The Dallas patrol management experiment: can AVL technologies be used to harness unallocated patrol time for crime prevention?

Objectives: To examine whether information on where the police patrol drawn from automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems can be used to increase the amount of directed patrol time at high-crime police beats and crime hot spots, and whether such increases would lead to reductions in crime. Methods: In an experimental study with a block-randomized design, 232 police beats were randomly allocated to an experimental or control condition. In the experimental condition, the police commanders knew the amount of time that police spent in beats and crime hot spots. This information was not provided to commanders in the control condition. Over a 13-week period, assigned patrol time, unallocated patrol time, total patrol time, and crime were tracked at both police beats and crime hot spots (N = 1006). Results: Knowledge of where police officers patrolled did not affect directed patrol at the beat level. At the hot spots level, the treatment group experienced meaningful increases in unallocated patrol time and total patrol time, and a decrease in crime. Conclusions: A key finding of the study is that information generated from AVL can be used to increase directed patrol time at crime hot spots, and that these increased levels of patrol will lead to reductions in crime. At the same time, our study points to the fact that only a small proportion of unallocated time in Dallas is actually focused on hot spots policing. We suggest that this is the reason why crime went down significantly at the hot spots but not in beats overall in Dallas.