GLOBAL POLICING DATABASE

5545

Evidence-Based Policing at Work in Smaller Jurisdictions

The police profession has been traditionally hesitant to accept a leading role in reducing crime, evidenced by the slow adoption of emerging best practices in crime reduction. Smaller agencies, in particular, rarely accept the risks of attempting new strategies, either because they fear failure or because they believe that these strategies, usually developed in large urban areas, simply cannot be translated to the non-urban landscape. The Riley County Police Department (RCPD) in Manhattan, Kansas, was no different. In 2008, a transition in leadership in RCPD brought about a change in thinking by publicly committing itself to a new mission of reducing crime and improving its citizen’s quality of life. The question it faced was how. For most of its existence, RCPD has relied on the traditional model of modern policing that decades of research show is ineffective for crime control: “random patrol, rapid uniformed response, deployment of officers to crime investigation once an offense has been detected, and reliance on law enforcement and the legal system as the primary means of trying to reduce crime.” So RCPD’s leadership decided to focus on evidence-based strategies that were effective in reducing crime, particularly those that addressed high crime places. In this article, we describe our efforts at applying evidence-based policing in a smaller jurisdiction.

Hegarty, T., Williams, L. S., Stanton, S., & Chernoff, W.

Journal article

2014

English

Hegarty, T., Williams, L. S., Stanton, S., & Chernoff, W. (2014). Evidence-Based Policing at Work in Smaller Jurisdictions. In Translational Criminology, 6, 14-15, 18.