The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: Document Title: COPS on Dots Doing What? The Differential Effects of Police Enforcement Actions in Hot Spots Author(s): Cory P. Haberman Document No.: 249880 Date Received: May 2016 Award Number: 2014-IJ-CX-0007 This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this federally funded grant report available electronically. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. COPS ON DOTS DOING WHAT? THE DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF POLICE ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS IN HOT SPOTS A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Cory P. Haberman July, 2015 Examining Committee Members: Jerry H. Ratcliffe, PhD, Advisory Chair, Department of Criminal Justice Ralph B. Taylor, PhD, Department of Criminal Justice Jennifer D. Wood, PhD, Department of Criminal Justice Cynthia Lum, PhD, External Examiner, George Mason University This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. ProQuest Number: 3719370 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ProQuest 3719370 Published by ProQuest LLC (2015). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. © Copyright 2015 By Cory P. Haberman All rights reserved ii This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. ABSTRACT COPS ON DOTS DOING WHAT? THE DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF POLICE ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS IN HOT SPOTS Cory P. Haberman Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2015 Doctoral Advisory Committee Chair: Jerry H. Ratcliffe, PhD Although hot spots policing has become one of the most promising policing strategies, the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of hot spots policing does not suggest what police should be doing in crime hot spots. To date, police enforcement actions – pedestrian investigations, traffic enforcement, and arrests – still dominate American policing. Yet empirical studies of these actions have not: focused on micro‐geographic areas, employed multiple measures of police enforcement actions, or empirically compared the effectiveness of different enforcement actions. Given these gaps in the literature, a mixed‐methods study sought to answer four research questions. (1) Do four police enforcement actions focused on offenders or potential offenders reduce violent crime in hot spots? The four police enforcement actions examined were pedestrian investigations, traffic enforcement events, quality of life arrests, and violent crime arrests. (2) Are any one of these four police enforcement actions more effective than the others? (3) When police commanders allocate resources to crime hot spots, what do police commanders think they are doing? (4) What are police commanders’ rationales for what they do in crime hot spots? The first two questions were answered using official data from the Philadelphia Police Department. A purposive sample of 169 high crime street blocks and intersections was drawn and longitudinal data analyses examined the effects of police enforcement actions on monthly violent crime counts from 2009 to 2013 (n = 10,140). Wald Tests were used to test for the differential effectiveness of the four enforcement actions. Qualitative methods answered the iii This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. remaining two research questions. Field observations of crime strategy meetings (May, 2014 to August, 2014) and interviews with police commanders (November, 2014 to February, 2015) were conducted. The quantitative results found total enforcement and pedestrian stop levels in the previous or same month linked to higher expected monthly violent crime counts. The positive effect of pedestrian stops was significantly larger than the effects of traffic enforcement or quality of life arrests. Despite the positive relationship between police enforcement and violent crime, the qualitative results provided insight into what police commanders thought they were doing in crime hot spots. Three themes emerged from the qualitative data: (1) “locking down” crime hot spots, (2) disrupting high risk offenders, and (3) educating potential victims. Police commanders rationalized these beliefs with four explanations of their effectiveness: (1) making offenders “think twice”, (2) denying potential offenders and victims certain places in order to reduce crime opportunities, (3) getting high risk offenders “off the street”, and (4) target hardening. Drawing on theorizing for how police enforcement actions might actually link to higher levels of crime (Grabosky, 1996) and methodological concerns raised by Taylor (2015), five possible explanations for the observed positive relationships among police enforcement actions and violent crime are provided: (1) an anticipatory effect, (2) over‐deterrence, (3) escalation, (4) unintended enticement and self‐fulfilling prophecies, and (5) temporal scaling. The anticipatory effect explanation centers on the police correctly anticipating outbreaks of violent crime but violent crime still not being reduced due to (1) dosage, (2) the overuse of enforcement, (3) police legitimacy, (4) temporal displacement or two components the study’s design (5) imprecise measurement and (6) lack of a proper counterfactual. Additionally, police iv This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. enforcement actions may inadvertently reduce guardianship though over‐deterrence, escalate competition among rival offenders, or inform potential offenders of crimes they could or “should” be committing. Finally, the study’s temporal scale (i.e., months) may not be fine enough to capture the actual cycling of how increased enforcement actions produce lower violent crime levels. The qualitative data are drawn upon to possibly support these explanations. Additionally, the pros and cons of police commanders’ perspectives on the use and effectiveness of enforcement actions are discussed in context of the criminological theory and crime control literatures. Finally, the results are discussed in terms of their implications for crime control theory and policy. v This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. STATEMENT OF FUNDING This dissertation was supported by the National Institute of Justice’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Award Number 2014‐IJ‐CX‐0007. The National Institute of Justice is part of the Office of Justice Programs and U.S. Department of Justice. The findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this dissertation are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, or U.S. Department of Justice. vi This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. ACCKNOWLEDGEMENTS My path to a PhD started at Bowling Green State University. In between our discussions of the Cleveland Indians, Dr. Steve Lab introduced me to environmental criminology and talked me into going to grad school. Thanks, Steve. Dr. Bill King has continuously mentored me since my time at BG. I will always consider Bill a mentor in the academic