This practice-based evaluation of evidence-based police strategies found that tactical police responses that seek to achieve short-term reductions in crime appear to be well suited for micro-time hot spots, areas of disproportionate amounts of crime.
This practice-based evaluation of evidence-based police strategies implemented by one police agency in everyday operations found that tactical police responses that seek to achieve short-term reductions in crime appear well suited for micro-time hot spots, areas of disproportionate amounts of crime. Police agencies around the country implement various strategies, often based on systematic crime analysis and focused on crime occurring in hot spots. A quasi-experimental ex post facto design is employed using 5 years of data from one police agency that has institutionalized the identification and response to micro-time hot spots into its day-to-day practices. Propensity score matching is used to match 54 pairs of micro-time hot spots using logistic regression to compute the propensity scores and greedy 1 to 1 matching with a caliper width of 0.5 of the standard deviation of the logit to match the cases. Independent t-tests show that tactical police response to micro-time hot spots can lead to significant reductions in residential burglary incidents without the spatial displacement of crime. Importantly, the conclusions are based on the evaluation of an agency’s systematic implementation of the evidence-based practices as its normal practices and not for the sake of research. (Published Abstract Provided)