Focus on high crime areas is effective

Stockholm Prize in Criminology 2010 awarded for research on policing

The 2010 Prize has been awarded by its international jury to

Professor David L. Weisburd for a series of experiments

showing that intensified police patrol at high crime "hot spots"

does not merely push crime around.

This line of research encourages police around the world to concentrate

crime prevention efforts at less than 5% of all street corners and

addresses where over 50% of all urban crime occurs, yielding far

less total crime than with conventional patrol patterns.

The jury selected Weisburd's work on spatial displacement as

the most influential single contribution of his wider body of work

that has helped to bridge the gap between criminology and police practice.

The jury noted that Weisburd has been a leader among the

growing number of criminologists whose evidence shows how

the application of research findings can help to reduce not only crime,

but also the unnecessary impositions on public liberty from

policing activities that do not address a predictable crime risk.

Weisburd's work builds on and adds to other research showing

the effectiveness of placing almost all police patrols at street

corners, addresses or blocks with high rates of robbery,

purse snatching, street fights, or illegal drug markets.

Police have generally been reluctant to re-structure most

patrols to match the extreme version tested in this research

for fear that "spatial displacement" of crime will yield no

net reduction in criminal events. This theory holds that,

like air in a balloon, criminals and their crimes will simply

move from one part of a city to another if pressure is

placed on crime at any given location. The competing

theory is that most public crime only happens in certain

kinds of locations, all of which can be made less hospitable

to crime by proactive police efforts. Yet until Weisburd's

series of crucial experiments, police have widely accepted

the spatial displacement theory by spreading patrol out widely.

Evidence for drop in crime rate
The evidence from research done by Weisburd and his

colleagues in Jersey City (New Jersey) and Seattle (Washington State)

shows that crime can drop substantially in small "hot spots"

ithout rising in other areas. Weisburd also produced evidence

to demonstrate that the introduction of a crime prevention

strategy in a small, high-crime place often creates a

"diffusion of benefits" to nearby areas, reducing crime

rather than increasing it in the immediate catchment zone

around the high-crime target place. His evidence suggests

that crimes depend not just on criminals, but on policing

in key places. The jury noted that this evidence should

encourage police agencies to focus far more patrols

than at present on very small areas with high crime rates.

Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, who is the Chief Executive

of the National Policing Improvement Agency in the UK

and a member of the International Jury for the Stockholm

Prize in Criminology, commented in writing on the significance

of Weisburd's experiments. Neyroud said that this research

"has been crucial to developing more effective policing."

Commenting on the prevailing theory of displacement,

Neyroud said that police can now be more confident that

policing works. "As we strive to make our communities safer,"

he said, we now know that intensive patrol and problem-solving

on the hottest of crime hot spots will push crime down

in those areas without forcing it up in the next area."