Integrated patrol - case study of a law enforcement experiment in Anne Arundel County, Maryland

The concentration of police resources on specific groups of people in particular areas or neighborhoods within a community plays well to contemporary political themes but, as an operational philosophy, falls short of defining a truly encompassing crime control and reduction strategy. Further, the rush to accomplish some measure of community-oriented policing (COP) within law enforcement agencies has led to an infusion of programs responsing to various societal ills that are well outside what Egon Bittner called the "core of the police role"(1) Although local political realities often drive a law enforcement agency's response to crime reduction and prevention, the potential benefits of COP make broadening its impact throughout the widest spectrum of the police organization and the community a worthwhile goal.

However, this goal should not be considered mutually exclusive of aggressive enforcement. In fact, an operational philosophy that combines community-based policing with aggressive enforcement provides a balanced and comprehensive approach to addressing crime problems throughout an entire jurisdiction rather than merely in targeted areas within a community. In Anne Arundel County, Maryland, an experiment in such integrated patrol has led to dramatically increased productivity in a midnight patrol shift and has contributed to an overall decline in crime throughout the county.

This article discusses the ongoing integrated patrol experiment in Anne Arundel County and some of the factors that led to its development. Among these factors is an understanding that despite the appeal and potential benefits of community-based policing initiatives, like anything, community-oriented policing has limits. COP should complement--but not necessarily replace--police agencies' traditional enforcement mandate. The integrated patrol approach grew from the presumption that community-based policing can-and probably should--coexist with a policy of aggressive enforcement. Integrated patrol also grew from a developing understanding that current methods of measuring police effectiveness may be inadequate for accurately assessing the full range of responses necessary to address crime in a comprehensive way.

Limits of Community-based Policing

During the past decade, police agencies throughout the country implemented community-oriented policing programs with the goal of reducing the incidence of crime through police-community partnerships. With the best intentions, and often with monetary support and direction from the federal government, local law enforcement agencies now consistently target the youthful offender, who often is living in a socially and economically challenged environment. This strategy anticipates that the young offender will be dissuaded from participating in antisocial behavior through a redirection of activities, sponsored in large part by public law enforcement, private business, and other community interests. Most law enforcement executives embrace the equation that the underlying philosophy will serve as a catalyst for a reduction in crime, enhanced satisfaction with the police, and a strengthening of police-community bonds.

Although nearly everyone would agree that such a goal is a noble one, skepticism persists regarding the long-range success of a philosophy that relies on changing value systems and cultural norms. The likelihood, for example, that the police alone could change the core values of a 14-year-old potential offender appears remote. Likewise, although occasional transformations do occur, police officers who spend at most a few hours a week within a community cannot expect to have a lasting impact on anyone who is not predisposed to rejecting those established values and norms.

Research on social disorganization gives compelling evidence that individual and collective value systems resist opposing influences. This research strongly suggests that ethnicity, family, and community standards often form the basis upon which values and goals are established in the classroom and in the community as a whole. The obvious conclusion is that peer, family, and community influences play a far more important role in shaping identities then do surrogate associations with police officers.(2) Against this backdrop, it appears that the accepted methods police agencies use to measure success might be woefully out of step with the realities officers face.

Measuring Success

Law enforcement administrators have traditionally relied on three indicators to measure agency effectiveness and to determine funding for particular operational programs. First, crime statistics always have played an important role in providing direction to police agencies. But, by relying on crime statistics as prima facie evidence that specific programs or philosophies are achieving their anticipated results, observers often fail to ensure that these statistics accurately reflect what they purport to measure. For example, politicians often view decreases in crime as indicators of successful programmatic responses to funding priorities, and although the converse is often used as justification for additional funding, some long-range studies suggest that police agencies have little direct control over increases and decreases in crime. This is so, researchers believe, because the police have no control over the sociological conditions that are blamed for fueling the growth of crime.(3) For this reason, the use of crime statistics as an evaluator of program success or as an indicator of money well spent is inherently inadequate.

Second, measuring the level of satisfaction with the police has been of organizational concern for decades and usually is accomplished through surveys, personal interviews, and by annually calculating the numbers of sustained internal complaints. Although these data-capturing mechanisims contain inherent biases and may be of little value when used as explanations of crime or other antisocial behavior, police organizations continue to rely on them as valid measures of agency effectiveness. This is the case even though, from an historical point of view, citizen attitudes towards the police have not been subject to change as a result of the level of patrol, nor are attitudes towards the police appreciably affected after police-citizen encounters.(4) In other words, there is little that government can do to change more than temporarily the existing penchant for individual likes and dislikes, or as in this case, satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the police.

