‘Top 10’ policing as an alternative place-based strategy: responding to the overcomplication and underestimation of the law of crime concentration

ABSTRACT

Recent trends in crime and place research emphasize a micro-level focus on the concentration, stability, and patrollability of crime hot spots. Empirical findings consistently suggest that hot spots are disproportionate in crime concentration, are time stable, and have high crime reduction potential for place-based interventions. Due to a growing literature on hot spot identification techniques, research may be overcomplicating and underestimating the degree to which these concepts manifest, creating unnecessary challenges to crime prevention strategies. The current study analyzes robbery in three cities to determine whether crime hot spot concentration, stability, and patrollability observed at different hot spot aggregations (1%, 0.1%, and the “Top 10”) have characteristics that make them amenable to more efficient crime-reduction initiatives at smaller aggregations. Collectively, current findings suggest that “Top 10” Policing, which focuses on just the 10 most criminogenic hot spots within an agency’s jurisdiction, could have a meaningful impact on overall crime rates.

KEYWORDS:

• hot spot policing
• crime prevention
• law enforcement
• crime and place
• micro-level

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We acknowledge that ‘Top 10’ is an arbitrary aggregation scale. We could have just as easily studied the ‘Top 25’ or ‘Top 50’ micro-places where crime concentrates. For the current study, however, we use a ‘Top 10’ framework to illuminate that at just the 10 most criminogenic micro-level units, meaningful crime reductions may be achieved.

2. San Francisco (https://datasf.org/opendata/), Seattle (https://data.seattle.gov/), Tucson (https://gisdata.tucsonaz.gov/).

3. Address locations were also listed for each crime data point in addition to the XY coordinates. A sensitivity check was conducted to ensure that hot spot units were not duplicitously identified due to intersection crime points being attributed to every spatially connected street segment. Only a small percentage of the points were attributable to intersections, with resultantly little effect on using street segments as the unit of analysis.

4. Total officer and patrol officer estimates are approximations derived from publicly available sources. San Francisco officer information was gleaned from annual report statistics (https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/sites/default/files/2022–06/SFPDSwornDemographics20220614.pdf), while both Seattle (https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-police-department-losing-officers-and-struggling-to-replace-them) and Tucson (https://tucson.com/news/local/tucson-police-chief-makes-case-for-better-pay-to-fight-off-shrinking-force/article_b0bfcf87-522e-5540-94da-64307c1517fd.html) were ascertained from local press releases on police personnel specific to 2021.

5. To best ensure statistical equivalency, ties were not broken at the aggregation threshold. Therefore, the ‘Top 10’ most criminogenic locations for each year could have varied slightly above or below the ‘10’ threshold set by the researchers. For example, the number of hot spot units in the ‘Top 10’ aggregation ranged from 7–12 across the three cities included. This process was also used for the other aggregation levels in each city (i.e., 1% and 0.1%).

6. Bernasco and Steenbeek’s (2017) generalized unbiased Gini coefficient (G’) was used when the number of street segments was greater than the number of robberies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathan T. Connealy

Nathan T. Connealy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Tampa. His research focuses on the spatial analysis of crime patterns, the intersection of policing, crime prevention, and technology, and quantitative research designs. His scholarship has recently been published in peer-reviewed outlets including Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Criminology & Public Policy, and Crime & Delinquency among others.

Timothy C. Hart

Timothy C. Hart is a faculty member of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Tampa. His areas of interest include survey research, applied statistics, geographic information systems (GIS), and victimization. His scholarship appears in various academic journals, including the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice and Behavior, and the British Journal of Criminology.