Jerusalem criminologist receives Stockholm Prize for ‘hot spots’ research
by Dan Slobodkin
Prof. David Weisburd of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and George Mason University was awarded the 2010 Stockholm Prize in Criminology at Stockholm’s City Hall Tuesday night in recognition of a series of experiments he conducted showing that intensified police patrol at high crime ”hot spots” does not merely push crime around the corner.
The Stockholm Prize is widely considered the most prestigious in the field of criminology, and this was the first time the international committee has bestowed the award on a single individual.
This line of research encourages police around the world to concentrate crime prevention efforts at less than five percent of all street corners and addresses where over 50 percent of all urban crime occurs, yielding far less total crime than with conventional patrol patterns.
The prize jury selected Prof. Weisburd’s work on spatial displacement as the most influential single contribution of his wider body of work, which has helped to bridge the gap between criminology and police practice. The jury noted that Prof. Weisburd has been a leader among the growing number of criminologists whose evidence shows how the application of research findings can help to reduce not only crime, but also the unnecessary impositions on public liberty from policing activities that do not address a predictable crime risk.
The evidence from research conducted by Weisburd and his colleagues in Jersey City and Seattle shows that crime can drop substantially in small ”hot spots” without rising in other areas. Hot spots can be a single street segment, a cluster of addresses or even a single building.
“Research has shown that in what are generally seen as good parts of town there are often streets with strong crime concentrations, and in what are often defined as bad neighborhoods, many places are relatively free of crime,” Weisburd said.
For example, in a study conducted in 2004, Weisburd and his colleagues found that 86 out of 29,849 street segments account for one-third of the total number of juvenile crime incidents in Seattle.
If police intervene at a hot spot, many citizens and even police officers believe that the criminal activity will simply move around the corner. Weisburd’s research suggests the opposite is true. A study from Weisburd and his colleagues in 2004 found that areas close to the hot spot receiving intervention actually showed a reduction in crime despite the fact that these areas were not the focus.
He also cautions that simply steering clear of “the bad side of town” may not help citizens avoid crime. “Research has shown that in what are generally seen as good parts of town there are often streets with strong crime concentrations. Also, in what are often defined as bad neighborhoods, many places are relatively free of crime,” Weisburd says.
While targeting crime at the places where it occurs seems like a simple shift in strategy, it requires drastic changes in data gathering and the overall philosophy and actions of the police. The strategies of place-based policing can be as simple as patrolling hot spots, but could also include changes in laws and techniques. Internationally recognized for his work in this area, Weisburd has worked with police departments around the world to alter and discontinue ineffective practices and implement new strategies that are proven to work.
The Prize was awarded by Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask at a ceremony in conjunction with the Stockholm Criminology Symposium.
Prof. David L. Weisburd
Weisburd – a professor of law and criminal justice at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Criminology in Jerusalem and director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University in Northern Virginia near Washington D.C. – has also studied how terror threats affect policing and the perceptions of the police in the community.
He has worked with Israeli colleagues on a series of projects in this area in Israel that are being supported by the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s START Center at the University of Maryland. One project for example, is looking at the effects of terrorist threats during the “second intifada” on the ability of police to “close cases” in various Israeli communities.
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