
Police In-Service Training
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and command staff alike. The program is intended to provide research in a jargon-free manner that cuts through the noise, misinformation, and misperceptions about the police. The discussions with policing experts will help the law enforcement community create better programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel myths of police officer behavior.
Police In-Service Training
Episode 10: Hot Spots Policing
Hot spots policing has been around for more than 20 years, and there are many studies exploring its use. Joining us to discuss the broad range of research on the topic is Brandon Turchan, a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University.
Main Topics
•We’ll summarize the nuts and bolts of hot spots policing.
•Brandon will explain that even if a hot spot never goes away, the police can keep these locations “cool.”
•Hot spots policing tactics can be successful, but the gains are amplified when combined with procedural justice or problem-oriented tactics.
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Bluesky: @policeinservice.bsky.social
Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and
command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better
programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
The medical world is often credited with developing an evidence-based approach to treatment.
Doctors would test ideas and see what worked, try new things to see if they worked better,
and do away with methods that clearly failed.
A classic example is the use of leeches, as they really didn't help to get rid of the
bad blood that was thought to cause a person's health problems.
An evidence-based approach has made its way into policing.
If policing understands anything, it's evidence.
Officers needed to establish reasonable suspicion, probable cause, and then prove their case
in court.
It's not enough to say that some guy looks pretty sketchy.
You need evidence to demonstrate that it's more likely than not the guy is guilty of
some crime.
Evidence-based policing can be applied to just about any aspect of policing.
Any policy, program, or other facet of the agency's work.
If there's an evidence-based to support or refute something, we should pay attention.
The notion of tradition or, quote, the way we've always done it, unquote, is akin to
using leeches in a modern world.
Today we're going to discuss hotspot policing.
If you listened to the very first episode of this podcast, you already know that hotspot
policing and the copper curve caused me to start podcasting in the first place.
Joining us today is a relatively newly minted professor of criminal justice at Michigan
State University, Brandon Turchin.
Brandon finished his PhD at Rutgers University not quite two years ago, and he has already
established a pretty impressive publication record with some of the demigods in the field.
Welcome, Brandon.
Thank you for having me.
I'm glad you could be here today.
This is great.
We've been planning to talk about this for a while, and I'm glad we got around to it.
Now, when I went to graduate school, I'd been in policing for a few years, you know, years
before that.
I knew that I wanted to study the police.
I had an internship with the state evaluating domestic violence, arrest laws in the state
and just went with the flow and did my dissertation studies in this area, how officers handle
domestic violence.
It was my first choice, but it was OK.
I liked it.
What time I moved into different areas of policing that were more interested to me is
hotspot policing, something that you had an interest in prior to graduate school, or did
you kind of fall into it?
I wouldn't say I entered graduate school specifically interested in hotspots policing at that moment,
but I did enter with kind of this broader interest in policing and specifically their
role in crime prevention strategies.
Then as I had the opportunity to get involved in different projects, inevitably kind of
my interest areas narrowed.
One of the kind of key factors that kind of helped me develop further interest in hotspots
policing was a project I got to work on with colleagues David Weisberg, Anthony Braga,
Cody Tellup and some folks from the Police Foundation, which is kind of a multi-site
procedural justice hotspots experiment.
So what was unique with this particular study was it was a hotspot study, but it also really
emphasized procedural justice, kind of this idea of fairness and objectivity in interactions
with the public.
And we found that not only was procedural justice effective within the context of reducing
crime and high crime areas, it was more effective than just standard hotspots policing.
So still comparing it to a concerted effort at directing additional resources and so
forth towards these high crime areas, emphasizing kind of how it is that police interacted,
performed better or reduce even more crime than kind of just the regular hotspots approach.
So kind of this study and kind of some other experiences really kind of had me start thinking
about areas where police can kind of be, you know, the police activities can kind of be
a point of potential consensus with the public.
So things like reducing violent crime and really kind of stressing not only just how
do we minimize unintended harms associated with policing, but how can police reduce crime
in a way that also kind of promotes kind of more positive perceptions of law enforcement overall.
OK, so the way you're describing it, I'm reminded of the frosting on a cake.
The procedural justice is the frosting.
So I want to talk about the cake a little bit more.
I suspect that a lot of people that are listening already have a general idea of what hotspot
policing is. But for the benefit of those who might not, can you give us an idea about
what that is? Absolutely.
So hotspots policing is at its core kind of this place based study, really focusing
police resources on areas where crime is most concentrated.
