NCJ Number
82924
Date Published
1981
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Findings and implications are presented from an evaluation of Atlanta's High Impact Anti-Crime Program, which used police stakeouts and decoys in an attempt to increase the apprehension of those committing commercial and street robberies.
Abstract
The intention of the program was to remove more burglars from the community and increase deterrence effectiveness by increasing apprehension and conviction of burglars. The project was implemented in December 1974. To estimate the trends in commercial and open space robberies, regression analyses on monthly data going back to January 1972 for commercial robberies and January 1973 for open-space robberies were performed. During the first 6 months of the project, 350 decoys and 2,725 stakeout operations were undertaken. The number of commercial and open-space robberies recorded at the end of the period were 450 and 839 incidents, respectively. These numbers provided two distinct measures for evaluating the project's performance: (1) from the forecasted number of incidents, commercial robberies decreased by 18.2 percent and open-space robberies by 20.2 percent; (2) adding the monthly number of incidents to the time-series models showed that the rate of decrease for commercial robberies increased from 7.1 to 10.3 percent annually and open-space robberies from .9 to 7.3 percent annually. The experience gained during the course of the evaluation shows that lack of proper quantitative assessment of the crime problem at the inception of the program has made the outcome deceptive, since the dynamic nature of the impact crimes was ignored during the course of 5 years of program operation. Another less apparent inconsistency in the evaluation design stems from the anticipation of a macro-level goal achievement by concentrating on projects at a micro-level, independently addressing certain categories or subcategories of crimes without any formalized priority structure. Tabular data are provided.