RESUMEN
Foot patrol work is rarely described in relation to public health, even though police routinely encounter health risk behaviors and environments. Through a qualitative study of foot patrol policing in violent 'hotspots' of Philadelphia, we explore some prospects and challenges associated with bridging security and public health considerations in law enforcement. Noting existing efforts to help advance police officer knowledge of, and attitudes toward health vulnerabilities, we incorporate perspectives from environmental criminology to help advance this bridging agenda. Extending the notion of capable guardianship to understand foot patrol work, we suggest that the way forward for theory, policy and practice is not solely to rely on changing officer culture and behavior, but rather to advance a wider agenda for enhancing collective guardianship, and especially 'place management' for harm reduction in the city.
RESUMEN
OBJECTIVES: The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (JRCD) has published important contributions to both criminological theory and associated empirical tests. In this article, we consider some of the challenges associated with traditional approaches to social science research, and discuss a complementary approach that is gaining popularity-agent-based computational modeling-that may offer new opportunities to strengthen theories of crime and develop insights into phenomena of interest. METHOD: Two literature reviews are completed. The aim of the first is to identify those articles published in JRCD that have been the most influential and to classify the theoretical perspectives taken. The second is intended to identify those studies that have used an agent-based model (ABM) to examine criminological theories and to identify which theories have been explored. RESULTS: Ecological theories of crime pattern formation have received the most attention from researchers using ABMs, but many other criminological theories are amenable to testing using such methods. CONCLUSION: Traditional methods of theory development and testing suffer from a number of potential issues that a more systematic use of ABMs-not without its own issues-may help to overcome. ABMs should become another method in the criminologists toolbox to aid theory testing and falsification.
RESUMEN
Primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs that address opportunity or structural factors related to crime are usually delivered to entire cities, sections of cities or to specific neighborhoods, but our results indicate geographically targeting these programs to specific street segments may increase their efficacy. We link crime incidents to over 24,000 street segments (the two block faces on a street between two intersections) over a 16-year period, and identify distinct developmental patterns of crime at street segments using group-based trajectory analysis. One of these patterns, which we term chronic crime hot spots, includes just 1 % of street segments but is associated with 23 % of crime in the city during the study period. We then employ multinomial regression to identify the specific risk and protective factors that are associated with these crime hot spots. We find that both situational opportunities and social characteristics of places strongly distinguish chronic crime hot spots from areas with little crime. Our findings support recent efforts to decrease crime opportunities at crime hot spots through programs like hot spots policing, but they also suggest that social interventions directed at crime hot spots will be important if we are to do something about crime problems in the long run. We argue in concluding that micro level programs which focus crime prevention efforts on specific street segments have the potential to be less costly and more effective than those targeted at larger areas such as communities or neighborhoods.