The usefulness of a crime harm index: analyzing the Sacramento Hot Spot Experiment using the California Crime Harm Index (CA-CHI)

Mitchell, Renée J.

doi:10.1007/s11292-017-9318-y

Cited by 27 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…In all of them, nontrivial amounts of dosage were measured in the control group. Arranged in order from lowest to highest baseline dosage, Sacramento (Mitchell, , p. 78) had the lowest C group dosage of patrol at 3.4 percent of study hours, as measured by GPS‐Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL) devices on the patrol cars (a mean of 693 minutes per day across 21 control hot spots = 33 minutes per day per hot spot, divided by 16 hours daily, 0900 to 0100, or 16 hours × 60 minutes = 960 minutes, so that 33 / 960 = 3.4 percent of study time had a police car present in the control group). In Peterborough, England (Ariel, Weinborn, & Sherman, , p .…”

Section: Reducing Uncertainty For Hot‐spots Effect Sizes: a Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using the citizens calls for service data in all three experiments as a common currency for effect size on outcomes, this limited evidence does show smaller effect sizes where the baseline level of patrol (as a percent of study time) was larger. In Sacramento (Mitchell, , p. 109), the mean effect size across calls for service in the 21 hot‐spots pairs was –.104 ( p = .63). In Peterborough (Ariel et al., ), the pooled Cohen's d across calls for service in the 34 T spots and 38 C spots was d = –.211 (nonsignificant CI = –.676 to +.252).…”

Section: Reducing Uncertainty For Hot‐spots Effect Sizes: a Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Testing hot‐spots police patrols against no‐treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment

2019

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Funding informationJerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology * We would like to express our gratitude to the British Transport Police, with special thanks for their contribution and long-term commitment to evidence-based policing and experimental criminology. Generous support for this research was provided by The Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology. We particularly wish to thank Jerry Lee, for his commitment to experimental criminology and the global advancement of evidence-based policing. We also thank David Weisburd, Alex Sutherland, Crispian Strachan, Geoff Barnes, the Criminology editors, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their useful comments. We are indebted to John MacDonald for his insightful statistical advice and critical read of earlier versions of this article. AbstractOur understanding of causality and effect size in randomized field experiments is challenged by variations in levels of baseline treatment dosage in control groups across experiments testing similar treatments. The clearest design is to compare treated cases with no-treatment controls in a sample that lacks any prior treatment at baseline. We applied that strategy in a randomized test of hot-spots police patrols on the previously never-patrolled, track-level platforms of the London Underground (LU). In a pretest-posttest, control-group design, we randomly assigned 57 of the LU's 115 highest crime platforms to receive foot patrol by officers in 15-minute doses, 4 times per day, during 8-hour shifts on 4 days a week for 6 months. The effect of 23,272 police arrivals at the treatment hot spots over 26 weeks was to reduce public calls for service by 21 percent on treated platforms relative to controls, primarily when police were absent (97 percent of the measured effect). This effect was six times larger than the mean standardized effect size found in the leading systematic review. This finding provides a benchmark against the baseline counterfactual of no patrol in hot spots, with strong evidence of residual deterrence and no evidence of local displacement. K E Y W O R D Sbaseline dosage, hot spots, no-treatment controls, randomized experiments, regional deterrence, residual deterrence Criminology. 2020;58:101-128.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crim AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIESBarak Ariel is professor of criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a lecturer in experimental criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he is the chief analyst of the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology in the Institute of Criminology. His research interests include deterrence theory and social control, compliance, evidence-based policy, experimental criminology, and policing. Justice. His research interests include residual deterrence, hot spots of predatory crime, evidencebased policing, experimental criminology, defiance theory, and experimental designs.Mark Newton is a former assistant chief constable in the British Transport Police and the head of railway policing and security with the Rail Delivery Group.How to ci...

