Month: March 2025

Hot spot policing in England and Wales, year ending March 2023

Following 2 successful pilots, the Home Office (HO) announced in April 2021 that 18 police forces with the highest levels of serious violence (SV) would receive funding to deliver enhanced hot spot policing. The aim of this programme, called Grip, was to deter SV through visible patrol activity in hot spots while also adopting strategic problem-oriented policing (POP) to address the root causes of violence within those locations. In September 2021, 2 further police forces were awarded bespoke funding to conduct hot spot policing, as they had the next highest volumes of SV. The 20 forces had a single-year Grant Agreement for the year ending 31 March 2022 and then a multi-year agreement for the next 3 years (though see below), to deliver the hot spot policing programme. Following consultation with leading hot spot policing scholars, we believe this is the first attempt to implement a national hot spot strategy and evaluate it robustly.
— Read on www.gov.uk/government/publications/hot-spot-policing-in-england-and-wales-year-ending-march-2023/hot-spot-policing-in-england-and-wales-year-ending-march-2023-evaluation-of-grip-and-bespoke-funded-hot-spot-policing

The Effectiveness and Implications of Police Reform: A Review of the Literature | ICJIA

Repeated and deadly encounters between law enforcement officers and Black Americans have given way to mounting calls for police reform. Reformers have proposed reallocating funds from policing to communities and social services, rethinking police use of force policies, and improving measures for officer accountability. This literature review briefly describes the impetus for police reform, reviews proposed police reforms, and examines available research on the effectiveness of police reforms. Overall, research indicates police agencies should not only focus on reducing crime, but also protecting and fostering the relationship between the public and police.
— Read on icjia.illinois.gov/

Mapping the Progress of Policies to Limit Non-Safety Related Traffic Stops | Vera Institute

Over the past decade, efforts to limit non-safety-related traffic stops have swept across the United States. These stops for low-level infractions—like a dangling air freshener, single burnt-out taillight, or expired registration—do not improve traffic safety, and police officers have used them in ways that disproportionately subject Black drivers to physical, psychological, and economic harm. Oftentimes, police have used these stops as a pretext to search for guns and drugs—with little success. Police departments across the country are proving that change is possible. The first known policy to eliminate non-safety-related traffic stops was implemented in 2013 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, under the direction of then-Police Chief Harold Medlock. Fayetteville’s experiment led to decreased racial disparities in traffic enforcement and fewer car crashes and traffic injuries/fatalities, with no impact on non-traffic crime, showing that this type of policy can work. Although the Fayetteville policy ended in 2017, it set the stage for state and local governments, police departments, and district attorneys across the country to take action for safer, fairer traffic enforcement.
— Read on www.vera.org/ending-mass-incarceration/criminalization-racial-disparities/public-safety/redefining-public-safety-initiative/sensible-traffic-ordinances-for-public-safety/stops-map

Youth in Adult Courts, Jails, and Prisons – The Sentencing Project

Overview

At the turn of the 21st century, it was estimated that 250,000 children every year were charged as adults in the United States. By 2019, that number had dropped 80% to 53,000. This drop is to be celebrated and is the result of legislative changes in 44 states and the District of Columbia, as well as federal funding incentives. However, there is still much work to be done.

The children that remain exposed to the adult criminal legal system are overwhelmingly youth of color. The vast majority serve short sentences in adult jail or prison and return home by their 21st birthdays, the age at which services can be extended to in the youth justice system in the vast majority of states; indicating that many youth could be served, more appropriately, by the youth justice system.
— Read on www.sentencingproject.org/reports/youth-in-adult-courts-jails-and-prisons/

New data fill long-standing gaps in the study of policing | Science

Data limitations have long stymied research on racial bias in policing. To persuasively demonstrate bias, scholars have sought to compare officer behavior toward minority versus white civilians while holding constant all other factors in the police-civilian encounter that might provide alternative explanations for enforcement disparities. These comparisons in “similar circumstances” are also critical in litigation concerning discriminatory policing, which can often lead to court-ordered remedies (1). Such “all-else-equal” scenarios are elusive in many realms of social science, but two challenges have made them particularly difficult to find in the study of policing. On page 1397 of this issue, Aggarwal et al. (2) report using data from the ridesharing service Lyft—having obtained vehicle location on more than 200,000 drivers using highfrequency GPS pings from their smartphones—to analyze speeding enforcement by the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) and to show how such data offer a path forward for addressing both challenges.
— Read on www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw3618