What is Hot Spots Policing?

Over the past two decades, a series of rigorous evaluations have suggested that police can be effective in addressing crime and disorder when they focus in on small units of geography with high rates of crime. These areas are typically referred to as hot spots and policing strategies and tactics focused on these areas are usually referred to as hot spots policing or place-based policing.

This place-based focus stands in contrast to traditional notions of policing and crime prevention more generally, which have often focused primarily on people.  Police, of course, have never ignored geography entirely.  Police beats, precincts, and districts determine the allocation of police resources and dictate how police respond to calls and patrol the city.  With place-based policing, however, the concern is with much smaller units of geography than the police have typically focused upon.  Places here refer to specific locations within the larger social environments of communities and neighborhoods, such as addresses, street blocks, or small clusters of addresses or street blocks.  Crime prevention effectiveness is maximized when police focus their resources on these micro-units of geography.

Hot spots policing covers a range of police responses that all share in common a focus of resources on the locations where crime is highly concentrated.  Just as the definition of hot spots varies across studies and contexts (from addresses to street segments to clusters of street segments), so do the specific tactics police use to address high crime places.  There is not one way to implement hot spots policing.  The approaches can range rather dramatically across interventions.

For example, the strategies of place-based policing can be as simple as drastically increasing officer time spent at hot spots, as was the case in the Minneapolis, MN Hot Spots Patrol Experiment.  But place-based policing can also take a much more complex approach to the amelioration of crime problems.  In the Jersey City, NJ Drug Market Analysis Program Experiment, for example, a three-step program (including identifying and analyzing problems, developing tailored responses, and maintaining crime control gains) was used to reduce problems at drug hot spots.  Also in Jersey City, a problem-oriented policing (POP) approach was taken in developing a specific strategy for each of the small areas defined as violent crime hot spots.

We note that predictive policing shares in common a focus on place-based prevention efforts, although the focus is more on predicting where crime is likely to occur in the future rather than responding to past/ongoing crime concentrations. There is now one predictive policing study in the Matrix that uses a micro place unit of analysis (Mohler et al., 2015).  There is one other predictive policing study in the Matrix (Hunt et al., 2014) that used a larger geographic unit of analysis (i.e. the police district), finding no impact of predictive enforcement on property crime.

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What is the Evidence on Hot Spots Policing?

Hot spots policing is listed under “What works?” on our Review of the Research Evidence. 

The evidence base for hot spots policing is particularly strong. As the National Research Council (2004: 250) review of police effectiveness noted, “studies that focused police resources on crime hot spots provided the strongest collective evidence of police effectiveness that is now available.”  A Campbell systematic review by Braga et al. (2012) comes to a similar conclusion; although not every hot spots study has shown statistically significant findings, the vast majority of such studies have (20 of 25 tests from 19 experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations reported noteworthy crime or disorder reductions), suggesting that when police focus in on crime hot spots, they can have a significant beneficial impact on crime in these areas.  As Braga (2007: 18) concluded, “extant evaluation research seems to provide fairly robust evidence that hot spots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy.”

In Braga and colleagues’ meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies, they found an overall significant average effect of hot spots policing, suggesting a meaningful benefit of the hot spots approach in treatment areas compared to control areas. Importantly, there was little evidence to suggest that spatial displacement was a major concern in hot spots interventions. Crime did not simply shift from hot spots to nearby areas.

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What Should Police Be Doing at Crime Hot Spots?

1. The Minneapolis Hot Spots Patrol Experiment suggested that increased police presence alone leads to some crime and disorder reduction. Officers were not given specific instructions on what activities to engage in while in hot spots. They simply were told to increase patrol time in the treatment hot spots.

Koper (1995) found that each additional minute of time officers spent in a hot spot increased the amount of time after officers departed before disorderly activity occurred until a plateau was reached. The ideal time spent in the hot spot was 14 to 15 minutes. The best approach for saturation patrol is for police to travel between hot spots, spending about 15 minutes in each hot spot, and moving from hot spot to hot spot in an unpredictable order, so that potential offenders recognize a greater cost of offending in these areas because police enforcement could increase at any moment.  These recommendations were applied to a hot spots experiment in Sacramento, where treatment hot spots received 15 minute visits from patrol visits approximately every 2 hours.  The intervention was associated with declines in calls and serious incidents.

2.The Braga and Bond (2008) hot spots experiment in Lowell, Massachusetts assessed which hot spots strategies were most effective in reducing crime. Results suggested that situational prevention strategies had the strongest impact on crime and disorder. Such strategies focus on efforts to disrupt situational dynamics that allow crime to occur by, for example, increasing risks or effort for offenders or reducing the attractiveness of potential targets. Such approaches include things like razing abandoned buildings and cleaning up graffiti. Increases in misdemeanor arrests made some contribution to the crime control gains in the treatment hot spots, but were not as influential as the situational efforts. Social service interventions did not have a significant impact.

3. An additional promising approach for dealing with crime hot spots is having officers incorporate principles from problem-oriented policing (POP). A recent experiment in Jacksonville, FL was the first study to compare different hot spot treatments in the same study with one treatment group receiving a more standard saturation patrol response and the second receiving a problem-oriented response that focused on officers analyzing problems in the hot spot and responding with a more tailored solution. Results showed a decrease in crime (though not a statistically significant decrease) in the saturation patrol hot spots, but this decrease lasted only during the 90 day intervention period. In the POP hot spots, there was no significant crime decline during the intervention period, but in the 90 days after the experiment, street violence declined by a statistically significant 33 percent. Problem solving approaches may take more time to show beneficial results, but any successes that come from a problem-oriented framework may be more long-lasting in nature. Braga and colleagues (2012) conclude in their systematic review that problem solving versus a focus on just increasing enforcement may bring about longer-term crime control gains. As they note, “While arresting offenders remains a central strategy of the police and a necessary component of the police response to crime hot spots, it seems likely that altering place characteristics and dynamics will produce larger and longer-term crime prevention benefits” (Braga et al., 2012: 32).