Deterrence, Police and Criminal Opportunities

• In Event: Police and Crime Prevention

Abstract

How can police reduce crime but not increase imprisonment? In this presentation we join three distinct literatures on crime control—the deterrence literature, the policing literature as it relates to crime control, and the environmental criminology and opportunity/situational crime prevention literature. Based on empirical findings and theory from these literatures we pose a mathematical model of the distribution of criminal opportunities and of offender decision making on which of those opportunities to victimize. Criminal opportunities are characterized in terms of the risk of apprehension that attends their victimization. Our primary focus is on how police may affect the distribution of criminal opportunities that are attractive to would-be offenders. We demonstrate that the model has important implications for the efficiency and effectiveness of police deployment strategies such as hot spots policing, random patrol, and problem oriented policing. The theoretical structure also makes clear why the clearance rate is a fundamentally flawed metric of police performance.

Authors

• Daniel Nagin, Carnegie Mellon University

• Robert Solow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Cynthia Lum, George Mason University