Examination of police dosage in residential burglary and residential theft from vehicle micro-time hot spots

Rooted in the near repeat phenomenon and police crime analysis, a crime “flare up” or micro-time hot spot is the emergence of several closely-related crimes within a few minutes’ travel distance from one another. It occurs within 1–2 weeks and can last several weeks or months before running its course and cooling down. A micro-time hot spot is a type of crime pattern identified by police crime analysts to guide short-term police response, particularly directed patrol. Published work by these authors has examined a subset of the 5 years of data to test the effectiveness of the Port St. Lucie, FL Police Department’s response to micro-time hot spots. Those quasi-experimental studies found separately for burglary and theft from vehicle occurring in residential areas that micro-time hot spots receiving police response had nearly 20 % fewer subsequent crimes than those receiving no police response. This study examines all 121 residential burglary and 163 residential theft from vehicle micro-time hot spots receiving police response to understand how two factors of police response dosage (i.e., the amount of directed patrol and how quickly directed patrol is deployed) are related to the amount of subsequent crime. Separate negative binominal analyses for each crime type showed that more directed patrols per day were related to lower levels of subsequent crime for both crime types, and a quicker response was related to lower crime for residential theft from vehicle. That is, the more and quicker the response, the quicker resolution and cooling off of the micro-time hot spot. The findings were stronger for residential burglary, and a visual examination of first standard deviation confident intervals of directed patrol rate by crime suggests that between four and six directed patrols per day in residential burglary micro-time hot spots was optimal. Although the data are from one police agency, these promising results support future research and provide guidance to police for implementing directed patrol in short-term hot spots of property crime.