Background Herman Goldstein developed problem‐oriented policing (POP) to focus police on more proactively addressing chronic problems, rather than using traditional reactive efforts. POP has been utilized to target a wide range of problems and has become commonly used in agencies across the United States and the world, although implementation is often uneven. POP interventions commonly use the SARA (scanning, analysis, response, assessment) model to identify problems, carefully analyze the conditions contributing to the problem, develop a tailored response to target these underlying factors, and evaluate outcome effectiveness. Objectives To extend and update the findings of the original POP systematic review by synthesizing the findings of published and unpublished evaluations of POP through December 2018 to assess its overall impacts on crime and disorder. The review also examined impacts of POP on crime displacement, police financial costs, and noncrime outcomes. Search Methods Searches using POP keywords of the Global Policing Database at the University of Queensland were conducted to identify published and unpublished evaluations between 2006 and 2018. We supplemented these searches with forward searches, hand searches of leading journals and the Center for Problem‐Oriented Policing, and consultation with experts. Selection Criteria Eligible studies had to include a target area or group that received a POP intervention AND a control area/group that received standard police services. The control condition could be either experimental or quasi‐experimental. Units of analysis could be places or people. We defined POP as studies that generally followed the tenets of the SARA model. Data Collection and Analysis We identified 39 new (published between 2006 and 2018) studies that met our eligibility criteria as an evaluation of POP. Twenty‐four of these studies had sufficient data available to calculate an effect size. Along with the 10 studies from our initial systematic review of POP, these 34 studies are included in our meta‐analytic review of POP. Nine of these studies were randomized experiments and 25 were quasi‐experiments. We calculated effect sizes for each study using Cohen's D and relative incidence risk ratios and used random effects meta‐analyses to synthesize studies. Results Our meta‐analyses suggest statistically significant impacts of POP. Our relative incident risk ratio analysis of mean effects suggests a 33.8% reduction in crime/disorder in the POP treatment areas/groups relative to the controls. We find no evidence of significant crime displacement as a result of POP and some evidence for a greater likelihood of a diffusion of crime control benefits. Few studies assessed noncrime outcomes, but our narrative review suggests POP is cost‐effective, but has limited impacts on fear of crime, legitimacy, and collective efficacy. Authors’ Conclusions Our review provides strong and consistent evidence that POP is an effective strategy for reducing crime and disorder. There is a great deal of heterogeneity in the magnitude of effect sizes across factors such as study type, study rigor and crime type. Despite this heterogeneity, 31 out of 34 studies (91.2%) have effect sizes in favor of a treatment effect and the overall mean effect is positive and significant in all of our models.

Problem-oriented policing for reducing crime and disorder: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis

Situational crime prevention focuses on the settings for criminal acts rather than on the characteristics of offenders. It provides a practical approach to improving safety and challenges criminological theories based on offenders’ propensities for mischief. According to situational crime prevention, crime is the result of an interaction between disposition and situation. Offenders choose to commit crime based on their perceptions of available opportunities. Consequently, situational factors can stimulate crime and addressing these factors can reduce crime. Situational crime prevention focuses on very specific categories of crime or disorder, and takes particular note of crime concentrations. Understanding how crimes are committed is critically important to situational crime prevention. It uses an action-research model and demands considering numerous possible alternative solutions. Situational crime prevention has been widely used across the globe and has been applied to minor deviance (e.g., littering), standard crimes (e.g., burglary and robbery), and to extremely serious crime (e.g., international terrorism and maritime piracy). The evidence for situational crime prevention effectiveness is substantial. Research clearly demonstrates that it does not inevitably displace crime. In fact, it often reduces crime near prevention sites.

Situational Crime Prevention: Theory, Practice and Evidence

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B0D692C8392928D760BA408A52246622/9781108949330AR.pdf/whose-eyes-on-the-street-control-crime.pdf

Whose 'Eyes on the Street' Control Crime?: Expanding Place Management into Neighborhoods

Public and political discourse has routinely suggested that immigration is linked to higher community levels of violence and drug problems. In contrast to these claims, research has consistently shown that immigration is not associated with greater violence at the macro level. However, few studies have examined the links between immigration flows and community drug problems. The current study seeks to address this gap in research by providing a county-level longitudinal analysis of immigration and drug overdose deaths both overall and by substance type for the 2000 to 2015 period and provides an analysis of homicide for comparison with prior immigration–crime research. In addition, this analysis compares immigration–overdose relationships across immigrant destination types. The current project relies on overdose and homicide data drawn from the Centers for Disease Control's Restricted Access Multiple Cause of Death Mortality files combined with data on county social, economic, health, and legal contexts drawn from multiple macro-level data sources. Findings reveal that immigration is not associated with higher levels of overdose or homicide deaths, and when effects are significant, immigration is linked to lower levels of overdose mortality across multiple substances and destination types. 

More immigrants, less death: An analysis of immigration effects on county‐level drug overdose deaths, 2000–2015

The most influential agenda for progressive police reform today aims to shrink the police footprint by reassigning many problems they currently manage to other institutions. This paper argues that this agenda relies on faulty understanding of the police role, and that a more promising agenda based on a better understanding is available. Police are a residual institution, charged with managing the crises that other institutions cannot handle adequately on their own, and it is not easy to reassign that work to anyone else. In the course of doing it, however, they develop expertise in the nature and sources of these crises that positions them to identify and help repair the institutional failures that generate them. The paper illustrates these claims with case studies of the challenges that efforts to reassign police work elsewhere have encountered and the role that police have played in institutional repair. It concludes by considering he normative concerns that this important aspect of the police role raises.

Shrinking the Police Footprint

Reframing an Obvious Police Problem: Discovery, Analysis and Response to a Manufactured Problem in a Small City

A growing body of research has begun to identify the social and ecological predictors of community overdose rates. However, questions remain about these relationships, and it is unclear whether the predictors of community overdose concentrations mirror those of other fatal social problems, such as homicide and suicide. Drawing on three leading ecological theories of overdose concentrations, the present study provides a longitudinal macro-level analysis of the community “determinants of death” for overdose (overall and by substance type), homicide, and suicide. Specifically, the authors use Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restricted-access mortality data, combined with measures of community social, economic, legal, and health indicators for the period from 2000 to 2015. Findings from time-series models reveal that county concentrations of overdose are linked to multiple theoretically driven factors—including opioid prescription rates, population decline, county health problems, and manufacturing employment—with several key similarities in the determinants of death across overdose, homicide, and suicide.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/23780231221100392

The Community Determinants of Death: Comparing the Macro-Level Predictors of Overdose, Homicide, and Suicide Deaths, 2000 to 2015

Significant public efforts have been mounted to stop the perceived epidemic of texting and driving, especially among younger drivers. However, despite the taken-for-granted nature of these fears, c...

Michael S. Zidar

Papers

Reframing an Obvious Police Problem: Discovery, Analysis and Response to a Manufactured Problem in a Small City

The Community Determinants of Death: Comparing the Macro-Level Predictors of Overdose, Homicide, and Suicide Deaths, 2000 to 2015

Texting and Driving: Is It Just Moral Panic?