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Although many studies have examined the correlates of homicide clearance rates, few analyses have examined the factors related to the clearance of burglary offenses. The purpose of this paper is to address several gaps in the literature to determine if burglary clearance rates are due to discretionary, non-discretionary, and/or neighborhood contextual factors.

Data are analyzed from more than 10,000 burglary incidents in Philadelphia from 2010 using multilevel models to simultaneously test for the influence of multiple perspectives of the factors of crime clearance.

The results indicate that variables representing broken windows enforcement, discretionary factors, and non-discretionary factors are related to the increased likelihood that burglaries are cleared, but processes associated with social disorganization within communities is not.

The findings contribute to the literature by showing that future examinations of the factors of burglary clearance should consider community contextual factors, and specifically, that broken windows police enforcement appears to be a more important predictor of burglary clearance than do factors related to social disorganization theory. As a result, it is suggested that law enforcement also consider their tactics regarding low-level offenses if they wish to address the clearance rate of burglaries.

This analysis is among the first to examine multiple perspectives of the factors of crime clearance on burglary incidents.

To assess whether a programme of “crackdown and consolidation” could lead to measurable and sustainable reductions in domestic burglary.

In 1998 the Home Office reducing burglary initiative was launched in England and Wales. Phase I comprised 63 projects; the evaluation of one such project based on crackdown and consolidation is considered here. The aim was to crack down on known burglary recidivists, and then consolidate any gains by engaging the local community and implementing various prevention measures. The article considers the background to the project, the history of the method and how it was applied in this instance. The plausibility of the view that this action led to reductions in offending is examined.

The project did not follow its original plan of a continuous cycle of crackdown and consolidation. However, the approach undoubtedly has the potential to work, although in this instance the consolidation served only to prolong the impact of the initial crackdown, rather than offer a sustainable solution.

There are financial and staffing implications of adopting a cycle of crackdown and consolidation. There also needs to be neighbourhood buy‐in – especially for the crackdown element – and early warning of changes in the burglary trend.

Whilst the concept of crackdown and consolidation has existed for some years, published accounts of it are limited. This article goes some way towards filling that gap by providing an evaluation of the method within an operational police setting.

Business victimization is a serious and pervasive issue within the USA. According to recent estimates, roughly 2,058,194 businesses are victimized each year. Of those, approximately 33 percent of business victimization cases are solved. Taken together, it is important for research to examine factors that influence business victimization clearance. The purpose of this paper is to examine how broken windows enforcement, social disorganization, community and police organizational factors influence business robbery clearance using data from Houston, Texas over a two-year period from 2010 to 2012.

Using a hierarchical linear modeling strategy, the current study found no effect of broken windows tactics, social disorganization elements and various organizational, and community characteristics on business robbery clearance.

Significant effects were found for a number of incident and offense characteristics including gang involvement, business type, type of weapon used in the crime, the number of business entities in an area, and racial populous.

To date, few studies have examined factors that influence clearance rates for business robberies. Thus, the current study adds to and extends upon the literature in theoretically relevant ways by exploring how broken windows policing, social disorganization and various community/police organizational variables influence business robbery clearances in a large city.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how both offenders and their families perceived their interactions with police and whether there were negative consequences of the offender-focused strategy that was implemented in a hot spots policing experiment.

Data from interviews of 32 offenders and 29 family members are examined qualitatively for themes to evaluate how the strategy was carried out and how it impacted offenders’ behavior and both groups’ perceptions of the police detectives and the strategy overall.

The results show that there was overwhelming agreement by both offenders and their family members that the police detectives who contacted them treated both groups with dignity and respect. After the contact was over, the offenders appeared to commit less crime, followed probation more closely, and had positive feelings about what the police detectives were trying to do. Improvement of the offenders’ relationships with their families was an unanticipated finding indicating a diffusion of benefits of the strategy.

The results suggest that when procedural justice principles are used in an offender-focused police intervention, positive impact can be achieved without negative consequences.

This is a rare example of an in-depth evaluation of the perceptions of offenders and family members contacted through a hot spots policing offender-focused strategy.

In early 2020, the world faced a rapid life-changing pandemic in the form of the Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. Citywide lockdowns with stay-at-home orders and mass closings quickly became the “new normal.” With these new mandates, routine activity, mental health and financial securities all began to experience major deviations, and it became clear that this could prove to be rather valuable in providing the opportunity for large-scale criminology experiments. This study aims to explore New York City's (NYC) crime patterns during this unique social situation. Specifically, has crime as a whole increased or decreased, and have particular crimes increased or decreased during these stressful fluid times?

