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What Works in Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Evidence-Based Crime Policy ((SSEBCP))

Abstract

While just a decade ago, there were almost no systematic reviews on policing, we now have 17 completed systematic reviews of police practices. We examined these reviews to assess what we have learned, questions that remain unanswered, and how we can best move forward. Our findings suggest the effectiveness of a number of policing strategies for addressing crime including hot spots policing, problem-oriented policing, community problem-solving to address disorder, directed patrol to reduce gun violence, focused deterrence approaches, and using DNA in investigations. Additionally, there is little evidence that focused policing approaches displace crime to areas nearby. This is a very different portrait of the effectiveness of policing than even as recently as the early 1990s, when it was widely believed that the police were ineffective crime fighters. Information-gathering interrogation methods seem promising for reducing false confessions, and programs to increase procedural justice show promise for increasing citizen satisfaction, compliance, and perceptions of police legitimacy. Community policing programs have an overall impact on improving citizen satisfaction and perceptions of legitimacy. In contrast, certain programs show less effective results, including second responder programs, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and police stress management programs. While the existing reviews have been beneficial in advancing policing knowledge, they are not without limitations. The major shortcoming in many reviews is a lack of rigorous eligible studies, particularly a lack of randomized experiments. Additionally, heterogeneity in treatments and outcome measures within reviews makes it difficult to draw strong conclusions from mean effects in meta-analyses. A lack of descriptive validity can also make effect size calculation challenging. Moving forward, we suggest a focus on balancing research generation and research synthesis to ensure that there are high-quality reviews with a sufficient number of rigorous studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/Default.asp?Item=2614.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, http://cebcp.org/jerry-lee-crime-prevention-symposium/ for more on the 2012 Jerry Lee Symposium.

  3. 3.

    Reviews on community policing, macro displacement, and disorder policing were not yet available in the Campbell library at the time this chapter was published, but results were available in peer-reviewed journal articles that we cite here.

  4. 4.

    These reviews are also covered in other chapters in this volume.

  5. 5.

    We searched Criminal Justice Abstracts, Criminal Justice Periodical Index, Sociological Abstracts, and Google Scholar for “systematic review” AND police OR policing. Because Google Scholar produced over 16,000 hits, we only examined the first 500.

  6. 6.

    Excluded reviews included a systematic review of the criminal profiling literature that only summarized the state of the literature but did not include interventions (Dowden, Bennell, & Bloomfield, 2007), systematic reviews of weak studies methodologically on police use of improper force (Harris, 2009) and the effects of drug law enforcement on violence (Werb et al., 2011), a systematic review of factors related to police suicide that again did not include any sort of intervention (Hem, Berg, & Ekeberg, 2011), and a systematic review of interventions to reduce problems around bars that included mostly nonpolice interventions (Brennan et al., 2011).

  7. 7.

    While Campbell did not publish Anthony Braga’s hot spots review until 2007, the initial narrative findings were published in a 2001 article and the initial meta-analysis in a 2005 article (see Braga, 2001, 2005, 2007).

  8. 8.

    We did not include this review because all but one of the most rigorous studies captured in this review were also included in the Blais and Dupont (2005) review.

  9. 9.

    While the Telep et al. (2014) review included non-policing studies, the vast majority of eligible studies focused on interventions with at least some level of police involvement.

  10. 10.

    We recognize that some nonexperimental studies can provide very credible results. For example, regression discontinuity designs (e.g., see Cook, Shadish, & Wong, 2008), or propensity score matching with very systematic knowledge of underlying causal structures and rich data to account for them (e.g., see Shadish, Clark, & Steiner, 2008) have been found to provide outcomes similar to randomized designs. Nonetheless, the bulk of the nonexperimental designs in these policing reviews were much weaker quasi-experimental comparisons.

  11. 11.

    The review by Mazerolle et al. was in progress when this chapter was completed, and so was not included in the previous section.

  12. 12.

    Weisburd, Telep, Wire, and Farrington (in progress) have begun a systematic review to look at the impact of increasing police presence (in both random patrol and hot spots interventions) on crime.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

    Cody W. Telep

  2. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    David Weisburd

  3. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    David Weisburd

Authors
  1. Cody W. Telep
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  2. David Weisburd
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Correspondence to Cody W. Telep .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

    David Weisburd

  2. Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    David P. Farrington

  3. Department of Criminology, Law & Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

    Charlotte Gill

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Telep, C.W., Weisburd, D. (2016). Policing. In: Weisburd, D., Farrington, D., Gill, C. (eds) What Works in Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation. Springer Series on Evidence-Based Crime Policy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3477-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3477-5_5

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