This police foot patrol strategy involved veteran officers patrolling an area of approximately 3 miles during one shift per day. It is rated No Effects. Compared with the control areas, there was no impact on violent crimes or citizens’ perceptions of safety in hot spots.
NOTE: CrimeSolutions features two similar, but distinct foot patrol programs that were implemented in Philadelphia. (The other is Police Foot Patrol–Philadelphia 2009.) These strategies are listed separately because of key differences in how each strategy was implemented. See the program note below for a more detailed discussion of these differences and a link to the other rated program.
Program Goals
The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment was a randomized controlled field experiment of three approaches to hot spots policing: offender-focused policing, foot patrol, and problem-oriented policing. The foot patrol portion of the intervention, implemented in 2010, was designed to reduce violence at violent-crime hot spots. It was expected that police could efficiently reduce the number of violent crimes in the city by targeting the areas in Philadelphia where the most violent crimes occurred. The idea was to increase officer presence at hot spots by implementing foot patrols that would enable officers to become familiar with the routines of residents. The foot patrols were intended to prevent crime from occurring and to help officers apprehend suspects should a crime occur.
Program Activities
In Philadelphia, foot patrol occurred 5 days per week over the course of 12 weeks. Pairs of police officers patrolled the targeted areas for at least 8 hours each day. Officers with varying years of experience were involved in the foot-patrol intervention. A little more than half were assigned by their supervisors because they had the necessary skills and experience; the other half volunteered. District captains had discretion over how many officers would patrol, which days and times officers would patrol, and other operational decisions. The timing of each shift varied, depending on the nature of crime in the location. For example, some officers assigned to foot patrols worked during the day shift (between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m.), while some worked during the evening shift (between 4 p.m. and 2 a.m.); a few officers alternated between day and night shifts weekly. The hot spots targeted by the foot patrols encompassed an average of 3 miles of streets and 23.5 intersections.
Officers were assigned to one foot patrol area so that the same officers would patrol throughout the entire experiment. Some officers reported implementing a variety of problem-oriented responses as they were patrolling their assigned areas, such as clearing trash in alleyways or parks where guns were previously hidden. Other officers reported using more traditional responses during foot patrol, such as making arrests and performing field stops.
Program Theory
Deterrence theory serves as the underlying premise of the idea that increasing police presence in hot spots through targeted foot patrols can reduce crime. When people who may be tempted to commit a crime view the police in their neighborhood, they perceive the risk of apprehension as greater than if a police officer is not present (Groff et al. 2015). Specific individuals are not targeted, but if a police officer patrols the neighborhood frequently and becomes familiar with the residents and local patterns of behavior, it is more likely that he or she will notice something or someone out of the ordinary and be able to identify and arrest criminals. As such, more visible police presence increases the costs associated with committing crimes (Police Foundation 1981).
Program Note
The foot patrol intervention of the Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment implemented in 2010, which is described here, is distinct from the foot patrol intervention described in the Police Foot Patrol–Philadelphia 2009 intervention. Although both experiments employed foot patrols at hot spots in Philadelphia, there were a number of important differences.
First, the two experiments involved police officers with different levels of experience. The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment foot patrol in 2010 involved veteran officers, whereas the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment in 2009 involved rookie officers who had just graduated from the police academy. Goff and colleagues (2015) noted that veteran officers appeared to be less aggressive in their enforcement, compared with rookie officers.
Second, there were differences in the length of time the foot-patrol interventions were implemented. The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment foot-patrol intervention took place over 12 weeks in 2010. By comparison, the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment was conducted over 22 weeks in the beginning of 2009.
Another difference was the amount of time officers spent patrolling targeted areas. In the 2010 experiment, one pair of officers worked one shift, resulting in at least 8 hours of patrol time per day. In the 2009 experiment, two pairs of officers patrolled areas, resulting in 16 hours of patrol time per day.
Finally, the area of the targeted hot spots differed by experiment. In the 2010 experiment, the hot spots encompassed an average of 3 miles of streets and 23.5 intersections, whereas the hot spots targeted by the 2009 experiment encompassed an average of 1.3 miles of streets and 14.7 intersections.
These factors may explain why significant effects on crime were found during the 2009 experiment, but not during the 2010 experiment (Ratcliffe et al. 2011; Ratcliffe et al. 2015).
