REDUCING FIREARMS VIOLENCE THROUGH DIRECTED POLICE PATROL*

Reducing Firearms Violence through Directed Police Patrol*

In the early 1990s, the Kansas City Police Department conducted a quasi-experiment in which they tested the effect of directed police patrols in a high violent crime neighborhood. The directed patrol strategy utilized officers in patrol cars who were freed from the responsibility of responding to calls for police service. The officers were instructed to proactively patrol the neighborhood with ...

POLICING CRIME GUNS Research in Brief

Homicides in the United States, which disproportionately involve firearms, remain more common than in most other developed nations, despite the substantial decline in lethal violence observed in America during the 1990’s. Can police patrols that are dedicated to reducing illegal gun carrying help reduce gun violence? Based on an article published by the Brookings Institution (Cohen & Ludwig 200...

Designing Optimal Police Patrol Districts

A police car, manned round the clock by two officers, costs at least $300,000 annually. With efficient management of this resource, police services can be improved without raising taxes. This ArcView extension allows police planners to design patrol districts and to evaluate them by displaying various performance measures. The extension uses a spatially distributed queuing system (the Larson Hy...

Evaluation of Police Patrol Patterns

The Desktop Hypercube is an interactive tool designed to help planners improve police services without additional response units (or to maintain a constant level of service with fewer response units). It calculates a number of variables, including travel times, workloads, and preventive patrol frequencies, thus giving planners the information they need to achieve various goals, such as reductio...

Firearms, violence, and the potential impact of firearms control.