Introduction

The most pertinent question any police commander contemplating deploying foot patrol should ask themselves is “What do I want to achieve?” This seems like a trite comment, but foot beat officers are frequently deployed without real clarity on what it is hoped they will accomplish. Clear and specific goals for a foot patrol operation are therefore essential. Even though the research evidence described earlier in this book is somewhat mixed, it is clear that foot patrols have the potential to achieve a myriad of policing goals. When Moskos wrote about New York City’s Operation Impact—a massive foot patrol program started in 2003 and involving up to 1800 rookie officers—he concluded “If the goal of police is to prevent crime, and it should be, foot patrol is the answer. Impact works” (Moskos 2008: 202). The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment also found that, with sufficiently enthusiastic officers in small, high-crime areas, violence could be reduced (Ratcliffe et al. 2011). Furthermore, the officers developed a considerable understanding of the local criminal environment and of local people on the margins of society (Wood et al. 2014). That being said, the Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment a year later discovered that reducing the dosage and making the foot beat areas larger negated any impact (Groff et al. 2015). These variable findings seem to mimic the limited research evidence from the preceding decades. Crime reduction is possible but not guaranteed. Foot patrols are not a silver bullet that can be applied in any random fashion. They should be a tailored and targeted strategy, suitably resourced, and with coherent and reasonable goals. Simply copying a deployment strategy from another police department carries little risk for a police chief and is easily justifiable if the original department claims success, but it will often fail because the two departments police areas with different problems, politics, officers, and communities.

It’s also clear that—whether effective at crime reduction or not—the public seem to adore foot patrols. When, during the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment, foot beats were added to neighborhoods that had not had foot patrol in the preceding 5 years, the communities perceived their areas to be the safest with the lowest likelihood of victimization, and they were not only aware of the foot patrols but also improved their evaluations of the job done by the police department (Pate 1986). Even in cities like Baltimore, where the police department and community have had a somewhat strained relationship in recent years, communities still request foot patrol to help deal with drug trafficking issuesFootnote 1 (U.S. Department of Justice 2016) and have successfully lobbied for foot patrols in troubled areas of the city (West Baltimore Commission on Police Misconduct and the No Boundaries Coalition 2016: 5).

If used judiciously and in the right locations, foot patrol, therefore, appears to have the potential to reduce crime, reassure the community, improve perceptions of the police department, and gather criminal intelligence. These are, however, very different tasks that will most likely require consideration of the geographic area, selecting the right type of officer, a different type of briefing and instructions to the officers (how officers are tasked), and a different type of reward system. This chapter discusses each of these considerations.

Selecting the Right Officers

In December 2004, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told CNN that you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. The same could be true of policing given that few police leaders in the field are also responsible for recruitment and training. In some circumstances and departments, operational commanders will be assigned officers for foot patrol without any choice in the matter. For example in Philadelphia, new officers—rookies—spend their first few months on foot patrol, and in New Haven, Connecticut, new officers out of the academy spend a year on foot patrol (Cowell and Kringen 2016). However, outside of these types of mandatory programs, a local area commander may have at least some discretion in selecting officers within his or her command for specific duties. If so, what are the characteristics of a good foot patrol officer?

Again it is worth reiterating that most pertinent question for a local commander has to be “what do you want to achieve?” The types of police officer drawn to community policing, helping the homeless, or working in gang interdiction or street crimes units are all probably different in significant ways, with personalities that reflect these different interests. As Moskos noted, “In high-crime neighborhoods everywhere, most police don’t give a damn about community relations. Officers tend to scoff at community relations in part because the ‘community’ police deal with are mostly criminals” (Moskos 2008: 203). Selecting officers with the wrong mix of skills may be disastrous for the outcome of a project. If the objective is to use foot patrol to improve community perception of police legitimacy, no amount of patrol will make any difference if the officer’s attitude toward community interaction is hostile. For example, consider the views of the Department of Justice officials after their interviews with officers in the Baltimore (MD) Police Department:

We found a prevalent “us-versus-them” mentality that is incompatible with community policing principles. When asked about community-oriented problem solving, for example, one supervisor responded, “I don’t pander to the public.” Another supervisor conveyed to us that he approaches policing in Baltimore like it is a war zone. A patrol officer, when describing his approach to policing, voiced similar views, commenting, “You’ve got to be the baddest motherfucker out there,” which often requires that one “own the block.” (U.S. Department of Justice 2016: 157)

The fundamental mind-set of the officers is likely to be the most important factor; however, it is also worth considering the career stage of potential foot patrol officers. After nearly 20 years’ ethnographic work with the Los Angeles Police Department, Barker (1999) contextualized police careers in 5-year blocks, with each stage representing an evolution of experiences, attitudes, and behaviors. It is likely that officers in their first few years are likely to approach foot patrol very differently than veterans not far from their pensions.

A survey of 400 officers from a variety of US police departments examined the productivity of police officers in these different career stages across a range of proactive measures; the number of traffic citations issued, DUI arrests made, and the number of drug arrests effected. The research confirmed what many in policing intuitively suspected. Officers in their first 5 years were highly motivated and productive, and by the time they were in their second career increment (5–10 years), they hit their stride and productivity was maximized (Johnson and LaFrance 2016). This is most likely due to a combination of having “learned the ropes” and how to orient themselves around operational systems, developing the confidence to conduct proactive police work, and having gained the experience necessary to be effective and efficient. After 10 years, productivity declined in the surveyed officers, possibly due to burnout, disgruntlement, or disengagement to focus on interests external to policing (Barker 1999).

