Program Profile: Police Substation Within a Business Improvement District in Newark, New Jersey

This is a police substation operating within a business improvement district in Newark (N.J.) with the goal of reducing crime in the target area. The program is rated Promising. There were statistically significant reductions in burglary and motor vehicle theft in the treated area compared with a control area over the entire 6-year postintervention period. There were no statistically significant differences in robbery, aggravated assault, or theft from auto.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals/Target Population

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are defined areas where property owners and/or merchants pay a tax or fee to fund various public service projects in the area’s geographical boundaries (Mitchell 2001). In New Jersey in 2012, as part of a public–private partnership, the Newark Police Department opened a substation in the Newark Downtown District, the official BID of the target area of the city. This substation in the Newark Downtown District BID serves as the headquarters of the Department’s Metro Division and achieves “spatial decentralization” in its command structure by granting the police unit jurisdiction over an area typically smaller in scope than police precincts or sectors. The goal of the substation operating within the downtown BID is to reduce crime by providing more opportunities for proactive policing in the target area.

Program Components/Key Personnel

BIDs can harness the capacity of private businesses to contribute to community well-being. Police substations operating in conjunction with BIDs can shift crime prevention from a purely police responsibility to a collaborative function shared across public and private stakeholders. The 3,500-square-foot police substation that was established through the Newark Police Department and Newark Downtown District partnership was in response to several public safety concerns within the downtown area, including persistently high crime levels, poor quality-of-life conditions, and a general negative perception by potential developers and visitors to the city (Roman 2011). The two entities had a memorandum of understanding for the first 3 years of operation that established the roles and responsibilities of each organization. The Newark Police Department paid for the cost of all utilities, and the Newark Downtown District funded the renovation and furnishing of the building space and paid the monthly rent for the substation.

The substation operates within the encompassing jurisdiction of Newark Police Department’s Third Precinct. The commander of the Third Precinct sets the overall strategy and priorities for the substation, with the substation commander responsible for managing the day-to-day operations. Beginning in January 2016, following the appointment of a new public safety director, officers at the rank of lieutenant were assigned as commanders of the Metro Division.

The Metro Division deploys a minimum of 12 officers each day within the substation target area. The officers conduct a mixture of foot and motor vehicle patrols across two 8-hour shifts daily. The substation can be considered as employing a saturation patrol strategy owing to this heightened police presence, compared with typical operations with the Newark Police Department’s patrol sectors.

Program Theory

Skogan (2019, 35–36) explained that there are two types of decentralization in policing: 1) spatial decentralization and 2) decentralized decision-making. Spatial decentralization allocates responsibility for managing and deploying crime prevention resources to midlevel commanders in charge of concise geographies. Decentralized decision-making affords midlevel commanders the discretion and authority to devise and deploy strategies within the geographic area they oversee.

In this intervention, the substation achieved spatial decentralization by granting a unit jurisdiction over an area typically smaller in scope than police precincts or sectors. Similar to substations, BIDs can promote a sense of geographic decentralization by focusing public safety efforts toward a specific district within a jurisdiction. The decentralization afforded by substations and/or BIDs may also provide necessary conditions for causal mechanisms of crime reduction to take hold (Piza et al. 2020).

Additional Information

The memorandum of understanding was signed between the Newark Police Department and Newark Downtown District and ran from Sept. 1, 2012, through Aug. 31, 2015. After the memorandum of understanding expired, the Newark Police Department kept operating the substation in the same location (Piza et al. 2020).

Study 1

Piza and colleagues (2020) conducted a quasi-experimental evaluation with a micro-synthetic control group to evaluate the effect of a newly established Newark (N.J.) Police Department (NPD) substation on aggravated assault, burglary, murder, theft from auto, motor vehicle theft, and robbery at 6 years postintervention. The substation was located within the downtown business improvement district (BID), operated by the Newark Downtown District.