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Section: Reducing Uncertainty For Hot‐spots Effect Sizes: a Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Reducing Uncertainty For Hot‐spots Effect Sizes: a Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing hot‐spots police patrols against no‐treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment

2019

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“…However, for technical reasons, we argue that the maximum sentences are preferable. The maximum sentences were also the method of choice by Mitchell (2017) in creating the California Crime Harm Index. Mitchell argued that: "While the maximum sentence an offender can receive in California is not the typical sentence, it is a consistent starting point for analyzing the relative harm of crimes across places (as well as across offenders and victims)."…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Technically, a CHI has a score derived from the application of a metric, which weights different offences based on a proxy measure of the harm it causes, relative to other crimes. In this context, "harm" refers to how harmful a crime type is perceived to be relative to other types of crimes (Ignatans and Pease 2015;Mitchell 2017; Office for National Statistics 2016).…”

Section: What Is a Chi?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing the Swedish Crime Harm Index: an Evidence-Based Strategy

Kärrholm

Neyroud

Smaaland

2020

Camb J Evid Based Polic

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Research Question Which method for deriving a Crime Harm Index (Policing 10:171-183, 2016) for Sweden from criminal justice sources offers the best evidence for providing a sensitive indicator of differences in harm levels across offence categories? Data The number of days of imprisonment for each offence category associated with five different kinds of scales were extracted and compared: consensus by an expert panel of judges, the statutory maximum penalties, statutory minimum penalties, the average of maximum and minimum penalties and the average of actual sentences imposed in a recent time period for each crime type. Unlike the UK, for which the Cambridge Crime Harm Index draws on sentencing guidelines, Sweden has no such guidelines to offer. Methods The data were compared for sensitivity defined as the difference in length of imprisonment days between high and low severity crimes, as well as other characteristics of the data sources. Findings Given the available alternatives, the sentencing data average of actual sentences handed down by crime type provided the greatest reliability and sensitivity across the penalties for offences of high and low severity. Applying that method to both crime trends and crime mapping produces substantially different results from counting all crimes with equal weight and can be used by police and others to allocate resources with greater precision in relation to harm prevention. Conclusions On both empirical and normative grounds, the average sentences in a recent time period for each crime category provides the most sensitive and democratic method for establishing an officially recognized Swedish Crime Harm Index.

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“…Should all crimes be counted as equal or should some types of crime be given more weight than others, as in the formula for the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CCHI) (Sherman 2007, 2011, Sherman 2013Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud 2016)? With evidence-based policing on the rise, and the recent development of crime harm metrics in the UK (Sherman et al 2016), Sweden (Rinaldo 2016), the USA (Ratcliffe 2014;Mitchell 2017), Canada (Babyak et al 2009), New Zealand (Curtis-Ham and Walton 2017), and Australia (House 2018), it is timely to consider how best to measure crime. That question must be answered before we can answer the larger question: How can we make optimal use of scarce resources in policing?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Danish Crime Harm Index: How It Works and Why It Matters

Andersen

Mueller‐Johnson

2018

Camb J Evid Based Polic

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Research Question How can Danish Police calculate a single metric, similar to the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud 2016), that allows the total harm from all victim-reported crimes to be compared over time and across different areas, offenders, gangs, and victims, and what difference can it make in analyzing crime? Data This analysis examines 2,129,550 reported criminal incidents in the national police crime reports spanning 16 years (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016) and 93% of all of the crime categories in the Danish Criminal Code, excluding those that are primarily detected through proactive policing. It uses the officially recommended days of imprisonment for each crime type to generate the weight of punishment that would be applied if one offender were convicted of each crime, by standards independent of prior criminal history of the offender. Methods The analysis coded the recommended number of days in prison for each offense type based on guidelines set out by the Danish Office of Public Prosecutions. The sentencing value from the prosecutor guidelines was reviewed by five prosecutors. The reliability between the prosecutor ratings and the prosecutor guidelines' sentencing value was calculated by using Cronbach's alpha (α = 0.93). Findings While the count of all victim-reported criminal events in Denmark in 2016 had dropped by 14% (54,000 fewer crimes) from 393,000 in 2011, the Danish Crime Harm Index value (after excluding adult rapes due to a 2015 change in reporting rules) for all victim-reported crimes rose by 0.5% or 46,640 days of recommended imprisonment, from 9,714,057 recommended days of imprisonment in 2011 to 9,760,697 days in 2016. Including rapes, the Danish CHI rose by 6% from 2011 through 2016.

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The usefulness of a crime harm index: analyzing the Sacramento Hot Spot Experiment using the California Crime Harm Index (CA-CHI)

Cited by 27 publications

References 15 publications

Testing hot‐spots police patrols against no‐treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment

Testing hot‐spots police patrols against no‐treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment

Designing the Swedish Crime Harm Index: an Evidence-Based Strategy

The Danish Crime Harm Index: How It Works and Why It Matters

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