Cities and Policing for Crime Prevention: Toward a New Urban Agenda

• In Event: Crime Prevention for Social Impact and Social Justice III

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, growing concern has emerged over a purported link between proactive policing to control crime and unfair, biased, and abusive policing approaches. Overly aggressive and indiscriminate policing programs run the risk of driving a wedge between police and the communities they serve, with residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods feeling less like partners and more like targets. With a special focus on cities, this paper advances a conceptual framework on how police can prevent crime without producing unintended harms to urban communities by being focused on risky people and places, respecting individual rights and dignity, and embracing community problem solving principles. A focus on identifying the causes of crime in high-risk places and holding high-rate offenders in these locations accountable avoids the problem of overly broad policing tactics that generate too many false positives, and helps address the desire of residents in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods to receive a police response that is effective and unbiased. Policing that is more geographically focused on places and those individuals that create the most harm in communities can help address poor police services, a longstanding problem faced by the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Authors

• John M. MacDonald, University of Pennsylvania

• Anthony A. Braga, University of Pennsylvania

• Aaron Chalfin, University of Pennsylvania