Smart Police Deployment Evaluating the Use of Automated Vehicle Locator Technologies in Policing

This award will provide the 2nd year of funding for the Police Foundation to conduct the second phase of an evaluation of Automatic Vehicle Locators (AVL) in patrol cars to evaluate how well this technology quantifies police presence on crime, and how effectively AVL can be used for deploying officers. The first phase developed a methodology for analyzing the AVL data for the purposes of better deploying police officers. The project will be conducted in cooperation with the Dallas Police Department. Randomized experiments will be used to assess whether AVL technology can increase the crime control effectiveness and efficiency of police patrol, with hot spots policing and other directed patrol approaches.
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The Police Foundation originally received funding to perform a study that would examine the reliability and utility of the use of AVL technology to quantify police presence. The study examined the impact of police presence on crime in specific geographic areas in Dallas, Texas and, more important, tested whether AVL can be an effective tool for deploying officers. The Dallas Police Department has AVL technology in almost all of its patrol vehicles (n = 873) and has implemented a Compstat program which focuses on directing patrol to specific problem areas.

In the first phase, The Police Foundation proposed to develop an innovative method for collecting and integrating AVL data with spatially enabled crime data, examine the reliability of AVL data by determining anomalous gaps in data when compared to police calls for service and crime, and then look at the joint trends observed between police presence and crime in police reporting areas (PRAs). In the second phase, The Police Foundation proposed to conduct a randomized experiment to assess whether AVL technology can increase the crime control effectiveness and efficiency of police patrol.
In the treatment group, they proposed to use data generated from phase one to inform commanders about the locations of officers and work with those commanders to develop and adopt new deployment strategies. The control group would maintain the same level of police presence that they had previously received. The effectiveness of these strategies would be assessed looking at official crime data and comparing crime levels in the experimental and control sites.

The results of the study would provide State and/or local law enforcement agencies with the capacity for using AVL technology to assess and adapt deployment patterns. This approach would advance information-led policing nationwide by providing a technology-based strategy for crime prevention and reduction.

The Police Foundation is in the final stages of this project and has requested continuation funding to be able to complete the aforementioned study.

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