn cameras, should include assessment of such outcomes in their analysis of the policies’ impacts on crime by citizens.

Crime-Control Impacts of Proactive Policing

As noted above, while the committee has provided a series of conclusions regarding the crime- and disorder-control impacts of proactive policing, there are significant caveats that limited our ability to develop specific policy prescriptions. Given the importance of the policing enterprise and its impacts on U.S. society, we think that a major investment in research on proactive policing is warranted, with a complementary investment in assessing standard policing practices.

A better understanding is needed of the crime-prevention effects of proactive policing programs relative to each other and relative to such activities as crime investigation, response to 911 calls, and routine patrol. For example, which types of proactive activities create a greater deterrent effect in a crime hot spot: foot patrol, technological surveillance (such as CCTVs), problem-solving projects, enforcement activities, or situational crime-prevention strategies? Can gun crimes be best reduced through focused deterrence/pulling levers, pedestrian and traffic stops, or crime prevention through environmental design?

Equally important to the relative deterrent effect of proactive policing approaches are the social costs and collateral consequences of those approaches. At the most basic level, identifying other effects than crime reduction of proactive policing approaches—positive or negative—is needed. Once identified, measuring for these effects when testing for the crime prevention effects of proactive policing should be included in study designs.

A key issue in place-based studies is whether crime displaces to other areas. There is now a strong literature showing that immediate geographic displacement is not common, and studies instead point to a diffusion of crime control benefits to areas near targeted hot spots. However, little is known about displacement to more distal areas and whether such displacement affects the crime prevention benefits of place-based strategies. Study of distal displacement needs to be a central feature of the next generation of research on place-based policing. Most evaluations also provide only local estimates of impacts, and it is critical to examine whether place-based strategies implemented across cities will have jurisdictional impacts. Estimating the size of jurisdictional impacts for strategies such as hot spots policing is critical for police executives and policy makers as they consider the wider benefits of these approaches.

More research is also needed on how technology contributes to the crime prevention effects of proactive policing strategies. There has been relatively little research on the impacts of technology in policing beyond technical, efficiency, or process evaluations. More studies of the crime-control impacts of license plate readers, body-worn cameras, gun-shot detection technologies, forensic technologies, and CCTV are needed. Furthermore,

the effectiveness of analytic technologies such as crime analysis and predictive policing software applications also remains under-researched. Given their increased use in proactive policing strategies, much more needs to be known.

To date, there are no rigorous outcome evaluations of law enforcement proactive interventions designed to reduce and prevent technology-related crime, such as cybercrime, fraud and theft using the Internet, or hacking. Proactive activities by federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security remain completely immune from public-domain evaluation in this and all other aspects of their proactive efforts.

Finally, it is important to determine whether community-oriented or procedural justice approaches can produce crime prevention effects. While improving citizen reaction to police activity is an important goal in and of itself, equally important—and connected to this goal—is the detection, prevention, reduction, and control of crime. Perhaps community-oriented or procedural justice approaches can be combined with other effective practices from the place-based, person-focused, or problem-solving approaches to attain both goals. But to date, the effectiveness of community-oriented and procedural justice interventions in crime control is uncertain.

Community Impacts of Proactive Policing

While there is broad recognition of the importance of community impacts of proactive policing strategies, there are only a few studies available on the community impacts of place-based and person-focused strategies, and the results for most types of outcomes are varied. A more extensive menu of observational, quasi-experimental, and experimental evaluations is needed. Systematic assessment of the contingent nature of outcomes is needed. Moreover, although a variety of logic models propose to account for the role that various community outcomes play in the process of affecting crime and disorder levels and community perceptions and behaviors, these logic models have not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests.

A gap noted throughout the research on community impacts is the lack of studies of the long-term effects of proactive strategies. Regardless of the rigor of the evaluation design in terms of inferring causal linkages between strategies and community outcomes, the extant literature provides only an ahistorical, incomplete, and potentially misleading perspective on what the consequences of proactive strategies will be. Future research should take into account both the long-term exposure of research subjects to proactive policing and the need to track the community consequences of those strategies over years, not months. Both variation in the accumulation of dosage over extended time and the consequences of this extended exposure are

virtually unexplored. Whether and how much a pattern of consequences is sustained or decays is also important to know.

