Public Policy Hotspot

What It Is

The policy issue at hand is hot spot policing. Hot spot policing is a law enforcement strategy that focuses limited police resources on street corners, alleys, or other places in a neighborhood where crime is particularly prevalent. It is supposed to help accomplish law enforcement's ability to target areas that have much more crime and try to prevent the crime from happening. Crime has been a problem in communities for decades. The rate of crimes has fluctuated so much during this time period that the police feel that something more what is currently in place needs to be done in order to prevent it from continuing to happen.

Pros and Cons

In the first article, Mastrofski, Weisburd, & Braga argue that hot spot policing can reduce crime and are completely for the policy to be in place. "We argue that the available scientific evidence is sufficiently strong and supportive to justify the initiation of a major program of development and evaluation...we anticipate that its adoption would fundamentally restructure urban policing". They provide a well argued, scientific, and logical approach to implementing this policy.

In the second article, Maguire argues that hot spot policing is not as effective as the previous authors claim it to be. It has its major pluses to implement the policy; however the time and ability it would take the law enforcement agencies to adapt to this new innovation is not feasible to most, if any. Maguire claims, "the argument is based firmly in the evidence-based criminology tradition with its reliance on randomized trials to access the overall impacts of hot spots policing on crime".

The third article, Hot Spots Do Not Exist... Taylor argues that hot spot policing does not and may never exist in the "real world". The author claims that there is no suggestive support or means to measure whether or not hot spot policing is better over any other style of policing. "All policy proposals have potentially adverse side affects, and the national HSP (hot spot policing) proposal is no exception". Taylor thinks it could be a potential risk to law enforcement to implement a policy that people know so little about.

Strengths and Weaknesses

All articles make very valid arguments as to why hot spot policing could or could not be possible. The first article concludes that it could be implemented and would make a world of difference, while the second article argues that it is not feasibly possible to implement such policy without attempting a different approach to the change. However in the third article, the author argues that hot spot policing does not exist and cannot be implemented because its fate and side effects may never be known. Although each article discusses and raises the issues at hand, none of them provide clear,