Cops in Hot Spots: a Smart Anti-Crime Solution
Hot spot patrolling, which combines deterrent and control elements with reinforcement actions in communities, has proved to reduce crime rates in several Latin American cities
Do we need more police officers guarding our streets or greater efforts toward crime prevention? Should our societies implement better educational policies or get tougher on offenders?
These are some of the questions boggling the minds of hundreds of experts around the world when they think about how to reduce insecurity in cities. And if we think about Latin America, where the homicide rate is three times higher than the global average, the answers become all the more pressing.
The good news is that we are already taking steps in the right direction—or at least so it seems. Hot spot patrolling, a method first developed in the United States, uses statistical tools to concentrate policing where it is most needed and combines some deterrent and social control elements with community strengthening actions.
The premise is simple: Crime does not happen everywhere all the time. A careful analysis of relevant data often shows that a very disproportionate fraction of criminal activity is concentrated in very small places at very specific times. Such is the case of Cali, Medellín, Bogotá and Barranquilla, where, according to a study carried out with several colleagues in 2014, we found that as much as half of murders occurred in only 7 percent of the territory.
Identifying these hot spots then allows us to redirect public resources toward combating crime—namely, policing, installing security cameras and deploying preventive social programs—prioritizing these areas. Though one might think that crime would simply move to other areas, empirical evidence indicates that this only true to a certain extent, because the conditions that facilitated crime at those sites are not easily replicated in other areas.
In Latin America, there are few documented experiments regarding the impact of hot spot programs. Among such places are the Sucre municipality of Caracas—which includes Petare, one of the most violent areas of the city—and the Colombian cities of Medellin and Cali.
In Sucre, for example, we found that 80 percent of murders occurred in only 6 percent of the territory, as shown on the map. Based on this information, patrolling strategies were designed that prioritized visits to hot spots at times when criminal activity is known to be higher. This type of patrolling yielded positive results and an important lesson for city officials, who now regard impact assessment as a useful tool to make their policies more effective.
Colombia is another country where we are assessing hot spot patrolling, together with the National Police and Universidad de los Andes. In Medellin, we identified as many as 816 hot spots, 359 of which have now additional 15-minute patrolling, four times a day, every day of the week. Since spots needing additional patrolling were selected at random, any differences in crime rates between the treated and control sites can be attributed to the program. While the study is still on its implementation stage, preliminary results have already yielded promising results.
The methodological credibility, as well as the commitment of policymakers to this program, has already aroused interest of authorities in Cali, and is poised to become a benchmark in Latin America for evidence-based decision-making.
The World’s Most Unsafe Region
Hot spot patrolling should be accompanied by actions by public institutions to reinforce judicial systems, betting on providing decent opportunities for the social groups most likely to commit crimes, especially young people.
These efforts are particularly relevant in Latin America, a region that accounts for more than 30 percent of global homicides (despite having only eight percent of the population). In fact, 19 of the 20 most unsafe cities on the planet are in Latin America. As if that weren’t enough, some 18,000 people die every year because of crime in Central America.
The insecurity problem in Latin America is complex and needs to be addressed from multiple angles. But knowing that science and policymakers are working together to generate more efficient responses to violence means we are moving in the right direction. The hot spot patrolling experiment and its good results are proof of this.
