Partnerships between police and academics have recently become much more collaborative and focused on working together in addressing crime. In contrast to more traditional academic-police research partnerships, embedding a criminologist within a police department involves taking the step from external partner to internal resource.
Embedded criminologists maintain their scientific objectivity and independence in carrying out scientific inquiries within police departments. However, an embedded criminologist also functions as an important part of the police organization by collaborating on the development of programs through crime-problem analysis and evaluation research and by interjecting scientific evidence into policy conversations to guide police executive decision making.
In this article, I briefly summarize my work as an embedded criminologist in the Boston Police Department (BPD) during the tenure of former Commissioner Edward F. Davis between 2007 and 2013.
The Boston experience
In December 2006, Davis was sworn in by Mayor Thomas M. Menino as the BPD Commissioner. After experiencing dramatic decreases in violent crime over the course of the 1990s, Boston experienced a resurgence of serious violence during the early to mid-2000s, peaking at 7,533 violent index crimes in 2006.
Most concerning was an increase in assaultive street violence, especially assaults committed with guns. The yearly number of fatal and non-fatal shootings increased 133 per cent from 162 in 2000 to 377 in 2006.
During the first months of his tenure as commissioner, Davis appointed me as his chief policy advisor and assigned me to work with the BPD on a set of strategies that would better position the department to manage the small number of places and small number of people generating the bulk of the violence in Boston.
Controlling violent crime hot spots
Commissioner Davis implemented the Safe Street Teams (SST) hot spots policing strategy in January 2007. Using computerized mapping technology and violent index crime data for the 2006 calendar year, I worked with the BPD Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) to identify 13 violent crime hot spot areas to receive the SST program.
A deputy superintendent was assigned to oversee the SST initiative and, in each violent crime hot spot, a team of one sergeant and six patrol officers were permanently assigned to implement community problem-solving actions.
As the program was implemented, the BPD wanted to make certain that the SST areas were indeed centered on some of the most persistently violent places in Boston. Long-term investments of scarce police resources in violent crime hot spots would make little sense if the location of these hot spots shifted year to year irrespective of police activities.
As such, we analyzed the concentration and stability of violent crime in specific hot spot locations over time in Boston. The purpose of this exercise was to ensure that the SSTs were appropriately assigned to those locations that consistently generated repeated violent crime incidents over a longer time period.
The analysis uncovered remarkable stability in violent crime trends at specific street block faces and intersections. With regard to robbery, from 1980 to 2008, about one per cent of street block faces and eight per cent of intersections were responsible for nearly 50 per cent of all commercial robberies and 66 per cent of all street robberies.
The story was much the same for gun violence, as only five per cent of street block faces and intersections experienced 74 per cent of the gun violence in this same time period. Nearly 89 per cent of the street block faces and intersections in the city did not experience a single shooting event during this 29-year time period. Amazingly, the worst 60 street block faces and intersections in Boston experienced more than 1,000 shootings between 1980 and 2008.
While the analysis confirmed that SST officers were allocated to persistently violent locations, this exercise also revealed that there were many violent places in Boston that weren't covered by the SST program. As such, statistical matching techniques were used to identify similarly violent comparison street intersections and block faces for inclusion in a rigorous quasi-experimental research design.
The evaluation revealed that the SST program was associated with a statistically significant 17 per cent reduction in violent crimes in the program areas relative to the comparison areas. A subsequent analysis of locations surrounding the program and comparison areas revealed no evidence of significant violent crime displacement. In other words, violent crime didn't simply move around the corner due to focused police attention in the hot spot areas.
Reducing gang violence
Despite international acclaim, the BPD discontinued the well-known Operation Ceasefire-focused deterrence strategy as its primary response to outbreaks of gang violence in January 2000. Given the concerning resurgence of gang-related shootings in Boston, Davis announced soon after his appointment that Operation Ceasefire would once again be the BPD's main response to outbreaks of serious gang violence. As was the case in the 1990s, I once again became a member of the Ceasefire working group and my first contribution was to complete a fresh problem analysis of homicides and gang-involved shootings in Boston.
The problem analysis research revealed that the resurgence in gun violence during the 2000s was linked to the same underlying gang dynamics as the 1990s. In 2006, slightly more than one per cent of the city youth between the ages of 14 and 24 participated in 65 street gangs that were active in violence.
However, street gang violence generated more than half of total homicides and gang members were involved in nearly three-quarters of non-fatal shootings as victims. The gun violence offenders and victims were often very well known to the criminal justice system with long criminal histories and many being under probation and/or parole supervision.
Focused deterrence strategies honour core deterrence ideas, such as increased risks faced by offenders, while finding new and creative ways of deploying traditional and non-traditional law enforcement tools to do so, such as communicating incentives and disincentives directly to targeted offenders. Research products that document these high-risk social networks and the violent behaviours of particular groups over time are very valuable in ensuring that these strategies are sustained in particular jurisdictions.
Working with the BRIC, we developed gang shooting scorecards to help guide Ceasefire implementation. In its most basic form, shooting scorecards are simply rank-ordered frequencies of the criminal groups that commit the highest number of shootings and experience the greatest number of shooting victimizations during a specific time period.
Shooting scorecards, especially when supported by a management accountability system (in this case, the Ceasefire working group meetings and broader Compstat sessions), can be very helpful in ensuring that the groups most active in gun violence, and the groups that offend after the deterrence message has been delivered, receive the enforcement attention they merit.
Scorecards keep the operational partners focused on risky groups over time and maintain the implementation of the focused deterrence strategy as a whole. Gang shooting scorecard data was then used to conduct a rigorous quasi-experimental evaluation that revealed the re-invigorated Ceasefire focused deterrence strategy generated a 31 per cent reduction in shootings involving targeted gangs relative to shootings involving similarly violent non-targeted gangs.
Conclusion
The Boston experience suggests that police departments do benefit in tangible ways by adding criminologists to their staffs. The idea of embedding a criminologist inside of a police department to work alongside practitioners on particular program initiatives and as a general resource for a wide range of issues represents an evolution from traditional academic-police research partnerships that are usually limited to very specific projects and typically last for very short time periods.
Working in close partnership with sworn and civilian staff, embedded criminologists can enhance the capacity of police departments to understand the nature of ongoing crime problems and develop innovative programs to prevent these problems from recurring.
It's important to note here that embedding a criminologist is not a silver bullet that, by itself, improves the multifaceted challenges faced by police departments on an ongoing basis. Rather, inviting a criminologist to work on the inside of a police department in a stable position enhances the capacity of the agency to understand and address these challenges by virtue of adding a skill set not held by other police staff.
Anthony A. Braga is the Don M. Gottfredson professor of evidence-based criminology in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and a senior research fellow in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard University.