No More Mapless Maps

Place-based strategies offer a more efficient method of policing than offender-based strategies.

While places often demonstrate relatively stable crime levels over time, individuals experience both short-term and long-term variations in criminal propensity. David Weisburd, for example, once noted that police in Seattle would have to target four times as many people as places to account for 50 percent of the crime incidents that occurred between 1989 and 2002. While hot spot mapping has allowed police to more effectively target criminogenic places, the nature of the physical environments of hot spots has received less attention in the design of police interventions.

In Cohen and Felson's original article on routine activities back in 1979, they wrote "the risk of criminal victimization varies dramatically among the circumstances and locations in which people place themselves and their property". It follows that motivated offenders commit crimes against suitable targets at certain places according to the environmental characteristics of those places, making it easier to complete crimes successfully and evade capture. Therefore, the context of high-crime places should be incorporated into crime prevention programming.

Until the advent of Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM), this had yet to occur on a widespread basis, partly due to the then current analytical products commonly used in place-based interventions. Hot spot maps, for instance, show the concentration of crime but offer little insight into the physical structure of these places. This is akin to what Reboussian et al. (1995) refer to as a "mapless map"—a mere description of crime distribution without an analysis of why crime clusters in specific locations.

Mapless maps have facilitated hot spot policing activities that are largely one-dimensional, focusing primarily on concentrating resources in high-crime places. However, little problem-oriented policing (POP) or S.A.R.A. effort has been given to modifying the features of places that attract illegal behaviors or give rise to crime. As Anthony Braga explained in 2015, "Too many police departments seem to rely on over-simplistic tactics, such as ‘putting cops on dots’ or launching indiscriminate zero-tolerance initiatives rather than engaging a coherent crime prevention strategy."

Malcolm Sparrow reinforced this critique in 2016: "For anyone familiar with crime analysis, this is not new. And it is particularly not new when the default intervention strategy involves putting cops on dots." Jeffrey Brantingham, founder of a former predictive policing software company, explained that in response to place-based predictions, officers are instructed to use their "knowledge, skills, experience, and training in the most appropriate way to stop crime" (Huet, 2015).

Ambiguity about what to do at crime hot spots is not surprising, and follows a recurring theme in policing whereby technological advancements often reinforce established analytic and tactical approaches rather than foster new and innovative ones. Over a six-year study, Peter Manning found that crime mapping and information technology were never used to challenge existing strategies but rather adapted to support current practices.

How can the scope of place-based policing practices be expanded to incorporate the structure of criminogenic places? The answer may lie in moving beyond hot spots.

Sparrow contends that "the only way to break out of this circularity trap—where operational methods determine what analyses are commissioned, and the analyses conducted determine the types of problems that are detected—is to throw wide open the analytic operation and demand much greater versatility… By deliberately increasing the versatility of the analytic operation, the organization increases the range of problems it can detect. Discovering new types of problems, in turn, then challenges the organization to develop relevant and novel operational responses."
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To be clear, current analytical products serve police well in many respects, given the demonstrated crime prevention utility of place-based approaches. But an honest reflection of the status quo highlights the importance of evaluating police responses not just by crime reduction but also in terms of efficiency, risk governance, and cost-effectiveness. Simsi Analytics, with risk terrain modeling, provides a more in-depth understanding of how structural factors and the interactions of people at places facilitate crime emergence and persistence. Simsi helps agencies expand the scope of place-based policing, enabling chiefs and mayors to enhance risk governance. This is how many cities are serving their communities with data-informed, justifiable actions for crime prevention and service delivery.

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Paraphrased from "Risk-Based Policing" by Kennedy, Caplan & Piza (2018). See this book for complete references cited here.