One approach to changing community perception of police legitimacy is to change police behavior during contacts with the public. There is considerable evidence in the social psychology literature suggesting that personal contacts can change attitudes. However, there is insufficient research on the likelihood that one personal contact with a police officer can change orientations that have built up over a lifetime, irrespective of how the police behave during that single contact. Studies of the impact of a single experience with the police on a person’s general orientation toward the police are relatively few, and the results are mixed. Research is needed that tests the ability of a single interaction to shape general views about police legitimacy. This work needs to consider different types of encounters. It also needs to take account of characteristics of the person being stopped (race, age, gender, trust in the police) and that person’s history of encounters with the police. Finally, there needs to be a broader consideration of impacts on communities and the inevitable interactions between what the police do in a community and how that activity affects the development trajectory of that community, not only with respect to crime but also for housing, economic development, and other social outcomes.

Racial Bias and Disparities in Proactive Policing

The committee believes that the area of racial disparity and racially biased behavior is a particularly important one for enhancing the rigor and quantity of research on proactive policing. The committee identified five areas where research is most urgently needed with regard to racially biased behavior and proactive policing: (1) psychological risk factors, (2) training on bias reduction, (3) attention to behavioral bias as an important outcome of research on crime reduction, (4) an emphasis on assessing “downstream” consequences of proactive policing on racial outcomes, and (5) an emphasis on “upstream” influences regarding how proactive policing approaches are adopted.

First, a focus is needed on the psychological mechanisms of racially biased police behavior in actual field contexts, not only in laboratory simulations. As we reviewed in Chapter 7 , research in social psychology has identified a number of risk and protective factors that in laboratory settings are associated with either an increase or decrease in racially biased behaviors, even in subjects who do not appear to harbor racial animus. Many situations common in proactive policing map onto these factors. In spite of the potential relevance of the laboratory findings, there is virtually no evidence about whether or not police contexts or trainings produce sufficient protections against those risks in the field. A systematic approach to

these risk factors in proactive policing would be an important step toward producing an evidence base for evaluating racial disparities in proactive policing.

Second, rigorous research is needed on whether police training in this area affects actual police behavior. Even though there have been large investments in police training to address racial bias and disparate treatment, there are at present no rigorous studies that inform these efforts.

Third, the incidence of racially biased behavior and of racial disparities in outcomes should become an important outcome metric for research on proactive policing. To date, outcome evaluations in policing have focused primarily on crime control and at times on community satisfaction or perceived legitimacy. Seldom have studies assessed racial outcomes of proactive policing, despite the fact that these outcomes constitute a key issue for policy in American society. Assessing disparate impacts in policing in an informative way will require spatially detailed demographic information about the population at risk of encountering the police when the policy is in place, in order to identify an appropriate benchmark and identify the marginal person affected by the policy. Until standardized metrics for measuring racially biased behavior are available, along with measures of the populations exposed to proactive policing policies, thorough assessments of proactive policing efforts will likely require formal empirical analysis, as well as qualitative and ethnographic analysis, of proactive strategies, their implementation, and their impacts.

Fourth, understanding the downstream consequences of racial disparities is an urgent research need. Does proactive policing have a long-term impact on racial disparities or race relations in communities? What are the costs of such impacts, and can and should they be compared to the crime-control benefits of proactive policing? As we argued in Chapter 7 , proactive policing may lead to long-term decreases in inequalities in communities because of the benefits of lowered crime and related social consequences of crime. But little is known about such issues to date. To weigh these potential costs of proactive policing against the crime-reducing benefits, researchers must develop some metric for quantifying and estimating the cost of racial disparities, racially biased behavior, and racial animus. Survey techniques commonly used for cost-benefit research in environmental economics may be a useful guide.