Last, the popularity of prevention as an indicator of success among police program managers is easy to understand. To refute the effects of prevention strategies would require a precise measurement of crime that did not occur. Moreover, it would be reasonable to expect that the level of criminal activity in a given community would be commensurate with the attention paid to it by law enforcement. To the extent that communities can apply an ever-increasing proportion of shrinking government resources to a relatively small group of recipients, the level of satisfaction can be expected to remain favorable. Similarly, the use of prevention statistics also will remain popular as long as municipal legislatures continue to provide funding on the basis of this measurement.

Something Is Missing

The missing ingredient within the current community-based policing paradigm has been the lack of attention to traditional law enforcement responsibilities. Little has been written, for example, about using confidential informants, stakeouts, intelligence-gathering, and aggressive vehicle stops--in conjunction with flexible organizational structures--to respond to criminal activity. Although continuously updated information regarding crime trends and patterns is key to any such attempt, problem solving should not be confined to youth crime or specific neighborhood dysfunctions. Community policing and problem-oriented policing can be successful in a larger context involving every member of the organization.

New York City, for example, has established a zero tolerance for most misdemeanor street-crimes. This philosophy recognizes the relationship between the enforcement of minor infractions and the perception among citizens of police omnipresence. Backed by a management framework that stresses aggressive enforcement, information management, and a case to-fruition mentality, the police officer on the beat can decide what and where the problem is and what to do about it.

The shortcomings of traditional program evaluation methodologies necessitate a more precise indicator of success for such initiatives. One underused method is the assessment of fear. The extent to which police can reduce citizens' fear of being victimized may provide a more realistic assessment of police success than measurements currently in use. Considerable disparity often exists between the reality of an issue and how the public perceives it, often dictated by the way the issue has been framed by the media. This fact leads some to suggest that the perception of an issue may be as important as its reality.

When viewed in this way, the absence of fear may signal a perception of confidence in the police and may have more assessment value than traditional measures. To that end, a high-profile crime-fighting force whose ability to solve crime quickly, use good judgment, and remain flexible as the task demands, is essential. Applying flexibility of response within the traditional organizational structure also can maximize productivity, reduce downtime for personnel, and increase overall effectiveness.

Applying the Philosophy

The shift supervisor--whose job is to focus personnel on case-clearance--must act as the linchpin of this operational change. As a basic tenet of the integrated patrol philosophy, police officers are permitted to determine the enforcement activities necessary for their particular area and respond accordingly. If an officer's entire shift is devoted to responding to 911 calls for service, then follow-up would be encouraged during downtimes. Conversely, an officer with fewer service calls during a shift would be expected to work in conjunction with other personnel to provide necessary enforcement action or to gather intelligence or engage in problem-solving activities. As the team concept is crucial to this philosophy, it is not always necessary that officers be productive within the limitations of the term's traditional definition. An officer may be productive by assisting team members with a new computer program, instructing team members about search warrants, or working on any number of necessary staff functions.

Still, this flexible approach requires that all team members adhere to a number of absolutes. First, team members must interrogate all arrestees for the purpose of gathering additional intelligence or solving additional crimes. Second, team members must keep current on criminal activity, wanted suspects, and crime patterns occurring within their areas of assignment. Last, team members should develop and maintain citizen contacts for the purpose of intelligence-gathering.

In order to coordinate this approach, the commander not only must know what initiatives each officer pursues and provide encouragement, but also provide the necessary time and resources to complete tasks. In this way, the commander becomes an activity facilitator rather than an activity director. Commanders who subscribe to the traditional method of measuring officer performance by counting reports, tallying tickets, and totaling the number of drunk driver apprehensions, may find adjusting to this new approach troublesome.

For this type of endeavor to succeed, commanders must possess a meaningful appreciation of each subordinate's skills, abilities, work habits, goals, etc., and use this knowledge to apply the correct motivational stimulus at appropriate times. By deftly coordinating and directing creativity rather than limiting it, commanders need only open the door for creative thought and action and stay out of the way.

Case Study

In January 1996, the Anne Arundel County Police Department initiated an experimental integrated patrol strategy in its western patrol district. The demographics of this primarily residential area of suburban Maryland--including a military complex and a number of commercial pockets--as well as a steady increase in calls for service created conditions conducive to a change in deployment strategy. The experiment would be limited to the midnight shift, which was tasked with establishing and refining a model patrol strategy.