So kind of this underlying premise is that crime is not evenly distributed across space.
I'm sure to the surprise of probably no one listening to this podcast, everybody knows
that, again, there's some parts of the city that have reputation or a pattern of more
crime than others. But then even as we go from kind of the citywide level and start
kind of narrowing kind of the smaller geographic areas, whether it's districts or a
neighborhood, that even when in these smaller geographic units, crime isn't evenly
distributed. But kind of as we shift towards these smaller aerial units, we begin getting
closer to kind of what we conceive of as a hotspot.
And we kind of define hotspot as kind of this microgeographic area.
It could be a single address, it could be an apartment complex, a street segment, a
collection of a couple of street blocks in all really small geographic areas.
Sure, officers listening to the podcast now can probably think of a particular house or
in a particular apartment that consistently called to all the time, always kind of a
problematic location. These are kind of examples of what we're talking about with
hotspots. What's kind of really striking and remarkable is the, you know, extreme
concentration of crime that is observed from city to city.
So, yes, all cities are unique in their own ways, but particularly, you know, interesting
research by David Weisberg in this kind of law of crime concentration, he found looking
at across eight cities that roughly half of all crime that occurred in the city occurred
at just five percent of street segments in those cities.
Right. And that roughly 25 percent of all crime in the city occurred at just one to
one and a half percent of street segments.
So this extreme concentration consistently observed city to city, that type of data
analysis paired with kind of input from officers really relying on their expertise to
really work in tandem with the kind of more formal data analysis really sets you up to
be able to conduct a strong hotspots policing intervention.
And so kind of identifying these kind of areas where crimes disproportionately
concentrated allows police to then direct finite resources to those areas to really
kind of maximize resources and kind of generate efficient reductions in violence.
Right. And that's that's something important these days when we keep hearing about
agencies having problems with recruiting and retention.
You've got to maximize the efficiency of the officers rather than having them wander
around the entire city in some places that will never need them.
And even people will make the argument, well, they need to drive by because people will
see them. There's actually some research that says, well, most people aren't looking at
the street to see the cop in the first place.
And I live outside north of Buffalo, and so I've been shoveling in the snow quite
frequently. And lo and behold, a cop happened to drive by in my neighborhood is one of
the safer neighborhoods in the entire county.
But the other point you're getting at earlier, as you were saying, is those narrow
focused street segments or intersections.
When I was when I worked years ago, I was training in one officer said this area, you
know, this is this is a crappy area, a neighborhood.
Well, I got his point and he wasn't being derogatory.
He was explaining to me that this was one of the hotspots.
But the idea of the entire neighborhood is actually not they're not accurate.
It's usually a small concentration of, as you said, just a few street segments that
they have the if some people will say the worst of the worst.
Now, there have been dozens of studies into hotspots and dozens is probably even
even very conservative.
So you did a systematic review of the particular topic.
What's what's the value or relevance for police from such a broad perspective rather
than, you know, as you say, the individuals, Seattle or Washington, D.C.
or Detroit or Philadelphia?
What's the what's the advantage for police to look at something you just wrote about,
which is broad?
So especially nowadays, it's like trying to, you know, if you try to find a TV show
to watch across all the apps, there's just so much information out there.
There's so many different outlets, a similar thing with research and kind of
evaluations of police interventions.
So, you know, so much information, so many different outlets, it can be daunting
for someone even incredibly motivated as an individual to try and seek out the
latest evidence based strategy, just how do you know, just finding some of the
stuff, you know, can be challenging in the first place.
So with our systematic review, what we're really trying to do is to make it easier
for both practitioners and academics by understanding kind of existing research
and recent trends and kind of cutting edge developments through kind of
identifying evaluations of hotspots policing in peer reviewed journals,
published reports, unpublished reports in all the different outlets, bring it all
together, kind of into one place.
Once we kind of have all these evaluations, we really emphasize quality
evaluations, so studies that include a pre-intervention and post-intervention
comparison, as well as some other area that doesn't receive this hotspots
treatment. So a comparable kind of comparison group that kind of receives
what we would call like a business as usual policing.
So for countless reasons, you know, police can't just stop responding to
crime as it happens because, you know, academics want to do a study, right?
That's not feasible. So when we're talking to kind of this comparison group,
it's kind of what normal level police is, you know, no special attention, but just
existing kind of levels. So we can identify all these studies, bring them
together in one place, try to synthesize it and be able to kind of make kind of
broader claims about across, you know, all these different evaluations and
really try to make it more easily digestible for police to really take and
use and inform their decisions when kind of just deploying officers.
