Summary: The Philadelphia Foot Patrol

Patrol Studies Summaries: The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment (2009)and Atlantic City, New Jersey, Cooperative Policing Partnership (1994)
Jasmine Glenn
American InterContinental University

Abstract
Police Patrol is the backbone of most police departments .On patrol, a police officer makes rounds in a specific area called a beat. Officers usually ride in cars but can sometimes be seen on foot. Previous studies of foot patrol indicate that these patrols are costly and do not reduce crime. They do, however, make citizens less fearful of crime and improve citizen attitudes toward the police. This assignment explores summaries two police patrol studies designed to measure the impact routine patrol had on the number of crimes committed
in their areas on patrol. What is a patrol study? A police patrol study is an experiment where police presence is increased or decreased. This is done to determine a correlation between police presence and crime.

The average police patrol has three parts: answering calls, maintaining a police presence to deter crime, and looking into suspicious activities.
Preventive patrol is the most controversial. It is thought that with seeing police cars cruising randomly through city street will create the feeling that the police are everywhere and therefore reduce the crime in that area. The first case study mentioned is a prime example of preventive police patrol. The Philadelphia Police Department and researchers in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University collaborated for a study involving over 200 police officers on foot beats around some of the city’s most violent corners. In the Philadelphia Police Department invited academic researchers to worked together to plan the Philadelphia Foot Patrol. With the resources to patrol 60 locations, researchers identified the highest violent crime corners in the city, using crime statistics from 2006 to 2008. Police commanders designed 120 foot patrol areas around these corners, and assign pairs of foot patrols in these target area. Officers generally patrolled in pairs with two pairs assigned to each foot patrol. They worked from Tuesday morning to Saturday night in two shifts (10am to 6pm, 6pm to
2am).
Results:
After three months of increased police foot patrol violent crime decreased 23%, drug‐detection increased 15% and arrests increased 13%.

Although foot patrol can help decreased crime, there must be other way to make crime prevention more effective. In 1989 the Baltimore police department combined police foot patrol in a form of community policing call “ombudsman policing”. Ombudsman policing is a type of policing that involves a foot patrol officer asking the people that live within his beat about what is the most serious problems occurring in their area and then devising a plan to address and solve those problems. They conducted these experiments in two neighborhoods in Baltimore, one in southeast Baltimore, the other in northwest Baltimore, three areas within both neighborhoods were assigned to received foot patrol, ombudsman policing, or nothing.
Results:
In Southeast Baltimore foot patrol had no effect in the neighborhoods while ombudsman policing led increased feelings of safety. But in Northern Baltimore neither foot patrol nor ombudsman had had the effect they had in the southeast.