Supervisors identified the primary goals of the experiment as increasing officer productivity, expanding organizational responsibility beyond writing incident reports, decreasing reliance on specialized units for case follow-up, and establishing flexibility as an operational norm. To these ends, a new management philosophy quickly emerged that emphasized increased patrol activity--most notably vehicle stops, field interrogations, and building checks. Employing creative closure strategies-including the ability for officers to move throughout the patrol area as they observed crime patterns develop--became an operational hallmark and an important factor in instilling a case-to-fruition mentality among patrol officers.

As part of the patrol strategy, sergeants and lieutenants continually reviewed crime data and brainstormed with patrol officers to determine the best response strategies for particular problems. Cases requiring follow-up were returned to the responding patrol officers before being forwarded to detectives. Individual officers ultimately were held accountable for investigating and resolving crimes that occurred in their patrol areas. If the officer assigned to a particular area identified the need for a stakeout or search warrant, supervisors paired the officer with another patrol officer to assist. In the early days of the experiment, this approach quickly established a standard for what was expected of each patrol officer individually and the squad collectively.

As the creativity of patrol officers was allowed to flourish, officers began to demonstrate individualized expertise in such diverse areas as criminal investigations, traffic enforcement, drug suppression, routine patrol, execution of search warrants, stakeouts, and computer support. At the same time, productivity and case-closure rates began to rise. Only months into the experiment, as supervisors saw that the patrol force was capable of assuming much more responsibility for crime clearance, they further refined the integrated patrol strategy.

The most productive investigators in the patrol force assumed responsibility for following up on cases that they thought could be resolved quickly. In the interim between such cases, these patrol-investigators worked on cold cases that had fewer solvability factors.

Additionally, in response to an increase in commercial break-ins, each night, a different officer driving an unmarked vehicle was assigned to patrol commercial areas with the sole responsibility of checking buildings for burglaries. Although this revolving assignment did not always prove popular among officers, this preventive patrol approach netted arrests within days of its implementation.

Since its inception, the integrated patrol project has yielded impressive results. Over a 14-month period from January 1996 to March 1997, the midnight shift of the western district patrol squad solved 21 breaking-and-entering cases, 23 armed robberies, 27 vehicle thefts, 2 rapes, 20 simple assaults, 34 non-vehicle thefts, 1 carjacking, I abduction, and 139 destruction of property cases. In 1996, under the integrated patrol strategy, the squad issued 3,657 traffic citations--compared to 2,010 in 1995--and apprehended 365 drunk drivers--compared to 200 DWI apprehensions in 1995. The increased productivity and enhanced case-clearance rates generated by the integrated patrol approach spurred department administrators to continue the program and to consider expanding it to other shifts and patrol areas.

Conclusion

Although the art of policing has changed a great deal over the last several decades, especially with regard to personnel deployment strategies and new technologies, relatively little attention has been paid to the way in which administrators deal with personnel or define productivity within a structured, paramilitary environment. A management philosophy that sets parameters but encourages solutions by the rank-and-file is infinitely more desirable than a system that discourages, albeit unintentionally, the innovative and creative worker. Together with effective measures that more accurately validate police successes, a new management philosophy can emerge.

The application of community policing programs within this structure, however, is best accomplished through aggressive enforcement, a case-to-fruition mentality, the use of the flexible organizational structure concept, and common sense. The tendency to apply law enforcement resources exclusively to specific communities to the exclusion of others also should be avoided in favor of encouraging individual officers to apply the resources available to them on every call for service. In an integrated patrol approach, shift commanders assume a difficult, but ultimately integral, role. They must know their employees, encourage their employees' activities, measure the results fairly, provide guidance and support, and act to maximize the effectiveness of the team. By combining aggressive enforcement with a comprehensive community-based orientation, law enforcement agencies can unleash officers' full creative power to combat crime.

Endnotes

(1) E. Bittner, The Functions of Police in a Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: Olegeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1980), 6-24, 36-47.

(2) R. Bursik, "Social Disorganization and Theories of Crime and Delinquency: Problems and Prospects," Criminology, 26, no. 4 (1988): 519.

(3) C. Klockars, "The Rhetoric of Community Policing," in Thinking About Crime: Contemporary Readings, ed. C. Klockars and S. Mastrofski (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 530-542.

(4) G. Kelling, T. Pate, D. Dieckman, and C. Brown, "The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment," in Thinking About Crime: Contemporary Readings, ed. C. Klockars and S. Mastrofski (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 139-162. It should be noted, however, that in the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment, researchers recorded a significant reduction in citizens' fear of typical street crimes and an increase in generalized feelings of personal safety when foot patrols (as opposed to motor patrols) were deployed. The Police Foundation, The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment, (Washington, DC: The Police Foundation, 1981), 123.

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