So we kind of, you know, with my colleagues, Anthony Braga, David
Haro, Andrew Papacristos, we try to kind of update this hotspots policing
review every five to seven years or so to be able to stay on top of any
late, you know, recent developments within the field.
So the current review that we're talking about today now captures over
30 years of research into hotspots policing and violence.
So really, it's growing kind of exponentially over time within kind of
each update to the review.
Right. And when I was reading your article, I thought to myself, this would
be the perfect journal article to give to graduate students.
OK, here's one single article on hotspots, which condenses, as you just
said, 30 years of information into, you know, 25 or 30 pages rather than have
them read 20 different articles and then try to synthesize it themselves.
So that's it's a benefit for students and, you know, being honest, it's a
beefy endeavor. It's a lot of time to kind of really search through everything,
look through each study individually, compile it and synthesize it.
But again, our hope, it really is that is of utility again, not just for an
academic exercise, but really to help inform police policy as well.
Great. A lot of the research indicates that hotspots, let's see.
Well, let me put it this way.
Over time, there's a buildup of research that tends to provide a consensus view
of a topic, whatever the topic is, whether it's the research into community
policing, but again, 30 or 40 years of that, there's now a larger body of
research into officer involved shootings.
What's the consensus then on hotspots?
Essentially, you know, does this policing type of policing work, even if
doesn't include the procedural justice angle?
You know, how frequently should officers be out there?
What's the optimum number?
Is there a potential for overkill by saturating a neighborhood?
Yeah, so with our review, we, you know, search the literature.
We identified 32 studies that included 38 tests of hotspots police.
So some studies might include, you know, test one or two different strategies
within the context of hotspots policing.
So we found 38 tests, hotspots policing that included at least
one violence related outcome.
When we brought all these studies together, kind of standardize all the effects.
We found that overall hotspots policing was associated with a 24% decrease in
violent crime compared to, again, this business as usual, you know, condition.
So what was normally happening already.
But we also found, so this overall 24% reduction in violence, we also found
significant reductions starting to look at specific individual violence outcomes.
So the largest reduction was a 31% decrease for robbery.
We were just under a 24% decrease in assault in a 16% decrease
in violent firearm offenses.
So all favoring this kind of hotspots policing approach over a existing
normal level of attention kind of strategy, because our focus is kind of
synthesizing this kind of broader literature.
We didn't get into the nitty gritty of number of officers within kind of each
study as the wide variability from study to study or the length of patrols.
But we did consider overall types of strategies implemented within the
context of hotspots policing.
So we grouped things into two different types of hotspots policing.
One we kind of refer to as this kind of traditional hotspots model that
emphasizes things, you know, often thought about like increased patrol or
in increased vehicle patrol, increased foot patrol, increased enforcement
activity, whether it's stop and frisk, whether it's increased arrest, kind of
this more enforcement or traditional model.
The other category of hotspots policing activity we identified was more
problem oriented policing.
So with that, really taking steps to conduct an analysis, trying to identify
the underlying problem that's driving persistent crime at these particular
locations, this could involve working with kind of when I think of as place
managers, so maybe it's a business owner, staff at a recreation center, those
kind of more public presence entities, or it could be something like partnering
with kind of influential members in the community, whether it's parents or
clergy to kind of help shape kind of this underlying behavior, if it makes
sense, you know, use offenders or depending on who it is suspected of
committing the crime, it could also involve maybe changing the physical
environment, a wide range of activities that was under this kind of problem on
oriented policing umbrella.
But again, it's really trying to solve the underlying problem.
So we took this into account in our review that we're talking about here and
found that this traditional approach to hotspots policing, still effective, it
resulted in a significant 16% decrease over just the normal business as usual
approach, but by comparison, problem oriented policing generated a 35%
decrease in overall violence.
So 35% decrease with POP versus 16% decrease with traditional tactics, but
we kind of, you know, just reflects, you know, quickly thinking back on it, you
know, in this current context, it kind of makes a bit of sense that POP might
create a greater reduction in violence, because it's taking the extra step to
address the underlying problems associated with the persistent crime.
So whereas the traditional strategies, effective again, but often have
required that visible police presence to create a deterrent effect that it may
not be as influential on behavior when police, you know, move on to somewhere
else.
