Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2010, $188,620)
The current project seeks to fill gaps in knowledge on the use of CCTV by law enforcement through the creation of "transferable lessons" largely absent in the current literature. The first section seeks to contextualize environmental factors related to camera effectiveness. The viewsheds of each camera, which denote the precise area of visibility, will serve as the unit of analysis and three crime categories will be measured for one year periods following/preceding camera installation: Part I violent crime, Part I property crime, and all Part I crime. The second component of the study will analyze the process by which the Newark Police Department responds to incidents detected by CCTV. A series of ANOVA models will test this assumption by comparing video detections and calls-for-service on the following factors: average minutes between report to dispatch, average officer response time, and proportion of cases closed by a police action. Additionally, logistic regression models will measure the impact of the following independent variables on case clearance: minutes between report and dispatch, officer response time, incident priority level, and a dummy variable identifying whether the incident was detected by CCTV or not. The final component is a quasi-experiment measuring the impact of immediate police response to crimes detected by CCTV. High-violence schemes will be grouped into pairs with one case being assigned to the treatment group while the remaining cameras comprise the control group. The treatment group will receive an additional operator dedicated to monitoring the experimental cameras, as well as four police units exclusively tasked with responding to events detected by experimental cameras. The control group will be policed in the standard fashion, with camera operators watching all the systems' cameras and creating a CAD assignment upon detecting a crime. Four success measures will capture the impact of this program: detections of crime by video operators; enforcement action of the dedicated field units; incidents of part I crime and calls-for-service; and experimental-group response times and proportion of cases closed. These findings will be compared with the control group and a buffer zone to gauge the impact of patrol units teamed with video surveillance operators in high crime areas.ca/ncf