If commanders seek to use foot patrol to reduce a substantial crime problem and feel that enforcement and proactive activity is a route to that goal, then assigning officers who are younger in service would appear prudent. They are likely to be more motivated to engage in proactive police work. As many of the rookie foot beat officers in Philadelphia told us, they wanted to work hard, try different styles of policing, and try to come to the notice of their superiors in a positive way. If the desired outcome is enhanced community relations, then selecting older officers with more service and a desire to be more community service oriented might be a more appropriate strategy. While they may be a little more cynical of the police organization and more averse to engaging in proactive work, they might welcome the opportunity to work with the community and develop contacts with people that are not grounded in conflict. The identification of late-career opportunities for officers may be a useful way to keep them engaged and to retain their experience and professional knowledge. As Dempsey argues, more seasoned officers may be able to exercise better judgment and discretion when dealing with incidents and radio calls. And while good judgment is important for all patrol officers, foot beat officers are particularly visible to the community (Dempsey 1992).

Whomever commanders select, the officers will be more enthusiastic if there is clear and explicit evidence from the precinct/district leadership that foot patrol is valued as distinct from other operational roles. This requires that commanders set realistic goals and targets for the foot patrol officers and objectives that are more in line with the reality of a foot post. Assessing the merit of foot patrol officers against the outputs of vehicle-bound officers (such as number of calls attended or arrests made) would appear to be counterproductive and misses the value that foot patrol can bring to a community and crime reduction strategy.

Officers who “get” the change of pace and focus of foot patrol and are willing to keep working actively even if they are no longer in a rapid response role and mind-set should be encouraged to volunteer for foot patrol. Moskos (2008: 203), while on foot patrol with the NYPD during Operation Impact, recognized that “Foot patrol is tedious and tiring. And as if to confirm foot patrol’s low organizational status, only rookies are assigned to Impact. While the theory behind Operation Impact itself has been described as ‘Compstat on steroids,’ actually doing it can be as boring as listening to a statistician on Quaaludes.” It therefore requires officers with the right mind-set, officers who are at least willing to engage in public interaction. When out walking with two Philadelphia foot patrol officers in the 22nd district, author Dan Rubenstein (2015: 77–8) noted this interaction between “cops and robbers” thus:

“What happened?” a fleshy young man said to [police officer Brian] Nolan and his partner, Mike Farrell, as they walked past. “Somebody steal your car?”

“Just getting some exercise,” Nolan shot back. “You might want to try it sometime.”

The above is hardly the epitome of a civil exchange but potentially important in terms of starting an interaction that could be of benefit to crime prevention. The officer has made eye contact and will no doubt remember the same young man next time he comes around the block. With the injection of a little humor, an olive branch of connection might be possible. At the very least, the young man is probably more aware that the officer can recognize him in the future and can find out who he is. Something this simple can help the crime reduction effort. After all, crime loves anonymity.

Rocco Urella, who was serving in 1971 as the Pennsylvania state police commissioner, noted that “with a policeman with the basic right attitude on the beat you are going to get public support. Public support is the necessary element in effective police enforcement” (Grimes 1971: 3, emphasis added). The challenge is identifying and rewarding the basic right attitude. One of the simplest ways to get on the right track of the basic right attitude is to request volunteers. If a project and its goals are outlined, requesting volunteers can attract officers with the right attitude and mind-set because they know what the project entails before they volunteer. Of course, this may initially be a challenge. Across the five departments studied by Cowell and Kringen (2016), they noted how many of the foot beat officers did not initially want to be on foot patrol. Only after experiencing the work directly did the officers see the benefits to the community and to themselves.

When we interviewed officers during the Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment, there was quite a gulf in attitude and enthusiasm between foot patrol officers who volunteered and those who didn’t. At times, we heard from officers who had been either ordered to the foot beat or “voluntold” (told they were volunteering or ordered to volunteer). They often reported being bored by the work and thought the project a waste of time. Volunteers appear much more willing to go beyond doing the minimum and were keen to learn more about the particular crime problems in the beat from crime analysts and the community. They would come into the university and speak enthusiastically about what they did and what they hoped to achieve. The difference in attitude and perception of the job was jarring.

Training Foot Patrol Officers

In the wake of the successful Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment, the Philadelphia Police Department instigated a policy that placed every new officer from the academy on a foot beat for the first few months of their service. In the wake of that policy, a training document noted that “This document was prepared with the realization that most of us received little training on how we should walk a foot beat, or what tactics we should employ while assigned to one” (Philadelphia Police Department 2010: 1).

If a commander seeks to address a significant crime problem and thinks that officers on foot can better target serious repeat offenders, then training in the latest rules and requirements regarding pedestrian stops and field investigations is vital. Officers on foot probably have a better capacity to argue for a totality of circumstances regarding why they stopped and frisked an individual than officers in cars because they are more in tune with the neighborhood, its problems, and the crime issues in the area. Furthermore, they are often more likely to have observed the specific behaviors of a suspect for a longer period of time than officers who pull up in a car. While the pace of foot patrol is slower, it allows more time to observe suspicious behavior, appreciate situations and contexts, and gather reasonable justification for actions. The rules regarding the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States appear to be frequently misunderstood by officers, so a legal update and instruction on how to clearly articulate the circumstances of every stop are important.