The analysis estimated effects over a 6-year postintervention time frame with two distinct time periods: 1) the initial 3-year program period (Sept. 1, 2012, when the substation opened, through Aug. 31, 2015) and 2) the period subsequent to the expiration of the memorandum of understanding between the NPD and Newark Downtown District that established the roles and responsibilities of each entity (Sept. 1, 2015, through July 23, 2018). The second 3-year period was assessed to determine whether any changes in the nature of the substation operations between the two periods resulted in variable outcomes. The second 3-year period was slightly truncated, owing to the expansion of the substation target area on July 24, 2018. Restricting the postintervention period to July 23, 2018, ensured that only the effect of the original substation and related crime control efforts were measured. The CrimeSolutions review of this study focused on results at the end of the entire 6-year postintervention period.

Both street segments and street intersections were the units of analysis. Street segments represented “the two block faces on both sides of a street between two intersections” (Weisburd et al. 2004, 290). Street intersections were created through computer geoprocessing techniques, which generated points at every location in Newark where two or more streets intersected. Jointly, street segments and street intersections were considered street units. This process resulted in 4,081 street intersections and 6,166 street segments (n = 10,247 street units) in Newark.

A micro-synthetic control method was used to identify a control area that mimicked pre-intervention crime trends and that was similar in demographics to the treated area. This procedure incorporated the following nine covariates to match control street units to the treated street units: 1) number of overall crime incidents experienced during the 3-year pre-intervention period; 2) Newark’s urban enterprise zone (which mirrors a BID’s focus on urban revitalization without the supervision of a nonprofit organization and revenue raised from self-imposed taxation), to compare street units from the treated area—predominately comprising commercial properties—with street units from similarly constituted areas of Newark; 3) proportion of pre-intervention, high-crime street units in the surrounding Census block group; 4) street unit type: street segment (coded as “1”) or as an intersection (coded as “0”); 5) principal roadways (as more-frequently used streets may present more crime opportunities than less-busy streets, each street segment was coded either as a principal roadway [coded as “1”] or as part of another roadway classification [coded as “0”]); 6) length of street unit (as longer street segments may offer more crime opportunities relative to shorter street segments); 7) number of enforcement actions conducted during the 3-year pre-intervention period (pre-enforcement actions were included to reflect the level of law enforcement activity within each street unit during the 3-year pre-intervention period); 8) percentage of new construction in the Census block group; and 9) percentage of units occupied (nonvacant) in the Census block group.

This process resulted in a matched analysis of 248 street units in the substation treatment area, and 248 street units in the weighted control area. There were no statistically significant differences between the treated area and control area on crime trends or demographics. The synthetic control procedure was able to generate exact matches for all of the time-invariant characteristics, and for the time-varying crime control characteristics.

The Newark Police Department provided crime data. The micro-synthetic crime analysis provided measures of crime changes (relative to controls) in both the treated area and the surrounding catchment area following the opening of the substation. Linear difference-in-difference estimates of aggregated crime counts in the treated area compared with the control area were conducted for individual years and for cumulative subtotals of 3-year subsets to assess the effect of the substation on property and violent crime outcomes over the entire 6-year postintervention period. Subgroup analysis was conducted to assess whether spatial displacement or diffusion of benefits occurred following the opening of the substation.

Diffusion and Displacement

Piza and colleagues (2020) conducted an additional synthetic control analysis to assess whether spatial displacement or diffusion of benefits occurred following the opening of the substation. In this analysis, the 248 street units falling within the catchment area were the treated group, and new street units were drawn as synthetic controls. In the initial 3-year program period, significant displacement effects were found for robbery and theft from auto. During this same period, burglary decreased by approximately 92 incidents, exhibiting a diffusion of benefits effect. In the subsequent 3-year period, displacement effects were again observed for robbery and theft from auto, with increases of approximately 54 and 68 incidents, respectively. Diffusion of benefits was observed for motor vehicle theft, with a reduction of approximately 181 incidents in the catchment area.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Following are CrimeSolutions-rated programs that are related to this practice:

Geographically Focused Policing Initiatives

Geographically focused policing initiatives increase the presence and visibility of police officers at specific high-crime locations to significantly reduce crime and disorder. This practice is rated Promising for reducing crime in treatment areas relative to control areas.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

Crime & Delinquency - Multiple crime/offense types

Why might a practice's outcome ratings differ from the ratings of specific programs encompassed by that practice?