Finally, the committee identified very little research on what drives law enforcement agencies to adopt proactive police policies. The history of criminal justice and law enforcement in the United States, along with ethnographic evidence on how police actions are perceived in communities, suggests that the role of race and ethnicity in the adoption of policing practices should be carefully assessed. However, scholars of proactive policing have yet to study carefully how race may influence the adoption of specific

proactive policing policies. It is critically important to understand not only the impacts of proactive policing on racial outcomes but also how race may affect the adoption of specific types of proactive policing. This was a concern raised to us by representatives of such groups as The Movement for Black Lives and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (see Chapter 7 and Appendix A ). Are more aggressive proactive policing strategies more likely to be chosen when Black or disadvantaged communities are the focus of police enforcement? This question needs to be addressed systematically in future research.

THE FUTURE OF PROACTIVE POLICING

Proactive policing has become a key part of police efforts to do something about crime in the United States. This report supports the general conclusion that there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of some proactive policing practices. Proactive policing efforts that focus on high concentrations of crimes at places or among the high-rate subset of offenders, as well as practices that seek to solve specific crime-fostering problems, show consistent evidence of effectiveness without evidence of negative community outcomes. Community-based strategies have also begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public. At the same time, there are significant gaps in the knowledge base that do not allow one to identify with reasonable confidence the long-term effects of proactive policing. For example, existing research provides little guidance as to whether police programs to enhance procedural justice will improve community perceptions of police legitimacy or community cooperation with the police.

Much has been learned over the past two decades about proactive policing programs. But now that scientific support for these approaches has accumulated, it is time for greater investment in understanding what is cost-effective, how such strategies can be maximized to improve the relationships between the police and the public, and how they can be applied in ways that do not lead to violations of the law by the police.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred.

Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing.

Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

READ FREE ONLINE

Welcome to OpenBook!

You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

Show this book's table of contents , where you can jump to any chapter by name.

...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter .

Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

View our suggested citation for this chapter.

Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

Get Email Updates

Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free ? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released.

• ABC7 Bay Area 24/7 live stream Watch Now
• Watch the latest ABC7 newscast here Full Story
• Track wildfires across CA with this interactive map Full Story

10 Pittsburg, Antioch police officers charged in civil rights, corruption probe: Authorities

ANTIOCH, Calif. (KGO) -- Nine current or former Antioch and Pittsburg police officers and one community service officer were charged Thursday in a federal corruption investigation that found evidence they committed civil rights violations and fraud in an effort to get a pay raise and lied on reports to cover up use of excessive force, U.S. authorities said.

Ismail J. Ramsey, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, filed four indictments that outlined charges including wire fraud, deprivation of rights under color of law, conspiracy against rights, and conspiracy to distribute anabolic steroids. Nine police officers and one community service officer are named in the charges, though only two are charged in multiple indictments.

Only three of the officers remain employed by the departments and were not on active duty, officials said.

RELATED: Civil rights investigation launched into Antioch PD for alleged racist texts, excessive force

Arrest warrants were served Thursday in California, Texas and Hawaii, said Robert Tripp, special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco Field Office. One has not yet been arrested, officials said.

Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe confirmed that multiple officers were arrested by the FBI on Thursday morning.

"Today is a dark day in our city's history, as people trusted to uphold the law, allegedly breached that trust and were arrested by the FBI," Thorpe said in a statement. "As our city absorbs this tragic news, we must come together as one. Today's actions are the beginning of the end of a long and arduous process."

The FBI and Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office have both investigated the departments since early 2022. The state attorney general's office opened its own probe earlier this year.

EXCLUSIVE: Antioch police chief calls texting scandal 'hate speech;' open to federal oversight

Among the allegations are chains of text messages sent between as many as 45 Antioch officers, using racial slurs and describing violence against suspects, and going as far as threatening Thorpe, who is African American. The N-word was used at least a dozen times, as were terms describing African Americans as "gorillas."

In another alleged text, an officer writes:

"lol putting a pistol in someone's mouth and telling them to stop stealing isn't illegal... it's an act of public service to prevent further victims of crimes."