If officers are to be more than walking enforcement machines and engage with a community problem-solving role, then it has been noted that:

Officers assigned to foot patrols must have the training, resources, and support to develop and implement programs that address the specific needs of the beat area. Initiatives could include school presentations designed to curb underage drinking, physical security assessments to decrease the likelihood of crime, coordination of other departmental resources such as traffic or narcotics to address an identified problem, or supporting crime watch groups. (Craven 2009: 1)

One officer in Philadelphia used these skills to request the posting of “no loitering” signs, and when posted “this gave him probable cause to stop those who were causing problems or hanging out on the sidewalks. After some time, the problem disappeared” (Philadelphia Police Department 2010: 2).

A third area where training can be helpful is in the area of social assistance and public health. Rather than see a snapshot view of a situation, officers on a permanent beat assignment can develop a longitudinal view of the problems affecting people and places that have been referred to as “microplaces of harm” (Wood et al. 2015: 218). In urban environments, this often brings officers into contact with people struggling with drug addiction and mental health issues. The reality is that even if officers do not embrace the role:

Law enforcement officers, and especially foot patrol police, serve as public health interventionists, despite the fact that this role is incidental both to the imagination of officers and the general public. In the course of their daily routines, foot patrol police encounter health risk behaviors and environments, yet there are improvements to be made both at the level of police knowledge and attitudes, and more broadly at the city level where coordinated efforts to bridge security and health are critically needed. (Wood et al. 2015: 220)

Awareness of addiction and treatment options, as well as training in dealing with people struggling with mental health issues and cooccurring issues, will be valuable to officers if these are significant issues in the proposed foot patrol environment.

The Geographic Area for Foot Patrol

If the aim of foot patrol is to reduce crime, then the geographic area should have a significant concentration of crime. Foot patrol is just one technique of many that falls under the rubric of hot spots policing. It has long been known that crime is more concentrated in some places than others (Guerry 1833; Quetelet 1842; Mayhew 1862), and in the urban milieu crime focuses in small places known as “hot spots” (Spring and Block 1988). These hot spots are places that are a geographic area of higher than average crime relative to nearby locations (Chainey and Ratcliffe 2005; Eck et al. 2005). Crime hot spots can vary from street to street (Weisburd et al. 2004), and even within high-crime neighborhoods, crime can cluster at specific locations, yet the contiguous areas remain relatively crime-free (Sherman et al. 1989). Hot spots policing is the focusing of police resources and crime prevention activities to these higher-crime places. If police are to have a deterrent effect on crime, then it has been argued by numerous researchers that the best return on the investment in policing should be found in the places where crime is most concentrated (Braga 2005; Weisburd and Braga 2006; Braga et al. 2012).

It does, however, also depend on the type of crime. Shoplifting, by its very nature, is an indoor activity usually conducted away from the surveillance of officers patrolling the public street. The same can be said for other crimes that are usually conducted indoors or in other nonpublic places, such as non-stranger rape, credit card fraud, and assaults in schools. Foot beat officers are more likely to be effective against street crimes such as vehicle theft or theft from vehicles, residential and nonresidential burglary, robberies, assaults, and public disorder events. Some research has identified a threshold level of crime below which it may be difficult to demonstrate any statistically significant impact of hot spots policing. For example, the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment identified a minimum threshold of around six incidents in the preceding 3 months (i.e., in the top 40% of beats) as a baseline violent crime indicator that the hot spots were active enough to benefit from an intervention (Ratcliffe et al. 2011). In a hot spots policing experiment in Sacramento (California), a minimum threshold of 30 calls for service in the preceding 90 days was identified as a significant indicator of likely hot spots policing success (Mitchell 2016; Telep et al. 2014).

If the operational commander’s desire is to improve community relations, then it may be possible to select a larger beat that contains a number of places where people gather for work or social events. The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment areas had about 150 to 200 households and on average between 35 and 50 nonresidential places like churches, schools, and businesses (Pate 1986). A better return on the investment of foot patrol in terms of improving public perception of the police may be possible if the officers focus on areas where the public congregate and more citizens can see their officers. Possible examples include outside of schools at school opening or closing time, in or near public transit intersections (especially during rush hours), and near places of worship. These are all good places for officers to “circulate and mingle.” Places with higher concentrations of residents are particularly helpful, such as walking through public housing schemes and projects and attending community meetings and events. If businesses are being targeted for crime or for general reassurance purposes, then foot patrols that concentrate on the business corridor in question are also appropriate.

Hot Spots Within Hot Spots: The Hotspot Matrix

Business districts can become a sort of “hot spot within a hot spot,” a characteristic of some crime areas previously recognized over a decade ago and articulated through the Hotspot Matrix. The Hotspot Matrix is a typology of spatiotemporal characteristics of hot spots that categorizes the potentially infinite array of spatiotemporal arrangements into three broad categories of within-hotspots spatial patterns and three broad categories of temporal pattern (Ratcliffe 2004). It becomes operationalized when an analysis identifies the type of crime distribution that is occurring within a crime hot spot. So even though the general area is known to be a high-crime one, are the individual crime events scattered throughout the crime hot spot (a dispersed spatial pattern), do they demonstrate some spatial clustering (a clustered pattern), or is there a particular place (such as a bar or school) that is responsible for the vast majority of the crime within the hot spot (a hotpoint)?

