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On one level, motor vehicles might represent the possibility of unfettered freedom, escape (from government authority) and autonomy through providing work and leisure opportunities. On another level, in remote places, ‘hybridised’ and ‘Indigenised’ vehicles have been appropriated to speak to economic and cultural realities of everyday life. This chapter considers how night patrols may articulate expressions of decoloniality by enhancing Aboriginal social capital or what we refer to here as ‘collective efficacy’. It draws upon a subset of the findings from an evaluation of Indigenous Youth Programs in New South Wales to examine the effectiveness of night patrols operating in nine communities across the state. While the patrols were universally endorsed by the communities they served, some services were functioning at a high level while others had experienced periods of dysfunction and inactivity. The factors that impede effective service provision for night patrols in some communities were compared with other communities where services were functioning well. The chapter argues that night patrols can build and harness collective efficacy providing more than mere community policing functions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the Philadelphia Police Department instituted a large‐scale randomized controlled trial of foot patrol as a policing strategy and experienced 23 percent fewer violent crimes during the treatment period. The authors examine whether activities patrol officers were conducting might have produced the crime reduction. The activities of foot and car patrol officers research takes a closer look at what types are examined separately and differences between car patrol activities pre‐intervention and during the intervention are explored. Activities of foot versus car patrol officers during the study period are compared across treatment and control areas.

Official data on police officer activity are used to compare activities conducted by foot patrol officers with those by car patrol officers in 60 treatment (foot beat) and 60 control areas consisting of violent crime hot spots. Activities of car patrol officers are described pre‐intervention and during the intervention. Foot patrol officers’ activities are described within treatment and control areas during the treatment phase of the experiment. Car patrol officers’ activities are reported separately. The statistical significance of changes in car patrol activity pre and during intervention is evaluated using a series of mixed model ANOVAs.

There were noticeable differences in the activities conducted by foot and car patrol. Foot patrol officers spent most of their time initiating pedestrian stops and addressing disorder incidents, while car patrol officers handled the vast majority of reported crime incidents. Car patrol activity declined in both treatment and control areas during the intervention but there was no statistically significant difference between the treatment and the control areas.

The major limitation of this study is the restricted set of data describing officer activity that is captured by official records. Future studies should include a more robust ethnographic component to better understand the broad spectrum of police activity in order to more effectively gauge the ways in which foot patrol and car‐based officers’ activities interact to address community safety. This understanding can help extend the literature on “co‐production” by highlighting the safety partnerships that may develop organically across individual units within a police organization.

The study provides evidence that individual policing strategies undertaken by agencies impact one another. When implementing and evaluating new programs, it would be beneficial for police managers and researchers to consider the impact on activities of the dominant patrol style, as necessary, to understand how a specific intervention might have achieved its goal or why it might have failed to show an effect.

The research contributes to the understanding of the separate and joint effects of foot and car patrol on crime. In addition, it provides police managers with a clearer picture of the ways in which foot patrol police and car‐based officers work to co‐produce community safety in violent inner‐city areas.

The border control becomes challenging when a protected region is large and there is a limited number of border patrols. This research paper proposes a novel heuristic-based patrol path planning scheme in order to efficiently patrol with resource scarcity.

The trespasser influencing score, which is determined from the environmental characteristics and trespassing statistic of the region, is used as a heuristic for measuring a chance of approaching a trespasser. The patrol plan is occasionally updated with a new trespassing statistic during a border operation. The performance of the proposed patrol path planning scheme was evaluated and compared with other patrol path planning schemes by the empirical experiment under different scenarios.

The result from the experiment indicates that the proposed patrol planning outperforms other patrol path planning schemes in terms of the trespasser detection rate, when more environment-aware trespassers are in the region.

The experiment was conducted through simulated agents in simulated environment, which were assumed to mimic real behavior and environment.

This research paper contributes a heuristic-based patrol path planning scheme that applies the environmental characteristics and dynamic statistic of the region, as well as a border surveillance problem model that would be useful for mobile sensor planning in a border surveillance application.

The purpose of this paper is to use an evaluation of a micro-place-based hot-spot policing implementation to highlight the potential issues raised by data quality standards in the recording and measurement of crime data and police officer movements.

The study focusses on an area of London (UK) which used a predictive algorithm to designate micro-place patrol zones for each police shift over a two-month period. Police officer movements are measured using GPS data from officer-worn radios. Descriptive statistics regarding the crime data commonly used to evaluate this type of implementation are presented, and simple analyses are presented to examine the effects of officer patrol duration (dosage) on crime in micro-place hot-spots.

The results suggest that patrols of 10-20 minutes in a given police shift have a significant impact on reducing crime; however, patrols of less than about 10 minutes and more than about 20 minutes are ineffective at deterring crime.

Due to the sparseness of officer GPS data, their paths have to be interpolated which could introduce error to the estimated patrol dosages. Similarly, errors and uncertainty in recorded crime data could have substantial impact on the designation of micro-place interventions and evaluations of their effectiveness.

This study is one of the first to use officer GPS data to estimate patrol dosage and places particular emphasis on the issue of data quality when evaluating micro-place interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the combined crime rate and staffing levels of a patrol area affect patrol officers’ productivity. Specifically, the author identified and analyzed two macro-level correlates of patrol officer productivity: reported violent crimes per officer and reported property crimes per officer (a beat’s “crime-to-cop” ratios).

