Cops as treatment providers: realities and ironies of police work in a foot patrol experiment

Abstract

Experimental research on policing is inspired by the public health analogy of officers as treatment providers. A randomised violence reduction experiment in Philadelphia recently used foot patrols as place-based interventions in violent city spaces during a hot spots policing experiment, and a 23% reduction in violent crime was observed. This paper reports on field observations of foot patrol officers involved in this experiment, which were designed to capture officers' perceptions of, and experiences with the foot patrol function. While the findings resonate with Bittner's depiction of policing on ‘skid row’, they illuminated the importance of ‘territoriality’ in a place-based intervention. Officers developed extensive local knowledge of their beat areas, which allowed them to draw from a repertoire of techniques to exert spatial control in the management of disorder. The choice of techniques depended in part on officer style, and the ways in which individual police negotiated the tensions between ‘reassurance policing’ and the crime fighting demands of ‘real police work’. Perhaps most importantly, officers felt constrained by the (artificial) parameters of an experiment that did not allow for the incorporation of local knowledge. This research helps to highlight the value of qualitative research for experimental designs, and reinforces the need to acknowledge and integrate officer knowledge in the design of sustainable interventions.

Keywords:

• hot spots policing
• experimental research
• public health
• violence
• foot patrol
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Philadelphia Police Department, especially Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and Chief Administrative Officer Nola Joyce. We are also grateful to the district Captains and other supervisors who facilitated our site visits. The authors are indebted to the line officers who were the subject of this research who so willingly and openly shared their experiences with us. We would like to thank Lallen Johnson, Travis Taniguchi and Cory Haberman for their assistance with field work. We would also like to thank Scott Burris, Monique Marks, Clifford Shearing and our anonymous peer reviewers for their very valuable feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. This research was supported in part by Temple University's College of Liberal Arts Research Award and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's programme for Public Health Law Research.

Notes

1. There were no funds to support observations in the control areas. Foot beat numbers have been changed as a measure to protect the identities of the officers.