The Hotspot Matrix also has broad categories for temporal patterns. As stated earlier, both authors bring personal experience of police foot patrol to this book. For example, one of us (Ratcliffe) can still remember being posted to the Roman Road Market in Bow, East London back when it was in the old H district of the Metropolitan Police. A foot patrol in the vicinity of a busy street market that had suffered numerous vehicle thefts and thefts of items from cars probably seemed a good idea. After all, offenders were taking advantage of busy market times and the influx of vehicles that were left unsupervised while market stall owners worked the market and customers visited the area. But given that the market was only open a couple of days a week and always deserted by 5 pm, a weeklong night shift walking patrol in the market area from 10 pm to 6 am seemed particularly ill-conceived and pointless. Awareness of time is therefore important in any deployment.

Analysts and command staff should therefore ask “what is the temporal signature of the crime events within the hot spot?” The Hotspot Matrix suggests three main temporal patterns. If “the crime events could happen at any time over the 24-hour period of a day, or because the time span of events is so large that it is not possible to determine any significant peaks of activity” (Ratcliffe 2004: 11), then the temporal pattern is described as diffused. Note that the time span refers to the possible range of times in which a crime could have occurred. Assaults are usually easy to identify, having a short time span based on the victim knowing when he or she was assaulted; however, burglary and vehicle theft can have long time spans, comprised of the time between when the victim last saw the property unmolested and the time when the crime was discovered.

There may be a temporal signature when crime is focused. This means that crime could occur at any time of the day but tends to have a shorter period of a few hours when there is significantly more crime activity. After school hours or business districts vulnerable to overnight burglary are good examples of focused temporal patterns.

Finally, the last category is “a rare group of hotspots where the temporal activity is confined to a small period of time, or where the [temporal] signature almost negates the possibility of criminal activity at some time periods. This does not mean that some events cannot occur in other periods, except that unlike the focused hotspot, there are few events happening outside the acute time” (Ratcliffe 2004: 12). These acute temporal patterns can occur at troublesome bars around closing time or outside sports stadiums after a game.

As an example, consider Table 1 which shows an example Hotspot Matrix for a commander considering the use of foot patrol to deal with a street crime problem in an urban community. Within the crime hot spot itself, the temporal pattern could be diffused (crime could occur any time of the day or night) and the spatial pattern dispersed (anywhere within the hot spot). With such a diffused, dispersed hot spot, foot patrol would have to tour the entire crime hot spot at all hours of the day and night. This would require teams of foot patrols, increasing cost and reducing likely effectiveness. Compare the operational possibilities to a crime hot spot that had a robbery problem that was temporally focused and spatially clustered, such as in the area immediately around a small commercial strip in the hours after schools let out. With such a focused, clustered hot spot, officers would know where to concentrate their activities, and the commander would not have to make the foot patrol a 24-hour a day assignment. This increases likely effectiveness and efficiency of cost—increasing the likelihood that the foot beat officers can make inroads into the crime problem.

Table 1 An example Hotspot Matrix for using foot patrol in an urban community
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Other Foot Beat Area Considerations

What about more suburban or rural areas? As Moskos (2008) suggests, a good rule of thumb could be that if the mail carrier is delivering the mail on foot (therefore mainly urban and suburban locations), then it should be possible to patrol on foot. Many dormitory suburbs in America are spatially dispersed, and they frequently lack footpaths. These would be difficult and probably less effective places in which to conduct foot patrol. So while an initial scan of a jurisdiction might identify a hot spot in rural and suburban areas with lower population densities, these hot spots can be awfully large areas for foot patrol to cover. With a lower density of crime often the result, the benefits are likely to be minimal in terms of crime reduction and potentially below a threshold of any value at all (Mitchell 2016). The crime patterns should be closely monitored for some form of spatial and temporal pattern before committing resources in suburban or rural areas. Bicycle patrols may be an alternative to consider in areas that are deemed too large for traditional foot beats.

It has been our experience that a police commander’s initial instinct is frequently to make a foot beat area as large as possible, in the hope of maximizing the crime or reassurance rewards of the commitment of resources. This is usually a mistake. Larger areas increase the diversity of the foot beat and increase the ratio of places within the patrol grid that have little crime. It also reduces the impact of any community reassurance. If people see officers walk down their street every 15 minutes, then they know they are in a foot patrol area. If they see officers walk down their street only once, they probably suspect it is a peculiarity. Any offenders in the area are unlikely to adjust their perception of risk that the police will interdict if they commit an offense. Again, if an area is deemed too large, bicycle patrols may be a viable alternative.

It should be borne in mind that officers have demonstrated a tendency to stray from their assigned locations. To minimize this, great care should be taken to include sufficient areas in the beat to make it interesting, while keeping it as small as possible. This point is also dependent on the crime problem. For example, if a nuisance bar is central to the crime problem, then the bar should, of course, be included in the beat. But consideration should be given to including nearby parking lots if bar patrons park there or to local transit stops. Incorporating a local drug market or commercial strip will provide additional ways for officers to stay constructively busy.

One possibility is to design pilot foot beats and then revise them a couple of weeks after they have been implemented. If the commanders include the operational officers who are actually working the street in any redeployment discussion, then the experiences of the officers can be incorporated into an improved design that will more closely mirror the underlying pattern of human behavior and physical environment. It will also improve the commitment of the officers to the target area.

