The Coupling Effect on Policing and Our New Data Reporting System
Coupling, in criminology, is the idea that crime is intimately connected to the location that it occurs, and that crime won’t just “move around the corner.” Understandably, some may not believe this theory — that if police focus on a specific area and try to deter crime, criminals won’t move their illicit activity to where the police are not as rigorous.
Reasonably, people presume that criminals will always just find somewhere else to do their criminal deeds. However, multiple studies have shown this not to be the case.
For example, in Jersey City, where police field tested the theory of coupling on a high prostitution area and a high narcotics area, they found that criminal offenders would rather stop their illicit activities than move their operations to another location nearby.
“Overall, our quantitative measures offer strong support for prior studies that show that focused crime prevention efforts are not likely to have large displacement effects to areas nearby. In this sense, crime does not seem to simply “move around the corner” as a result of hot spots policing efforts. […] A main reason is simply that they are familiar with those areas. Most of the offenders we examined live close to their “work” in the targeted sites, and they feel “comfortable” with these locations. They resist movement to other sites both because of a natural tendency to stay with what is familiar, and because movement would demand that they encounter new and less familiar circumstances. Just as law abiding citizens will tend to stay close to home, our ethnographic and interview data suggest that offenders here are strongly attached to their home turf.”
If crime and criminal activity is not a foregone conclusion, and that illicit acts are tightly tied to streets, blocks, and locations, then why don’t we just police those areas all the time and worry less about the rest of the community?
Two reasons:
1. Police are busy all day taking calls on any number of topics. Lansdale police are persistently in motion, helping residents across the neighborhood with any number of issues. Committing even a single officer to a single location would have a major impact on our ability to service the entire community.
2. We don’t always have the data to help inform where the hot spots are.
While we cannot easily solve the staffing challenge, we are solving the data challenge.
This year, Lansdale Police will begin reporting under the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) rather than reporting under the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system. The difference between these two systems is in the details — literally. Under the current UCR system, officers report only the highest crime committed, and not all the crimes that occurred at that incident. In the NIBRS system, officers can report up to 10 separate crimes within a single incident. Additionally, NIBRS has over 20 indexed crime categories to report on, compared to UCR’s eight.
The added level of detail in our reporting will help better identify hot spots in our community. Lansdale is not big enough to focus on a single criminal act on a single block. However, it is big enough to take an aggregate approach to our reporting and view hot spots through the lens of total criminal activity within each reported incident. By transitioning to NIBRS, we can take a more nuanced approach to how we respond and prioritize policing in the community, so that we are more effective in our approach and more cost efficient in our execution.
What feels like a small change on the backend of our reporting system is a major step forward in continuing to modernize and grow our community policing model in Lansdale. Policing is a critical function of any growing community, and to help manage that growth, our data systems need to grow with them.
By making this change, Lansdale Police Department is staying ahead of the game and helping our community approach policing in a more scientific way.