The authors briefly review previous crises and worldwide trends but focus on NYC crime as collected by the New York Police Department's statistics unit, “CompStat.” An analysis of 13 crime types from March 30 to July 5 was completed, including percent differences and individual weekly incidence rates in citywide crimes compared to the same time in 2019.

The analysis demonstrated that all crimes analyzed, except for murder and burglary, exhibited a statistically significant difference during COVID-19 conditions compared to the same time the previous year. Grand larceny auto and gun violence crimes significantly increased during COVID-19 weeks, whereas rape, other sex crimes, robbery, felony assault, grand larceny, transit, housing, misdemeanor assault and petit larceny all significantly decreased.

Due to the ongoing nature of the pandemic, this is amongst the first studies to examine trends in NYC crime during pandemic mandates. Expanding our knowledge in these situations can inform natural disaster responses, as well as criminal justice policy and practice to better protect the public in future crises.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a foot patrol and citizen contact-based policing intervention in a suburb outside Dallas. Funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance “Smart Policing” initiative, the intervention consisted of assigning a single bilingual officer to an economically disadvantaged apartment complex in the heart of the city.

An examination of calls for service across several offense types was performed for the target complex, the adjacent neighborhood, and a nearby apartment complex. The aims of the study were to determine whether the intervention affected specific calls for service and geographic and/or temporal displacement/diffusion occurred.

Two key findings emerged. First, the intervention produced several hypothesized reductions and increases in specific call types, but temporal displacement rendered those effects short-lived. Second, diffusion to surrounding areas was observed and persisted through various treatment dosages.

The study provides useful information to practitioners who might seek to implement foot-patrol-based tactics in hot spots and micro-places. However, foot patrol and/or citizen contact patrol alone may not yield sustainable crime reductions in their target areas.

Few recent studies have examined the efficacy of foot patrol in crime hot spots. No recent studies have evaluated citizen contact patrol within micro-places. This study sought to address both limitations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of a police foot patrol considering micro-geographic units of analysis.

Six years of monthly crime counts for eight violent and property crime types are analyzed. Negative binomial and binary logistic regressions were used to evaluate the impact of the police foot patrol.

The impact of police foot patrol is in a small number of micro-geographic areas. Specifically, only 5 percent of the spatial units of analysis exhibit a statistically significant impact from the foot patrol.

These analyses show the importance of undertaking evaluations at the micro-scale in order to identify the impact of police patrol initiative because a small number of places are driving the overall result. Moreover, care must be taken with how small the units of analysis are because as the units of analysis become smaller and smaller, criminal events become rarer and, potentially, identifying statistically significant change becomes more difficult.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the distribution of police response time to in-progress burglaries differ according to the level of social disorganization across different neighborhoods.

Using 2006 calls for service data collected from the Dallas and Houston Police Departments and from the 2000 US Bureau of Census statistics, the effects of social disorganization on police performance were examined through multilevel analysis of the distribution of police response time patterns across different neighborhoods in Dallas and Houston.

The analysis of the DPD and HPD in-progress calls produced somewhat consistent findings on the relationship between the level of social disorganization and police response time. Concentrated disadvantage, immigrant concentration, and residential stability are important predictors of the distribution of police response time patterns in Dallas and Houston.

Neighborhood social disorganization is related to the distribution of agency response time patterns. Detailed response time analysis is crucial for agencies to improve police performance and the community-police relationship.

In the policing literature, researchers have tended to neglect rapid response when examining many aspects of policing. The present study expands on existing research by examining the theoretical link between the level of neighborhood social disorganization with the distribution of rapid police response to in-progress burglary in two cities.

There has been a sharp rise in recorded crime in post‐war Britain: since 1960 known offences have increased by an average annual amount of at least 6 per cent. Most analysts, of course, believe this reflects changes in policing and in public reporting behaviour as much, if not more, than it indexes real trends in offending. Nevertheless, there are now more than 3m offences committed annually in England and Wales alone; and between 1980 and 1985, domestic burglary increased by over 150 per cent. Residental burglary and vandalism are a major component of the modern crime problem, accounting for 13 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, of known offences in 1985 (if thefts from dwellings were added, residential property crime would account for an even greater proportion of the total). This is, in itself, a sobering thought. Equally disturbing are the increasing expenditure on policing that crime trends have encouraged (40 per cent since 1979); the real cost of solving burglaries (which is currently estimated at £1.2bn per year in England and Wales); and the amount of property stolen or damaged (which was estimated at £35m in 1983 for one Northern police force area alone). Add to this the discovery of the British Crime Survey (conducted for the first time in 1982, and repeated two years later) that as few as two‐thirds of the burglaries and one‐fifth of the incidents of vandalism experienced by private victims ever comes to the notice of the police and it is obvious why residential crime is causing such concern among both politicians and the public.