Tasking Foot Patrol Officers

There is some evidence suggesting that selecting officers for foot beats who are starting out and new to the job results in more use of enforcement sanctions. As one sergeant who worked in New York’s Operation Impact said “A lot of rookie cops go to the worst areas and just attack: write summonses, write everything, arrest everybody” (quoted in Henderson 2015). In Philadelphia, we discovered this during the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment when pedestrian stops, arrests, and other types of enforcement increased significantly in the intervention areas (Ratcliffe et al. 2011). One Philadelphia police captain described a recent success in a violent crime gang hot spot by stressing the value of foot patrols: “Deployment wise, we increased our deployment, we increased our visibility in that area, we got some feet on the ground. .. We got foot beats down there and constantly hit that area” (Haberman 2016). While on the surface, this can sound proactive, in our experience, officers are often dispatched to a crime hot spot with insufficient information to enable them to perform optimally. How are officers supposed to achieve the goals of their commanders if those same leaders do not pass on sufficient instructions? It sounds trite, but both of the authors of this book have seen it happen time and time again. Commanders want to address a particular issue and build community support but don’t convey those key details to the foot patrol officers. The foot beats do the best they can but sometimes engage their role in a way that is counterproductive to the commander’s intent.

At the very least, officers (in any capacity—not just foot patrol) should be made aware of the reason for their assignment and how they are supposed to best support the organization and their commander’s mission. They might receive a few pointers from the sergeant on roll call, but too often the sergeant is equally unaware of the dynamics of the crime problem and leadership’s intent. Information that was discussed in a management meeting (such as crime briefings or Compstat meetings) is rarely conveyed effectively downward through the ranks. As a result, foot patrol officers receive a geographic assignment with little additional information beyond that there has been a spike in robberies, for example, in the general area. Does the commander want the officers to engage with the community, or conduct surveillance on known offenders, or provide reassurance patrols in busy areas? Commanders rarely articulate their goals or the measures by which success will be assessed. This presents a wasted opportunity to maximize the use of an expensive resource, often leaves inexperienced officers to determine tactics, and can result in officers feeling disillusioned when they do not see any amelioration of the problem they are trying to address. The foot patrol officers can feel like they have been “dumped” in an area, divorced from the organization, and undervalued.

Good goals for foot patrol should be SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. By setting these types of objectives, the application of foot patrols to address a policing problem becomes more accountable. In other words, by having specific and measurable goals that have an identified time frame (when will the goals be achieved?), it is possible to evaluate the outcome. Although evaluations may expose failed policies, the identification of when something is not working is usually the necessary catalyst to improvement (Syed 2015).

Foot patrol need not only be about enforcement for short-term crime reduction gains (where they can be achieved). After all, “foot patrol is a protean concept that serves many masters while achieving many goals” (Giannetti 2007: 22). Some innovative commanders have used foot patrol as a mechanism to gain useful information and intelligence on community problems. In Philadelphia, one entrepreneurial police officer assigned to a crime analysis role gave surveys to the foot patrol officers assigned to her district. The survey responses identified key features of the community’s residential design that were enabling a burglary problem to continue and thrive. This officer (since promoted) saw an opportunity to gain more community intelligence by using foot patrols as more than just tools of community engagement or enforcement.

In a 2010 survey of over 100 officers in Philadelphia, nearly two-thirds thought that patrol officers (in general, not just foot patrol) effectively use their knowledge of activities going on in their beat to reduce crime, and more than three-quarters felt that patrol officers have the skills and ability to collect information on their beats (Ratcliffe et al. 2012). During Philadelphia’s Operation Safe Streets, foot patrols provided sufficient criminal intelligence such that, once the foot beats reverted back to vehicle patrols, one commander lamented “the intelligence that was supposed to be recorded on the officers’ supplemental logs –intelligence vital to the redirection of patrol efforts—had dried up” (Giannetti 2007: 26). Yet when given the option of expanded patrols in high-crime areas, the officers in the 2010 Philadelphia survey preferred other patrol types. While 55% thought foot patrol would be effective or very effective at combating violent, more supported bicycle patrol (73% effective or very effective) and vehicle patrol (79% effective or very effective). The effectiveness of bicycle patrols is largely unknown, but it is increasingly clear that motorized patrols do not gather much information useful to crime analysis or criminal intelligence.

If information collection is one goal of foot patrol, or even a part of a larger strategy, then one potential framework for tasking officers is VOLTAGE. VOLTAGE is a structured analytical framework designed to provide a configuration to analytical questions within policing (Ratcliffe 2016). VOLTAGE is shown in Table 2 and has its origins in an intelligence-led policing framework for understanding crime problems. Crime analysts may be able to help address some of the components of the VOLTAGE framework; however, foot patrol officers are uniquely placed to build local relationships and interact with people on the street in a way that can facilitate a deeper and more insightful understanding of the area’s crime problems. Regretfully, in too few instances do we find that foot patrol officers are used to gather information that can inform a comprehensive crime reduction response.

