One of the biggest challenges in policing is anticipating where, and when, crime will occur in order to efficiently deploy police resources. The near repeat phenomenon is a known crime pattern which can inform police intervention and deployment strategies. The near repeat pattern for burglary can be used to inform the testing of different intervention strategies to prevent additional burglaries. This project was funded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.
Researchers worked with the Baltimore County Police Department and the City of Redlands (CA) Police Department to conduct a Randomized Controlled field Trial (RCT) in each jurisdiction. The RCT was designed to test whether providing timely crime prevention information to neighbors of a residential burglary victim could interrupt the near repeat pattern for an area. The study targeted the delivery of crime prevention to the micro level space-time window of significant risk rather than to an entire neighborhood. The crime prevention strategies used were community driven and the communities were surveyed on their perception of the police intervention strategy. The study required the use of custom-designed software to randomly allocate high-risk burglary zones to either a treatment or control group. The software is open source and available to departments interested in implementing a near repeat crime intervention strategy.
To download a copy of this project’s summary, visit https://tinyurl.com/y2muj5jw