So kind of addressing the underlying conditions can kind of substantially
improve reductions in violence.
So what I'm hearing is a conversation about hotspot policing requires officers
to not just go there, get out of their car with their lights on, it requires
engagement and that that's your, your bottom line hotspot policing.
So you're suggesting some of the studies say that if you go that extra mile, and
I hesitate to say it that way, but that's the only thing that comes to mind, kind
of like with the procedural justice, if you put a little frosting on the cake,
the cake is good.
It's going to get you where you want to go.
It's what was it?
16% and that's, that's not the shake stick at, and so doing these extra, extra
efforts in either procedural justice or, or problem oriented policing gets you
more, which is really, really interesting to hear.
But now I'm going to, I'm going to challenge you just a little bit.
And if you don't have an answer for this, this is fine.
Cause I know this is not what you studied, but, um, what some of the research
shows is that, uh, hotspots are persistent, uh, some lasting decades.
You mentioned this, I think in your intro on page one, that there are some places
that just, they've been like this forever.
Now, a few years ago, I had a graduate student ask me some, something to the
effect of if hotspots are so persistent, can we say that hotspot patrols are
really effective that basically what she was trying to get at was these places
seem to be something there are conditions that are beyond what the police can
handle if, if she'd have asked you that question, how would have you, how, how
would you have answered her?
Yeah.
I mean, there's no doubt that there are places, uh, in any city that might
have this kind of historically persistent high crime, um, experience.
But I think there's a kind of a couple important things to keep in mind when,
when thinking about this issue, one being again, kind of talking about, so
again, maybe a department has tried hotspots police in the past, but kind
of what we just said, if it was just maybe relied on that traditional approach
without addressing the underlying conditions, um, it may not necessarily
create as kind of sustainable change, right?
Maybe that problem, um, re-emerges.
Second, it's important to recognize that maybe not all police departments have
the capacity to engage in these proactive policing efforts.
If a department's seriously understaffed or if they're constantly, you know,
stacked, you know, several calls deep that they're trying to respond to and
catch up, that's a lot.
I mean, and so the, the idea of trying to add something additional to it in
the form of hotspots police, even in a traditional and for, you know, increased
police presence sense might be very, really difficult, but I think the other
thing to think about with the idea of trying to reverse these kind of long
term persistent crime hotspots is that it may require again, forming key
partnerships with community, you know, people and entities that are present
and influential in that area in forming these types of relationships, isn't
something that happens overnight.
It takes a long time for these relationships to develop, build trust
that this it's a two way exchange, right?
It's not just police asking for something.
It's being receptive of what the public prioritizes there as well.
Um, and that also again, requires commitment for department leadership.
So inevitably within police departments, turnover is the nature of the animal,
right?
That, um, turnover can change things, right?
People change their assignments.
Well, then all of a sudden the new officer has to begin kind of learning
that, you know, rebuilding those relationships as they're transferred in
and out of different assignments.
So it takes a kind of a lot of time to build a relationship that may set up to
kind of more long term, um, crime prevention efforts, but I think it's
important to highlight that even if a department doesn't necessarily have the
capacity to conduct a sophisticated problem oriented analysis, or problem
analysis to lead into a problem or in policing intervention, or kind of engage
in these long term relationship building efforts that even in kind of the short
term, maybe traditional hotspots policing interventions, reductions and
violence still matter, even if the effects are short term or the problem
re-emerges six months or a year down the line, a short term decrease in violence
still means at minimum, a temporary relief for the people living in these
areas that have kind of had to endure these long, you know, years and years,
kind of living in a violent environment.
Short term decrease in violence means fewer victims and ultimately
again, fewer lives lost.
So it's, you know, minimal as maybe an additional effort, you know, might take
the form of, it still has the opportunity to kind of have a meaningful effect.
Okay.
Now just, I think a little bit beyond what you studied, but you know, you've
done a lot of the research and read a lot of the articles 30 years worth.
And so your, your, your systematic review might not have included what I'm about
to ask, but I'm, I suspect you understand the questions you'll, you'll know them
anyway.
Wouldn't hotspot patrols, officers spending 20 minutes, 15 minutes in an
area, doesn't that just push the problem?
They got to go someplace else.
The idea of what we can refer to me as spatial displacement or getting crime
simply moving around the corner has long been kind of a common critique of hotspots
policing or other place-based strategies.
But overall research, I think seems to suggest that kind of concerns over this
displacing of crime are generally overstated.