Table 2 VOLTAGE analytical framework
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We have witnessed foot beat officers (at the behest of crime analysts) go business-to-business speaking to store owners and assessing their willingness to help with a crime reduction initiative, survey burglary victims and gather more information about local crime, and work closely with transit officials to learn more about the link between crime in a train station and the surrounding areas. In Philadelphia, two foot patrol officers “created a book in which they have information on all those who have active warrants, past criminal histories, and those who they ped stop in their beat. They collect and update this information on a regular basis. They explained that being well informed and studying this information is necessary because criminals are constantly studying them. Their tactics have ‘leveled the playing field.’” (Philadelphia Police Department 2010: 3). While these initiatives appear to be rare examples, they demonstrate potential. And importantly from the first example, there is no point gathering information “just in case it’s needed.” It must be delivered to someone who can use it to improve decision-making (like a commander or crime analyst).

If foot patrol officers are assigned goals that are specific to the problem they are being tasked to address, they can then be held accountable to those goals. This then opens up the possibility of assessing the value of foot patrol on a more expansive range of criteria relevant to public safety and security.

Permanent or Park-and-Walk Patrols?

Rather than initiate permanent foot beats, some police departments have started to mandate that officers get out of their patrol car on a regular basis and walk in the community. These programs can be traced back to the stop, walk, and talk initiatives in places like Baltimore County (Maryland) in the early 1980s (Hayeslip and Cordner 1987). In St. Petersburg, Florida, the program is called Park, Walk, and Talk, and it requires all officers in the St. Petersburg Department to park in a neighborhood and chat to local people there for one hour a week (Bekiempis 2015). To ensure compliance, officers must log this activity so that participation can be confirmed by supervising officers. In early 2015, the Baltimore Police Department mandated that every officer gets out of their car at least once during a 10-hour shift, for a period of at least 30 minutes—a program that even had the support of the police union (Bekiempis 2015). However command staff do not enforce the mandate or provide sufficient supervision, so in reality, few officers actually comply. An official review concluded “It is, therefore, unsurprising that some officers fail to integrate community policing efforts into their time on patrol. There are few incentives and little encouragement to do so” (U.S. Department of Justice 2016: 161).

Sometimes these issues with maintaining foot patrol are due to a lack of organizational and cultural commitment with the department. At other times, they are related to realistic resource constraints. As one foot patrol officer interviewed in the study by Cowell and Kringen (2016: 28) lamented, “Staffing ruins everything—if you don’t have enough bodies, the walking beats are the first to go—they’ll pull you out of the walking beats and put you somewhere else.” Walk-and-talk programs may therefore be a genuine attempt to introduce foot beats while also a response to limited resources.

These different types of program have not been tested experimentally, so we cannot say for sure whether they are effective. As social scientists, we are reluctant to draw any conclusions from inconclusive (or nonexistent) data, but we also know this is the kind of vacillation that annoys practitioners seeking some indication of best practice. We will therefore offer an opinion based on our extrapolation from the limited existing knowledge.

The problems with limited and temporary programs where officers are encouraged or mandated to talk to the community for an hour a week or an hour a day are numerous. First, we are concerned that the amount of dosage is so small as to have no noticeable impact on either crime or community sentiment. One hour a week, here and there, is probably unlikely to change the perception of risk in the minds of would-be offenders nor will it improve the crime risk perception of potential victims. Second, there is probably insufficient dosage to convince a community that the police department is really investing in community policing in their area. Third, one hour per week (or similar) is probably insufficient time for officers to get into the appropriate mind-set for the change in pace and policing style. If they are spending the other 39 hours of their workweek in a traditional vehicle-based response role, one hour per week of park and walk is probably just viewed by most officers as a necessary evil designed to provide nothing more than merely a gesture to the community. And the community may see it the same way, perceiving a lack of true commitment by the police department.

Of course, it may be that a department is willing but strapped for officers and resources and unable to instigate a permanent patrol in a high-crime area. So is a temporary patrol strategy better than nothing? Perhaps, but this would need to be confirmed with a suitable experimental study. And considerable work may need to be made to convince the officers and the community that the effort is more than a “crowd-pleaser.” Split shifts (four hours in a car, four hours on foot) might be way to test the effectiveness of a higher dosage without committing resources to foot beats permanently and might be an ideal strategy for a department with vehicle shortages.

Incorporating Foot Beats into an Area’s Overall Crime Control Strategy

One frequent finding in the research literature is the relative isolation of foot patrols from their colleagues organizationally. Consider the following from Skogan and colleagues discussing the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy in the 1990s:

As we observed in many areas, important contributions were made by the district’s foot patrol officers. In Fiesta they were particularly enthusiastic about problem solving, and they were repeatedly singled out for praise by community activists. Foot patrol officers were also in close contact with the area’s thriving business community and available by pager. However, as we also frequently observed, they were not considered part of the beat team, did not attend team meetings, had no role in the beat’s implementation plan and were not asked to attend beat community meetings that occurred off their shift (Skogan et al. 1999: 205)

Similarly in the (unnamed) southeastern city of the United States that introduced foot beats to a business area, subsequently studied by Esbensen, the foot patrol officers met with the local area commander, meeting separately from their patrol comrades (Esbensen 1987). There can surely only be benefits if patrol officers in a response capacity are aware of the goals of the foot patrols and can provide appropriate support where necessary, and in return, foot beats can pass on information which may have an intelligence value to their colleagues in motorized patrol. Separate briefings seem to set up an unnecessary divide, and we feel is indicative of a lack of strategy integration at the local level.

