Does Hot Spots Policing Inevitably Lead to Unfair and Abusive Police Practices, or Can We Maximize Both Fairness and Effectiveness in the New Proactive Policing?

Hot spots policing has emerged as one of the most important and widely diffused of what are sometimes termed the “new policing” strategies. Such strategies were developed in response to a critique of police effectiveness in preventing crime that developed in the late 20th century. While hot spots policing strategies have been shown to be effective in preventing crime, a narrative is developing that links hot spots policing, as well as other new policing strategies focused on crime control, to unfair and brutal police practices. In this chapter, I examine this growing narrative both to challenge some of its assumptions and to create a counternarrative about how we can integrate hot spots policing with approaches that encourage positive evaluations of police legitimacy. After reviewing the development of hot spots policing, I show that there is little evidence that it leads to biased or abusive policing, and indeed that the approach more generally increases the focus of crime prevention and thus should reduce the degree to which police intervene in the lives of citizens across communities. At the same time, using stop, question, and frisks in New York City as an example, I illustrate that aggressive policing strategies likely to lead to negative community responses can be focused on hot spots. In concluding, I argue that we can maximize both crime control and citizen evaluations of police legitimacy in the context of hot spots policing, and I provide two examples of ongoing programs that attempt to achieve both of these goals.