A researcher at Hebrew University, Prof. David Weisburd, has found that, contrary to popular opinion, "hot spots policing" does not force crime to "move around the corner" - findings that will have important implications for public policy.

In recent years, police around the world have been developing crime prevention programs that identify "hot spots of crime" for intensive police attention. Such programs are based on research evidence that crime is tightly clustered in urban environments in street blocks or groups of street blocks.

A recent National Academies of Science report in the US has identified hot spots policing as the most promising police strategy available for combating crime, and it has been a central component of such well known new initiatives as New York City's Compstat program.

However, while there was a good deal of evidence that cracking down on crime hot spots can reduce crime in those places, concerns were raised as to whether crime would simply "move around the corner" in response to police actions.

This is termed "displacement of crime" by scholars, and it represents an important threat to hot spots policing programs. If crime will simply displace to areas near hot spots, then hot spots policing approaches cannot be seen as having long-term crime prevention value. Prof. Weisburd, director of the Hebrew University's Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law, decided to examine whether this was indeed the case.

Despite some previous indirect evidence suggesting that significant displacement was not a likely outcome of such programs, this was the first study to directly examine displacement in crime prevention focused on hot spots.

The study also examined the possibility that the reverse of displacement - "diffusion of crime control benefits" - might occur in areas near hot spots policing. If it could be shown that areas near a hot spots policing intervention improve despite the fact that no direct police resources were expended there, this would reinforce the value of hot spots policing programs.

With substantial support from the U.S. National Institute of Justice and the cooperation of the Jersey City, N.J., Police Department, Prof. Weisburd led a team of researchers in developing a controlled study of displacement in hot spots policing.

Two sites with substantial street-level crime and disorder were selected to be targeted and were carefully monitored during an experimental period. Two neighboring areas were selected to serve as "catchment areas" in order to assess immediate spatial displacement or diffusion. Intensive police interventions were applied to each high-crime site but not applied to the catchment areas.

The results study clearly showed that there was little evidence of displacement. While social observations of trends in drug crime, prostitution and disorder showed strong crime reduction outcomes as a result of the hot spots policing interventions in the targeted areas, areas nearby the hot spots did not show any increases in such crime and disorder. Indeed, in the case of prostitution in one site, and disorder in a second, there is statistically significant evidence of a diffusion of crime control benefits to the areas nearby. Nearby areas improved despite the fact that police activities were not brought in those sites.

These findings have important public policy implications. They provide the first evidence, on the basis of a direct study, that the crime prevention benefits of hot spots policing will not be watered down by displacement of crime and disorder to nearby areas. Indeed, they suggest that police are likely to gain an unintended benefit of improvement in nearby areas as a result of hot spots policing approaches.

For further information:
Rebecca Zeffert, Dept. of Media Relations, the Hebrew University, Tel: 02-588-1641, or Orit Sulitzeanu, Hebrew University spokesperson, Tel: 02-5882910 or 052-260-8016. Internet site: http://media.huji.ac.il.