A second consideration is the length of time for a foot patrol deployment. More than one study has found a decay in foot patrol effectiveness over time. In Philadelphia, our research into the foot patrol experiment found a decay in effectiveness started during the deployment and progressively got worse during the course of the program. Foot patrol became less effective over time (Sorg et al. 2013). A similar decay was found in the Kansas City Foot Patrol Project (Novak et al. 2016). After 90 days, regression models showed that the foot patrol implementation did not have a statistically significant impact on the number of aggravated assaults and robberies in each area over the entire period of the project. However as noted earlier, the coefficients were in the right direction, and there was no evidence of displacement or a backfire effect (things did not get worse). The researchers did identify an initial impact in the early phase of the foot beat implementation that was statistically significant. This might suggest the sort of treatment decay that was observed in Philadelphia. As the researchers concluded, “an examination of violent crime revealed statistically significant reductions in crime in the micro-places receiving foot patrol treatment, although the deterrent effect quickly decayed,” going on to write “foot patrol need not (and should not) be implemented for the long term, but, rather, may be usefully implemented for relatively short periods.” They estimate 6 weeks as a potential deployment length. It may be that nonpermanent patrols that last a number of weeks are more effective if moved around on an unpredictable basis than having permanent deployments that drag on for months and months with little sign of effectiveness.

The Community Component

While arguing for the use of crime mapping to aid deployment, Craven (2009) adds that foot patrols will be successful with a full involvement of the community in the patrol priorities. She goes on to suggest that departments “recruit a range of individuals (both officers and civilians) to use various models of patrol, demonstrating that both police and civilians can address public expectations through a variety of approaches such as volunteer efforts with neighborhood watch programs and crime-prevention programming.” That might be a bridge too far for some police services; however, her point that foot patrol officers are serving a community support role appears clear. As we pointed out in the introduction to this book, a key component—perhaps the core value of foot beat officers over vehicle patrols—is the ability for officers to be more approachable. Mackenzie and Whitehouse (1995) note that police officers on foot were viewed as approachable by the public, and they found that officers who patrolled on foot alone were deemed as more approachable than officers who patrolled in pairs. The belief that foot beat officers are more approachable has been confirmed by focus groups of the community and foot patrol officers (Cowell and Kringen 2016).

In our 2010 survey of over 100 officers in Philadelphia, many of the survey results were encouraging for the development of community policing. For example, only 7% of officers disagreed (or strongly disagreed) with the statement “police officers should work with the citizens to try and solve problems in their beat,” just 10% disagreed—strongly or otherwise—with the statement “improving the relationship between the PPD and the community is a priority of mine,” and only one person disagreed that “police officers should make frequent informal contacts with the people in their beat” (Ratcliffe et al. 2012). Yet in the same survey, more officers disagreed than agreed with the statement “The [police department] should spend more time getting to know minority communities” and the modal groups were neutral with regard to “The community in my patrol area is appreciative of my presence.”

The challenge with incorporating a community policing element into foot patrol policing is knowing the activities on which to focus. Community policing has been variously described as “a collaboration between the police and the community that identifies and solves community problems” (CPC 1994), as “a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies, which support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime” (U.S. Department of Justice n.d.: 3), or as “an organisational strategy that leaves setting priorities and the means of achieving them largely to residents and the police who serve in their neighbourhoods” (Skogan 2006: 27–28). With such vague definitions, it is clear that community policing can incorporate a myriad of activities including school visits, neighborhood watch, D.A.R.E. training, newsletters, coffee-with-a-cop-type meetings, community meetings, and participating in neighborhood events. Foot patrol officers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hand out slushy tickets to kids, and in New Haven, Connecticut, they hand out their cell phone numbers to people to improve community contact (Cowell and Kringen 2016). In many regards, the fluidity in the elements that people conceive as community policing has led to “fruitless debates” over what constitutes community policing (Mastrofski 2006: 44).

The challenge in an evidence-based policing framework is how to assign meaningful community activities to foot patrol officers, given there is little evidence to support the efficacy (either way) of any specific individual activities at improving crime prevention, public perception of crime risk, or perceptions of police legitimacy. Most police departments engage with all of these activities, mainly through dedicated community liaison officers rather than foot patrol officers. They are probably undertaken with a tacit acknowledgment that all of these tasks may have some undefined value, and therefore they had better do them all, just in case. But if we are to improve the rationale for policing and become more effective and efficient through evidence-based policing, at some point each action and role should individually come under the microscope if we are to disentangle the values of each and ultimately justify the ongoing use of taxpayer funds. And if foot patrol officers are tasked with community support activities, then the mechanisms for reward and accountability should reflect these roles. This challenge is discussed in the next section.