Using hierarchical linear modeling, the author estimated the effects of a patrol area’s violent crimes per officer ratio and property crimes per officer ratio on the annual number of traffic citations, warrants, misdemeanor arrests, and felony arrests generated by patrol officers (n=302). The author also examined the effect of these crime-to-cop ratios on a more advanced productivity metric.

The results suggest that a patrol area’s rate of property crimes per officer is associated with a moderate decrease in an officer’s annual number of traffic citations, warrant arrests, and misdemeanor arrests; a patrol area’s rate of violent crimes per officer is also associated with a moderate decrease in an officer’s annual number of traffic citations; and a patrol area’s rate of violent crimes per officer is associated with a moderate increase in an officer’s annual number of warrant and misdemeanor arrests. Notably, the crime-to-cop ratios are not correlated with a more sophisticated patrol productivity metric.

The author analyzed data from a mid-sized US police department that uses a generalists policing style. It is unknown if these results translate to smaller or larger police departments, as well as those agencies practicing a specialized policing style.

The findings suggest that police scholars should not only recognize how the crime-to-cop ratios of a patrol area might impact patrol officer productivity, but also incorporate more sophisticated metrics of patrol officer activity in future studies. These findings likewise signal to police practitioners that an area’s crime-to-cop ratios should be considered when allocating officers and other resources across patrol areas.

To the authors knowledge, this is the first study to identify and examine the link between a patrol area’s crime-to-cop ratios and patrol officer productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to provide information on the activities of police bicycle patrols.

A participant/observation research design was used. A five‐city, 32‐shift study on the output of police bicycle patrols was conducted. Same and similar ride‐alongs were conducted with bicycle and automobile patrols. All contacts (n=1,105) with the public were recorded and coded. These data included: number of people, tenor, seriousness and origination for each contact.

Analysis of these data provides evidence that bicycle patrols result in over twice as much contact with the public compared with automobile patrols. The field observation perspective revealed clear tactical advantages to bicycle patrols.

With a limited prior study of a police bicycle patrol's activities, this study is a significant initial step.

With evidence of tactical and numerical public contact advantages, more attention and resources aimed at deployment of police bicycle patrols appear to be warranted.

With large US cities and other departments using bicycle patrols, preliminary information on effectiveness appears to be both original and of value.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether patrol officers believe that police practices vary by precinct assignment and whether the precinct acts as a sub‐organizational level of analysis in police organizations.

The research design is a multi‐method ethnographic case study including observational fieldwork, both structured and unstructured interviews and official departmental documents.

The study finds that patrol officers overwhelmingly agree that police practices vary at the precinct level of analysis. This variation is perceived to be caused by: individual officer temperament/personality and level of experience,; culture, nature and expectations of the clientele/citizens; nature of calls for service, higher call loads and officer safety concerns; and command and precinct rules/norms. The study also finds that the precinct is a viable and important level of analysis within police organizations.

This study highlights the need to examine variation in police behavior within organizations at the precinct level of analysis.

The findings from this study have considerable practical implications because the findings indicate that to understand police patrol practices, police practitioners must investigate variation in the informal structures/cultures of police organizations at the sub‐organizational level of the precinct.

This paper is valuable because police researchers have investigated police behavior at the individual, situational, neighborhood, organizational and legal levels of analyses but have largely overlooked the intersection of these levels of analyses: the precinct.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of the p-median model to construct optimal patrol areas. This can improve both time spent traveling to calls, as well as equalize call load between patrol areas.

The paper provides an introduction to the use of integer linear programs to create optimal patrol areas, as many analysts and researchers in the author’s field will not be familiar with such models. The analysis then introduces a set of linear constraints to the p-median problem that are applicable to police agencies, such as constraining call loads to be equal and making patrol areas geographically contiguous.

The analysis illustrates the technique on simplified simulated examples. The analysis then demonstrates the utility of the technique by showing how patrol areas in Carrollton, TX can be made both more efficient and equalize the call loads given the same number of patrol beats as currently in place.

Unlike prior applications of creating patrol areas, this paper introduces linear constraints into the p-median problem, making it much easier to solve than programs that have non-linear or multiple objective functions. Supplementary code using open source software is also provided, allowing other analysts or researchers to apply the model to their own data.

The purpose of this paper is to detail the prevalence and nature of patrol officers' alcohol‐related workload.

A systematic social observation (SSO) methodology was used to collect data pertaining to the alcohol‐related activities and encounters of patrol officers. A fully randomized sampling procedure was used to select the days, times, and geographic areas of observation sessions. Observational data were obtained for 65 separate observations sessions ‐ totaling approximately 650 hours, 480 police‐citizen encounters, with 766 citizens, and 2,009 non‐encounter activities.

Approximately 26 percent of encounters and 10 percent of non‐encounter activities involved citizen alcohol use. Roughly 15 percent of patrol officer time is dedicated to alcohol‐related encounters and their associated activities. Alcohol‐related encounters were of a substantively different type than those in which there was no alcohol involvement. In sum, alcohol‐related encounters were more likely to involve a crime, occur in emotionally volatile situations, elicit a multiple‐officer response, and to take place out of the public sphere.

The paper demonstrates the utility of police‐researcher collaboration. The findings can make a direct contribution to academy and in‐service training.

Unlike previous SSO studies, this research used data obtained from a representative sample of police patrols. The use of a SSO protocol provides a level of detail about the nature of police‐citizen interactions within the context of alcohol‐related encounters not previously seen in the literature.