The texts also described recently retired Police Chief Steven Ford, who is African American, in racially derogatory terms. They also contained homophobic slurs and suggested violence against unhoused people.

As many as 45 of Antioch's approximately 100 officers were placed on leave because of the texts.

Residents call for 'real accountability' after grand jury indictment

Antioch and Pittsburg community activists say for decades they have been raising concerns around policing in their respective police departments. Now that the two-year FBI investigation involving current and former officers at both departments comes to an end, many are calling for real accountability.

"Today, finally, we believe that is going to be some accountability. We are only hoping for the best in these situations," says Devan Williams, a community organizer involved with the groups ACCE and Reimagine Antioch.

Williams says knowing that the 10 officers involved in the FBI investigation into the Antioch and Pittsburg police departments will now likely face trial means that the community can start to move forward. Though, he remains a bit skeptical.

"If you look at history, it hasn't always played out in the favor of the public. A lot of crimes committed by police officers aren't seen as crimes in the eyes of the law sometimes," says Williams. "We just want to feel safe. And I think that that's a good start, by moving forward, that Antioch highlights what could possibly be going on in the rest of the country."

Thursday morning, the FBI raided the homes of the officers after a federal grand jury in San Francisco handed down at four indictments covering a wide range of offenses, including conspiracy to violate civil rights, destruction of records and obstruction of justice.

RELATED: New report reveals Antioch officers referred to police chief as 'gorilla' in text messages

The investigation also exposed the massive racist text messaging scandal at the Antioch Police Department.

"The arresting officers felt it was necessary to use a flash-bang, and call that officer out, presumably from his house. That means that they had a sense that there was real danger in arresting him," says civil rights attorney Ben Nisenbaum.

He represents clients who filed federal lawsuits against the Antioch Police Department that arose out of the racist texting scandal. He says it's about time that charges are finally being brought forth.

"I don't see the feds making a splash this big unless they had something big to prosecute," say Nisenbaum. "To me, the wire fraud charges are very interesting. That means they are transactions that happened. And those are provable."

Shagoofa Khan is a long-time community organizer. She has had run-ins with Officers Morteza Amiri and Eric Rombough, two of the officers named in the FBI investigation. She was also directly targeted in the texting scandal. She is hoping for real accountability.

"I believe once changes are made, then the community can start healing and we can start building a police department that the city of Antioch desperately needs," says Khan.

VIDEO: Activist targeted in Antioch PD texting scandal threatens to sue: 'I feel very violated'

"I think today should give us some hope that the people who are supposed to uphold the law, that when they break the law, they don't just get to skate free," says Antioch Vice Mayor Tamisha Torres-Walker.

Torres-Walker says the community should be encouraged that their efforts to fight for change weren't ignored.

"Today is a representation to those who have been fighting for reform and ignored by so many leaders for decades. That their fight and voices didn't go unheard," says Torres-Walker. "Take today as a day to reflect on how we moved the city forward. And reimagine public safety. And invest in communities that haven't been in a long time."

Police departments' response

The Antioch Police Department's acting Chief Joe Vigil released the following statement:

"Today's announcement reporting the arrest of current and former APD officers is disheartening and undermines the incredible work our staff does on a daily basis. Any police officer who breaks public trust must be held accountable, especially because our effectiveness relies heavily on confidence and support from our community. I would like to thank the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Contra Costa District Attorney's Office, California Department of Justice, and United States Attorney's Office for their diligence in this investigation. From the beginning of this investigation, our administration has been fully cooperating with these agencies, and will continue to do so. No individual - including a police officer - is above the law."

The Pittsburg Police Department shared this statement:

"In September 2021, the Pittsburg Police Department became aware of allegations of illegal activity by an employee. Pittsburg PD immediately contacted the District Attorney's Office and asked it to conduct a criminal investigation. That investigation, which the FBI joined, led to a Grand Jury indictment and the arrest of two former Pittsburg employees and several current and former officers from the Antioch Police Department. Consistent with our previous statements, we cannot expand on the details of this allegation as there is an ongoing investigation and, now, a criminal proceeding. The Pittsburg Police Department will continue cooperating with investigators from the FBI and Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office."

