Hot spot policing, a staple of law enforcement playbooks for decades, sounds simple enough: Put cops where the shootings, thefts and drug deals are happening.
Yet in an era when law enforcement agencies are under intense scrutiny, police nationwide have given hot spot policing more neighborhood-friendly makeovers.
Today’s hot spot tactics aren’t just about flooding troubled neighborhoods with officers and patrols. Departments are taking enforcement directly to what they see as sources of violence, such as neighborhood clubs and hangouts or specific troublemakers.
“It’s not the hot spot necessarily; it’s the hot spot within the hot spot that’s important,” Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told The Washington Times. “Identifying certain individuals, breaking up networks of criminal activity that’s occurring in those areas … as opposed to some dragnet approach.”
Criminologists pioneered hot spot policing nearly three decades ago when researchers found that crime wasn’t concentrated in just the “bad parts of town” but often in a few select blocks.
The policing strategy has evolved from identifying a handful of geographic areas of crime to figuring out which exact residential dwellings or corner stores are breeding grounds for disorder and sometimes bloodshed.
Police have taken that refinement a step further and are now identifying the crooks who frequent those spots and are most responsible for the violence that fractures communities.
When Chief Garcia became Dallas’ top cop in 2021, he worked with criminologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio to divide the city into a 101,000-part grid, he said.
About 65 of those gridded slots are of primary concern to Chief Garcia. Those 65 parcels represent a tiny fraction of less than 1% of the city geographically but contribute to about 5% of the city’s overall crime.
The chief said Dallas police “treat” crime in those areas with their Place Network Investigations teams.
The targets are only the size of a football field and can cover apartment complexes or other locations.
Chief Garcia said the numbers show that precision raids by Dallas’ PNI teams are effective.
Although total arrests in Dallas are down by 4% year over year, they are up by 25% in the scaled-down hot spots that police have identified and targeted, he told The Times. He said violence-related calls for service fell by 1.5% citywide and 10% in the treated hot spots.
Places surrounding those PNI locations — the “catchment” areas, as Chief Garcia called them — didn’t experience any runoff of crime. Instead, the overall crime rate dropped 10% in those areas once law enforcement handled the problematic building or people.
Other cities have different demands and approaches to addressing criminal elements.
Labor Day marked the end of Detroit’s summer hot spot program. On Memorial Day, city police started working with state and federal prosecutors to crack down on violent offenders in the historically crime-ridden 8th and 9th precincts.
Dawn Ison, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said people arrested on carjacking, commercial armed robbery or gun offenses in those precincts faced federal charges, meaning much harsher sentences for those convicted.
The enforcement partners sent a letter warning 200 people on probation, parole or supervised release in the targeted precincts about the harsher penalties they would risk by reoffending.
“We don’t want anyone to think that we’re soft on enforcement,” Ms. Ison told The Times.
Early returns were mostly promising.
Detroit Police Chief James White said major crime fell by 18% in the 8th Precinct and by nearly 10% in the 9th Precinct from the previous summer.
That included reductions in carjackings, robberies and aggravated assaults in both precincts, but the chief said four more homicides were reported in the 8th Precinct this summer than in 2022.
Ms. Ison said nonfatal shootings dropped 15% this summer, which meant fewer lives lost but more evidence to be gathered for the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.
The network has been vital in developing leads to identify the “hot” people roaming about Detroit, Chief White said.
The database can decipher which gun produced a shell casing and connect the weapon to other crimes and people involved in the tit-for-tat shootings that drive Detroit’s deadly violence.
The ballistics network “helped us close a lot of cases, [and] if not close, link cases together that we wouldn’t have otherwise known were linked together,” Chief White told The Times. “Super valuable with retaliatory crimes. We see a lot of gang shootings and things like that that are retaliatory in nature. And we’re able to see that that one weapon has been used in a number of different shootings.”
Police leaders in the District of Columbia are using a hot spot strategy to reduce the number of robberies and carjackings driving the city’s crime wave.
Acting Police Chief Pamela Smith said in August that the department was conducting a robbery suppression initiative in areas with higher rates of armed holdups and car thefts.
She said the initiative reduced offenses in those zones by 21%, though year-over-year increases in robberies (up 65%) and carjackings (up 103%) remained high citywide.
D.C. Council members have tried to stem the persistent violence with emergency laws designed to give judges more power to lock up defendants while they await trial.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have chided the local government’s inability to protect its citizens. One of them recently hosted a meeting to advise congressional colleagues and staffers about protecting themselves on D.C. streets.
For police officers, working inside a hot spot isn’t about just cracking down on thugs.
Charles H. Ramsey, a former police chief in the District and Philadelphia, told The Times that it’s important for officers to get to know community members who live near crime.
During his time in Philadelphia from 2008 to 2016, Mr. Ramsey sent foot patrols to hot spots that he identified with the help of Temple University criminologists.
Having cops walk the block provided a clear public safety benefit and a formative lesson for police rookies. He said crime fell 28% in the hot spots where officers were on foot.
“It teaches the cops, at a very early age on the job, that there are more decent law-abiding people living in that neighborhood than there are criminals,” he told The Times.
“You don’t see that when you’re driving down the street at 30 miles an hour with the windows rolled up,” he said.
Building strong ties with the residents whom police are sworn to protect is a science.
David Weisburd, a criminologist at George Mason University who helped develop the practice of hot spot policing, said training police in “procedural justice” also can deter crime.
Procedural justice is an academic way of saying, “Be friendly.” Mr. Weisburd noted evidence that people who perceive neighborhood cops as congenial are less likely to commit crimes.
Mr. Weisburd referred to his study that compared officers who used procedural justice with those who didn’t in three cities: Cambridge, Massachusetts; Houston; and Tucson, Arizona.
The procedural justice group in all three cities reported 60% fewer arrests and a 14% reduction in crime than the control group.
“A lot of people would argue if the police are ‘tougher and meaner’ and whatever, they’ll do better,” Mr. Weisburd said. “This doesn’t suggest that. This suggests that if we’re more respectful, we’ll get even more deterrence.”
Another way to foster relations between police and community members is to combine hot spot enforcement with access to social services.
Departments in Dallas and Detroit are using the increased police presence to introduce services that help people get back on their feet financially or find a place to stay.
In Detroit, local police and federal partners helped people get GEDs or apply for driver’s licenses. Those and other resources were readily available to residents at a “Peacenic” held in each targeted precinct.
Chief Garcia said he walks through Dallas’ troubled neighborhoods to get a feel for the quality of life issues.
Part of his solution might mean fixing a dilapidated playground or adding lighting to dark areas.
To him, these small improvements contribute to behaviors that can lead away from a life of crime.
“When people live in hopeless situations, they do hopeless things that we have to respond to,” Chief Garcia said.
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.
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