Assessing and Rewarding Foot Patrol

As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Cory Haberman interviewed Philadelphia police district command staff. He wanted to know how they addressed crime in their districts and conceptualized solutions to crime problems. One Philadelphia police captain noted, “When they [potential offenders] see the cops all around here, cops on a bicycle, cops on foot, they may go elsewhere.” Another told Haberman, “My foot beats were off yesterday, I drove by [intersection], all the junkies were on the corner, all the drunks were on the corner. You know, you go by when the foot beats are in there, they’re gone” (Haberman 2016). Clearing corners may be an important activity in terms of public safety, but—as described above—does not necessarily generate arrest statistics or even field interview reports. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, foot patrol officers resolved a public nuisance issue in a manner that didn’t involve an arrest or law enforcement:

The department was receiving numerous complaints about homeless individuals sitting on milk cartons and loitering in front of businesses. One of the foot patrol officers figured out that these individuals were taking the milk cartons from the very businesses that were making the complaints because those businesses were not locking up their storage rooms. That officer went around to all of the businesses and arranged for the businesses to lock up their storage rooms, and the problem subsequently ceased. (Cowell and Kringen 2016: 11)

How then should the value of these actions be assessed, and if it does help to reduce disorder and violence, how do we reward officers for making the additional effort? The generating of statistics has been hugely important in the Compstat environment of New York City (Eterno and Silverman 2006; McDonald 2002), but the nuances of minor community contacts and the role they play in the potential to reduce crime have yet to be explored by criminologists. And approaches like Compstat can drive short-term thinking (Ratcliffe 2016), especially in police departments that have a quota expectation, whether it is formal or informal. Quotas “insult police professionalism and contribute to community hatred of the police. In a quota-driven system, police tend to see all citizens, even the good ones, as potential stats” (Moskos 2008: 206). Increasingly, both patrol officers and command staff recognize that these traditional measures of productivity are irrelevant to the myriad goals of foot patrol assignments (Cowell and Kringen 2016).

At a macro level, if cities are well resourced and have the incentive to do so, regular community surveys can help gauge community sentiment. Craven suggests departments “Complement statistical analysis with a community survey to obtain the opinions of residents and business owners regarding priority issues [and] invite the community to participate in planning sessions” (Craven 2009: 1). Community surveys cannot be one-off events. Individual surveys represent a mere snapshot of community sentiment; however, when multiple surveys are completed, it is possible to determine how community perception of crime and the police is changing over time. This ability to determine a trajectory of community satisfaction is more valuable than a single survey point. This requires cities and police departments to commit to multiple years of surveys and to retain the same questions across those years so that a true comparison can be made.

A possible future alternative to community surveys is the measurement of community sentiment via social media such as Twitter. There is evidence that Twitter data is correlated with reported crime counts, though there are still multiple sources of bias and error in these data (Williams et al. 2017). This is a relatively new area, and at the time of writing, there is little solid and reliable information on how to robustly measure community sentiment using social media. However, it does represent an emerging area that might in the future be able to reduce the costs of gathering public perception without the expense of community surveys. With geolocated tweet activity, it may be possible, in the future, to measure changes in public perception of crime risk or at the microlevel of geography at which foot patrol functions.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have endeavored to coalesce the available evidence and opinions available on best practice for the reader. We have tried to stay within the bounds of the available knowledge, but unfortunately, in many cases, there is simply an absence of robust research to support a policy one way or the other. In other words, we simply do not know what does and does not work in terms of best practice because too few departments have set up foot beats in a way that makes them amenable to study or opened their departments to the possibilities of research. Our conclusions, therefore, come with an important caveat that some of the views are based on our opinion, well known to be the lowest form of viable evidence (Farrington 2003). Many of our recommendations cannot be implemented individually. For example, an assurance from the top has to be met with enthusiasm from rank-and-file officers. As Moskos (2008: 207) notes:

A long-term commitment is needed for foot patrol to reclaim its place as the dominant form of patrol. At the top, the pressure to produce stats needs to let up. The only stats that matter— and they should be related— are crime, fear, and satisfaction. For police officers, foot patrol must be seen as real police work. That change needs to start at the bottom. If the transition to foot or bike isn’t voluntary, the anti–foot patrol mentality will never change.

With these important caveats in place, our policy recommendations from this chapter can be summarized as follows:

Objectives

  • Commanders should establish clear goals for the foot patrol operation.

  • Officers should be briefed on their specific goals and objectives.

  • Briefing of foot patrol should take place alongside other (non-foot) patrols.

  • Occasional foot patrol (for a brief period during a shift) has not yet been demonstrated to be effective.

Recruitment

  • Officers should be selected based on their personality for the intended role.

  • Volunteers should be sought whenever possible.

  • Younger officers may be appropriate when enforcement activities are desired.

  • Late-career officers may be more suited to community engagement.

Area Selection

  • If the local mail carrier does not walk, then the area may not be suitable for foot patrol.

  • Smaller beats encompassing only a few streets appear to be more effective than larger areas that dilute any positive effects.

  • Adjusting beats after they have been operational for a time to avoid deterrence decay seems prudent.

  • Deploying via the spatiotemporal signature of the problem (via the Hotspot Matrix) may increase efficiency.

Demonstrating a Return on the Investment

  • Specific training for the desired role is important, especially with regard to legislation around pedestrian investigations, dealing with people with drug or behavioral problems, and accessing other city support services.

  • Information gathering should be emphasized, and that information should be collated by someone.

  • Measuring community sentiment before and after foot beat deployment may be as helpful in demonstrating the value of the officers’ deployment as crime statistics.

  • Where possible, foot beats should be operationalized so their effectiveness can be tested.

This last point is important for policing. The constraint running through this entire book is the lamentable absence of robust evaluation regarding foot patrol, an absence that hampers the identification of appropriate best practice. Until more police departments are prepared to try different approaches, test them, be prepared for them to not work, and then adapt to better strategies, we will never truly learn how to best deploy foot patrol—or any other tactic. Policing will remain mired in the limited value of experience, opinion, and guesswork.