The Associated Press and Bay City News contributed to this report.

If you're on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

Related Topics

• OFFICER ARRESTED
• CONTRA COSTA COUNTY
• POLICE OFFICER
• INVESTIGATION

Top Stories

1 dead, fire captain hurt in Mountain View home fire: authorities

2 dead, 2 injured after argument leads to shooting in Oakland: police

• 2 hours ago

Unsafe lead levels found in water at multiple Oakland public schools

Bay Area shouldn't worry about newest mpox variant yet: health experts

Big changes to how you buy and sell a home go into effect today

Police looking for missing Bay Area woman in her 90s with Alzheimer's

Bay Area tiny homes could house new jail diversion program

Crews battling large fire in South Bay, officials say

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

Publications

• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

Trust in America: Do Americans trust the police?

While views of and experiences with police vary substantially across demographic groups, there is support for a number of police reforms.

Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election

Voters who support Biden and Trump have starkly different opinions on many issues, and these two groups are divided internally as well.

What the data says about crime in the U.S.

Federal statistics show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Fresh data delivery Saturday mornings

Before release of video showing Tyre Nichols’ beating, public views of police conduct had improved modestly

Prior to the Tyre Nichols video release, views of police conduct in the U.S. had improved in three of four measures, with crime an exception.

How Black Americans view the use of face recognition technology by police

Black Americans are critical of key aspects of policing and criminal justice. But their views on face recognition technology are more nuanced.

AI and Human Enhancement: Americans’ Openness Is Tempered by a Range of Concerns

Public views are tied to how these technologies would be used and what constraints would be in place.

Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Other Groups Declines

Trust in scientists and medical scientists has fallen below pre-pandemic levels, with 29% of U.S. adults saying they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public. This is down from 40% in November 2020 and 35% in January 2019, before COVID-19 emerged. Other prominent groups – including the military, police officers and public school principals – have also seen their ratings decline.

Growing share of Americans say they want more spending on police in their area

Amid mounting public concern about violent crime in the U.S., Americans’ attitudes about police funding in their own community have shifted.

Americans have heard more about clashes between police and protesters than other recent news stories

The public is more likely to have heard “a lot” about ongoing confrontations between police and protesters than several other stories.

A month before George Floyd’s death, black and white Americans differed sharply in confidence in the police

In April, 78% of Americans overall – but 56% of black Americans – said they had confidence in police officers to act in the public’s best interests.

REFINE YOUR SELECTION

Research teams.

901 E St. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

© 2024 Pew Research Center

Advertisement

Supported by

Who Are the Far-Right Groups Behind the U.K. Riots?

After a deadly stabbing at a children’s event in northwestern England, an array of online influencers, anti-Muslim extremists and fascist groups have stoked unrest, experts say.

• Share full article

By Esther Bintliff and Eve Sampson

Esther Bintliff reported from London, and Eve Sampson from New York.

Violent unrest has erupted in several towns and cities in Britain in recent days, and further disorder broke out on Saturday as far-right agitators gathered in demonstrations around the country.

The violence has been driven by online disinformation and extremist right-wing groups intent on creating disorder after a deadly knife attack on a children’s event in northwestern England, experts said.

A range of far-right factions and individuals, including neo-Nazis, violent soccer fans and anti-Muslim campaigners, have promoted and taken part in the unrest, which has also been stoked by online influencers .

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to deploy additional police officers to crack down on the disorder. “This is not a protest that has got out of hand,” he said on Thursday. “It is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”

Here is what we know about the unrest and some of those involved.

Where have riots taken place?

The first riot took place on Tuesday evening in Southport, a town in northwestern England, after a deadly stabbing attack the previous day at a children’s dance and yoga class. Three girls died of their injuries, and eight other children and two adults were wounded.

The suspect, Axel Rudakubana , was born in Britain, but in the hours after the attack, disinformation about his identity — including the false claim that he was an undocumented migrant — spread rapidly online . Far-right activists used messaging apps including Telegram and X to urge people to take to the streets.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .