NCJ Number
123305
Date Published
1990
Length
13 pages
Annotation
Just as the 1972 and 1973 Kansas City preventive patrol project examined the effectiveness of random patrol, so the Minneapolis patrol experiment tested the effectiveness of police concentration at "hot spots."
Abstract
The Kansas City experiment was one of the first studies to test a policing hypothesis through use of experimental and control groups. To test the effects of various levels of patrol, the study doubled or tripled the amount of patrol on five police beats, kept it the same on five, and cut it to zero on five. Findings indicated that the patrol level did not affect crime levels nor the public's sense of security. The Minneapolis patrol study was based in a crime analysis that indicated just 3 percent of all addresses and intersections in the city accounted for half of the police dispatches. Many of these locations were aggregated into "hot spots." This has enabled the police management to identify the specific problems in each hot spot. The hot spots experiment should spark additional research on saturation patrol at targeted problem areas. A spin-off of saturation patrol is the pilot program called Drug Market Analysis, which is using four cities to test a patrol strategy for systematically interrupting drug sales.