Yes, it occurs, but overall kind of collectively overstated.
So a couple, a couple of things to just think about within this context.
First, if displacement occurs, it's incredibly a rare, it's incredibly rare
that it occurs in total.
And by that, I mean, if police prevent 10 crimes on one street segment, it's
unlikely that the offender goes one block over and commits 10 crimes.
If they go one block over, it's more likely they're going to commit fewer
crimes than that.
Cause again, there's a reason why offenders are operating in the area that
they do is cause there's something about that environment is inviting to them.
So they could have already chosen to go one block over, but there's something
about the area that's being targeted that is more appealing for them.
Right?
So it's again, when displacement occurs, it's unlikely to occur at the same rate.
The second important issue to kind of keep in mind here is what oftentimes
occur in contrast to a displacing of crime is what we call like a diffusion
of benefits or a spillover effect whereby areas that are adjacent to these
targeted hotspots, they don't receive treatment, but they benefit from the
treatment that's occurring elsewhere.
And they get the crime, you know, reduction in crime benefits, despite
having places that needed to expend the additional resources to
target even bigger areas.
So in our review, we identified 14 tests of hotspots policing that did consider
this idea of displacement or spillover effects in general, we found that
roughly evenly, number of studies maybe have a little bit of suggesting
displacement, but never significant, similar to diffusion, a little bit
leaning towards diffusion, but not a significant difference.
So nothing more than what we would expect within chance.
But looking at these 14 tests overall, we found that hotspots policing was not
associated with either displacement or diffusion of benefits for violence.
So while there were no positive spillover effects, we weren't kind of
getting that little bit of extra benefit.
It also is that hotspots policing didn't worsen violence in areas nearby.
You know, it's interesting the way you phrased it earlier, there's something
inviting, you use the word inviting.
And I was talking to a colleague some time ago and they had a psychology
background and they said something about even bad guys have a comfort zone.
It was just really, you know, you don't realize that when I drive to work,
I know exactly where I'm going.
I can barely tell you the names of the streets.
I just do it, you know, routinely.
I'm comfortable.
I like it.
If for some reason the road was blocked because of the snow in this area.
Well, I know how to get around that.
That's not a big deal, but the same mindset would, would apply to some people
who are again, considered the bad guy.
They have a comfort zone that this is where I like being.
And when they're outside that zone, it gets a little, gets a little, they get
a little nervous about it and they're less comfortable, they're less willing
to commit some sort of crime.
Absolutely.
Now, can you speak to implementation?
And we all know that street cops, again, with the training and the younger
officers, some of the, some of the consistent patterns I'm seeing in some
of the people I'm talking to, depending on the topic is younger officers.
There's a certain mindset that they have, the go-getters.
So we are, we know that this is not the most interesting gig to sit down
someplace for 15 minutes, get out of the car and have a conversation.
So is, can you talk to the implementation of hotspot policing?
Yeah, so first recognize that not every police department in the country has
a crime analysis unit or a crime analyst that can do kind of this in-depth
problem analysis of every single hotspot on, in a given city, but, you know,
important also to keep in mind that evidence shows that even shallow
problem solving can generate kind of meaningful reductions in crime.
And by kind of what we refer to as shallow problem solving, it could be
kind of a surface level as maybe looking at crime patterns by day of the week
or time of day, and could even couple it with those maybe traditional approaches
such as maybe just increasing patrols.
So maybe a department sees that there's a, notice a spike in teens fighting
or engaging, you know, behaving disorderly in a park after school.
Being kind of mindful of the patterns and calls for service, crime incidents,
you maybe be able to implement a response where maybe two officers for two hours
walk this park right before school lets out or afterwards, right?
So it doesn't have to be, you know, overly complex.
Not everything has to be, you know, drawn out, undercover investigations.
It doesn't have to be a very flashy, showy raid or crackdown.
Hotspots policing can be kind of much smaller and manageable.
And well, you know, for the individual officer that these kind of crime
prevention efforts may not, you know, you may not feel the gains immediately, right?
But with persistence and kind of working as a team with fellow officers,
kind of consistently putting in the work can again really end up leading to,
again, this build up into reducing violence overall.
And again, at its core, you know, saving lives and kind of preventing serious harm
from individuals. So again, not an overnight thing, but again,
that persistence can can have tangible effects. Right.
I think it's also a component that officers need to be aware of if they're not already.
And a lot of them probably already are that.
And I think voice wrote about this within the past two years.
