Public Participation-Based Process for Developing a Traffic Violations Enforcement Program among Minority Communities

• In Event: Varieties of Policing Research

Abstract

In many countries, non-dominant minorities are over-represented in risky and delinquent behavior compared to the majority group. This is also true in Israel, where studies indicate that Israeli Arabs – a non-dominant minority in Israel – are over-involved in road traffic crashes and violations in relation to their size in the population and distance travelled. The current study develops and empirically tests an innovative public participation process aimed at designing a traffic violations enforcement program for Israeli Arab localities. This process draws on the principles of public participation, problem-oriented policing, and hot-spot policing, along with the social resistance framework and the procedural justice model. Participants in the experimental localities identified “soft” hot spots for traffic violations and designed an enforcement program to deal with them. This enforcement program was then implemented by the Israeli police for about five months. The intervention was evaluated through a quasi-experiment using before-and-after comparisons in four randomly selected localities – two experimental and two matched control localities. More than 12,000 systematic field observations provide clear evidence that the intervention – i.e., the public participation process followed by implementation of the designed enforcement program – significantly reduced traffic violations in the experimental localities.

Author

• Roni Factor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem