Hot Spots of Crime and Place‐Based Prevention

• Date: 01 February 2018
• Author: David Weisburd
• Published date: 01 February 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12350

VOLLMER AWARD ADDRESS

VOLLMER AWARD

Hot Spots of Crime and Place-Based

Prevention

David Weisburd

George Mason University and Hebrew University

The August Vollmer Award Address is intended to focus on contributions to justice

and on the recipient’s research and policy experiences. This contribution begins with

the recipient recapping his personal journey to recognizing hot spots of crime and

their importance for prevention. He then goes on to summarize the “law of crime

concentration” and its importance for the logic model underlying this approach. He

describes the seminal Minneapolis Hot Spots Patrol Experiment and the subsequent

evaluation research in hot-spots policing and place-based prevention more generally

that led to its broad acceptance as an effective crime prevention strategy. Finally,

the author turns to key unanswered questions in place-based prevention, focusing on

police legitimacy, identifying jurisdictional effects, and emphasizing the importance of

harnessing informal social controls.

My interest in place-based prevention first developed when I was finishing grad-

uate school at Yale Universityand took a position as a senior research associate

at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City in 1984. My job was to

conduct a process evaluation of the New York City Pilot Project in Community Oriented

Policing in the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn (Weisburd and McElroy, 1988). Following a

long tradition of community-based criminology and crime prevention, the purpose of the

program was to identify small neighborhoods (“beats”) in the precinct for special attention.

Each of nine patrol officers was assigned to one of these beat areas. These were the “bad”

I would like to thank Martin Andresen, Anthony Braga, Charlotte Gill, Elizabeth Groff, Cody Telep, Clair White,

and Sue-Ming Yang for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article, as well as Tori Goldberg

and Sean Wire for their assistance in developing the final version. Support from the National Institute of Drug

Abuse (Award No. 5R01DA032639-03) assisted in developing survey results from the Community Health and

Anti-social Behavior at Drug Hot Spots study reported on in the article. Direct correspondence to David

Weisburd, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS

6D12, Fairfax, VA 22030 (e-mail: dweisbur@gmu.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12350 C2018 American Society of Criminology 5

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 1

Vollmer Award Address Vollmer Award

parts of town, and they were defined as including anywhere from 12 to 30 square blocks.

I walked the beat areas with the police officers 4 to 5 days a week for a year. What I

learned in Brooklyn was to transform my thinking about crime prevention, as well as to

play a part in a major rethinking of whether and to what extent the police could prevent

crime.

In practice, the officers spent most of their time on just a few street segments within

each beat. It was clear from walking the beat with police that the problems were not

spread throughout the beat areas, but they were focused on a few problematic streets. This

realization led to what I thought of at the time as “small worlds of crime” or what was

to be termed later “hot spots of crime” (Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger, 1989; Sherman

and Weisburd, 1988). It represented a new unit of analysis for criminology and crime

prevention.1Although place had been important since the Chicago School of American

criminology (Beirne and Messerschmidt, 1991; Bulmer, 1984; Faris, 1967; Harvey, 1987),

and had gained renewed attention by criminologists in the 1980s (Bursik, 1986; Reiss and

Tonry, 1986; Sampson, 1986), place at this micro unit of analysis was a new idea that was

to have important implications not only for how the police respond to crime but also for

how criminologists understand the crime problem.

My time walking the beat with community police officers was also to have a strong

impact on what I thought police could achieve in preventing crime. In the period preceding

my work at the Vera Institute, scholars had produced a body of work in which the ability

of police to do something about crime was challenged. Beginning with the Kansas City

Preventive Patrol Experiment (Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, and Brown, 1974), in a series

of studies, researchers challenged conventional police practices such as preventive patrol

and rapid response to citizen calls for police service (Weisburd and Braga, 2006). This

“nothing works” narrative was predominate at that time, not just in policing, but also in

rehabilitation and prevention more generally (Weisburd, Farrington, and Gill, 2017). My

experience in the 72nd precinct led me to question the prevailing narrative as I observed

strong improvements on the hot-spots streets where the officers spent most of their time.2

I did not have quantitative data at the time to show that, but I left Vera with the sense

1. Although scholars and police did not address microgeographic places in a systematic way, it is certainly

true that police officers on patrol and in special units (e.g., drug enforcement squads) recognized that

crime was concentrated in some places more than in others. This may be why the officers in this

program so quickly moved to address problems on specific streets.

2. The activities of the police officers varied at the sites, but they included both outreach to residents and

enforcement activities. Although outreach and more general community policing efforts were the

theoretical impetus for the project, the officers engaged in a good deal of traditional enforcement at

the hot spots they identified. Police crackdowns, in which the team worked together at a specific site,

were common (Weisburd and McElroy, 1988; Weisburd, McElroy, and Hardyman, 1988). My observations

here follow those by Anthony Braga and I when developing the idea of “shallow problem solving”

(Braga and Weisburd, 2006), where we argue that problem-oriented policing (POP) officers often

prioritize traditional enforcement approaches.

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