He did some research in Baltimore.
And I don't recall the name of the article off the top of my head in this co-author.
But basically, they said that not every every hotspot is full of hot people.
So using numbers now, he didn't use numbers.
His was a qualitative approach, was like, if you've got 100 people living in this
neighborhood, that's a hotspot.
So you got 10 or 20 houses on that particular block and X number of people just using
a hundred that it's only about 10 of them that are the actual hot people that are
causing the other people are trying to cut the grass, walk the dog, shovel the snow,
you know, just just get by.
And so if we can get that through to some of the officers that might not appreciate
the fact that these people, they're just trying to live their lives and they're kind
of stuck in these neighborhoods that they don't think are all that bad except for
that those couple of jerks down the street.
So having conversations with those people about it doesn't even matter the
weather, the bills game.
We're Buffalo Bills fans up here in Buffalo.
So it was and we just it's demoralizing every year so you can commiserate with with
people that probably feel the same way.
But when you have those conversations with people who are, like I said, just trying to
get along, not the hot people, those are usually kind of pleasant conversations.
And absolutely. So something as simple as they have, you know, an officer has 15
minutes to spare.
That may not seem like a lot, but within that, they can still do things to have an
effect. So say they have a report to fill out, inevitably officers have reports to
fill out. If they're able to do it from their cruiser, they could drive over to one
of the hospitals, park, just work on the paperwork within the car.
They're still at that time, you know, simultaneously getting work done that they
have to do anyways.
Right. But they're also providing a visible police presence, which we know can at
least have a deterrent effect in that capacity.
But, you know, if they're able to kind of get out of the car, like you said, talk,
talk about the bills. I'm a Browns fan, so that's even worse right now.
So we won't spend too much time on that.
But if they're able to get out of the car, talk about the bills, just those kind of
casual conversations again, may not seem like much, but consistently doing that,
you start building relationships and having that kind of getting out of the
cruiser, talking to folks, doing that frequently, it also makes you as an
officer more approachable from the public standpoint.
So maybe it is that they come and tell you about, OK, we had, you know, there's
this problem going on.
Are you able to do something about it?
Or maybe they have information they can share about an incident that just occurred
and could help guide an investigation and result in a clearance.
So it's again, not every time you get out, you're going to have that type of
reaction, but again, being consistent in the approach, kind of increase the
accessibility kind of benefits otherwise.
Great. And we only have a couple of minutes left, so I'd like you to address
some of the implications for police practice.
I mean, you've kind of hit on some of these things already, but, you know, the
implications for the police, the personnel, the leaders.
So I think first, I'm sure everyone listening, you know, probably sitting in
different positions, whether, you know, command, patrol officers, right, different
roles, but say first, just kind of take stock of, you know, current efforts in
capacity. So think about maybe what has been tried in the past as a hotspot
strategy or where it was targeted, what's currently going on, what resources are
flexible that maybe could be moved around to have kind of at least short term
increase and maybe targeting hotspot areas.
So really kind of taking stock of, you know, current efforts in current available
resources and understanding resources are finite, it's that work within your own
capacity as a police department.
And, you know, it may seem daunting at first, but if you start small, it could
help to really kind of build momentum and kind of build on, allow you to build on
successes. So you may not have the capacity as a department to immediately
target 10 hotspots overnight, but maybe you can prioritize one or two and really
kind of focus time and effort in those areas that could generate reductions in
violence, which benefit not only the people living there, but it could kind of
show the capability of you as a department that you could maybe either
increase buy-in from other personnel within the department, helps gain
support from police leaders, or maybe it's even a city council, which could lead to
maybe more resources and more support to expand the number of hotspots being
targeted, or it may allow you those additional resources to shift from maybe a
traditional hotspots model of just increased patrol to kind of the more time
intensive problem-organized policing model and kind of, you know, allow more
kind of relationship building, kind of shift towards maybe a more long-term
reduction in violence there.
So again, yeah, massive reductions don't happen overnight, but kind of being, you
know, taking the time, being patient, being self-reflexive, kind of know, okay,
think about, okay, what's working?
What are some things that might be able to improve as you're kind of carrying
this out?
But again, at the end, again, it's a team effort, but again, can have a
meaningful effect on violence.
Well, that's great information, Brandon.
I really appreciate your time.
Thanks very much for spending it here at the podcast.
All right, thank you.
You have a great day.
That's it for this episode of the Police In-Service Training Podcast.
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