Hot spot policing — a staple of law-enforcement playbooks for decades — sounds simple enough: Put cops where the shootings, thefts and drug deals are happening. 

But in an era when law enforcement agencies are under intense scrutiny, police across the country have given hot spot policing a more neighborhood-friendly makeover.

Today’s hot spot tactics aren’t just about flooding troubled neighborhoods with officers and patrols. Departments are taking enforcement directly to what they see as the source of violence in a neighborhood: specific places — like clubs or hangouts — and specific troublemakers — repeat offenders usually.

“It’s not the hot spot necessarily — it’s the hot spot within the hot spot that’s important,” Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told The Washington Times. “Identifying certain individuals, breaking up networks of criminal activity that it’s occurring in those areas … as opposed to some dragnet approach.” 

Hot spot policing was pioneered by criminologists nearly three decades ago when researchers found that crime wasn’t concentrated in just the “bad parts of town,” but often to a few select blocks in a city.

The policing strategy has evolved from identifying a handful of geographic areas where crime is taking place to figuring out which exact residential dwellings or corner stores are breeding grounds for disorder, and sometimes, bloodshed.

Police have even taken that refinement a step further and are now identifying the crooks who frequent those spots and are most responsible for the violence that tears communities apart.

When Chief Garcia became Dallas’ top cop in 2021, he said he worked with criminologists at the University of Texas-San Antonio to divide the city into a 101,000-part grid. 

About 65 of those gridded slots are of primary concern to Chief Garcia — those 65 parcels represent a tiny fraction of less than 1% of the city geographically, but those parcels contribute to about 5% of the city’s overall crime.

The chief said Dallas police “treat” crime in those areas with their Place Network Investigation teams. 

While the PNI targets are slightly larger than the police grids, they’re still only the size of a football field, and often cover locations such as an apartment complex. 

Chief Garcia said the numbers show precision raids by Dallas’ PNI teams are proving effective. 

He told The Times that while total arrests are down year-over-year in the city by 4%, they’re up by 25% in the scaled-down hotspots identified and targeted by police. The chief added that violence-related calls for service fell by 1.5% citywide, but they’ve fallen 10% in the treated hot spots.

Even better: the neighboring areas surrounding those PNI locations — the “catchment” area as Chief Garcia called it — didn’t see any crime runoff come their way. Instead, those areas saw a 10% drop in overall crime as well once the problematic building or individuals were handled by law enforcement.

Different cities have different demands, and predictably, different approaches to addressing their own criminal element.

Labor Day marked the end of Detroit’s summer hot spot program where city police worked with state and federal prosecutors to crack down on violent offenders in the historically crime-ridden 8th and 9th precincts. The summer program began on Memorial Day.

Dawn Ison, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said that people arrested for carjacking, commercial armed robbery or various gun offenses in those precincts during the enforcement period would be charged federally for those crimes — meaning much harsher sentences for criminals.

The enforcement partners also sent a letter to 200 people on probation, parole or supervised release in the precincts that warned them about the tougher prison terms they’d risk by reoffending.

“We don’t want anyone to think that we’re soft on enforcement,” Ms. Ison told The Times.

Early returns were mostly promising for the summer hot spot strategy.

Detroit Police Chief James White said major crimes fell by 18% in the 8th Precinct and by nearly 10% in 9th Precinct when compared to last summer.

That includes reductions in carjackings, robberies and aggravated assaults in both precincts, though the chief did note that the 8th Precinct saw four more homicides this summer than it did in 2022.

Ms. Ison said separately that nonfatal shootings went down 15% this summer, which means fewer lives lost but also more evidence to be gathered for the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. 

NIBIN has been key in developing leads on who the “hot” people are roaming about Motor City, according to Chief White.

The database can decipher which gun a shell casing came from and connect the weapon to other crimes and suspects who are involved in the tit-for-tat shootings that drive Detroit’s deadly violence.

“[NIBIN’s] helped us close a lot of cases, [and] if not close, link cases together that we wouldn’t have otherwise known were linked together,” Chief White told The Times. “Super valuable with retaliatory crimes. We see a lot of gang shootings, and things like that, that are retaliatory in nature. And we’re able to see that that one weapon has been used in a number of different shootings.”

Police leaders in the District of Columbia are using their own hot spot strategy to cut down on the robberies and carjackings driving the city’s ongoing crime wave.

Acting Police Chief Pamela Smith said in August the department was conducting a Robbery Suppression Initiative in areas where armed stick-ups and car thefts were occurring at a higher rate. 

She said the initiative brought a 21% reduction of offenses in those zones, though year-over-year increases in robberies (up 65%) and carjackings (up 103%) still remain high citywide.   

The persistent violence in the District has seen D.C. Council members try to stem the tide with emergency laws designed to give judges more power to lock up defendants accused of violent crimes while they await trial.

Federal lawmakers on Capitol Hill have chided the local government’s inability to protect its citizens, and one legislator recently hosted a meeting to debrief congressional colleagues and staffers on protecting themselves on District streets.

Life for cops working inside a hot spot isn’t only about cracking down on thugs.

Charles Ramsey, a former police chief in the District and Philadelphia, told The Times it’s important for officers to get to know people in the community who live around that crime every day. 

During his time in Philadelphia from 2008 to 2016, Mr. Ramsey wanted cops to do foot patrol in the hot spots that he identified with the help of Temple University criminologists.

There was a clear public safety benefit to having cops walk the block — he said crime went down 28% in the hot spots where officers were on foot — but it was also a formative lesson for police rookies.  

“It teaches the cops, at a very early age on the job, that there are more decent law-abiding people living in that neighborhood than there are criminals,” he told The Times. 

“You don’t see that when you’re driving down the street at 30 miles an hour with the windows rolled up,” he said.

There’s a science behind making stronger ties with the residents that cops are sworn to protect.

David Weisburd, a renowned criminologist at George Mason University who helped develop the practice of hot spot policing, said training police in “procedural justice” also has a deterrent effect on crime.

Procedural justice is an academic way of saying “be friendly,” but Mr. Weisburd said there’s evidence that people are less likely to commit crimes when there is a perception that cops in their neighborhoods are congenial.

Mr. Weisburd referenced a study of his that compared officers who used procedural justice with those who didn’t in three different cities — Cambridge, Massachusetts; Houston, Texas, and Tucson, Arizona.

The procedural justice group in all three cities saw 60% fewer arrests and a 14% reduction in crime versus the control group.    

“A lot of people would argue if the police are ‘tougher and meaner’ and whatever, they’ll do better,” Mr. Weisburd said. “This doesn’t suggest that; this suggests that if we’re more respectful, we’ll get even more deterrence.”

Another way to foster relations between police and residents is to combine hot spot enforcement with access to social services. 

Departments in both Dallas and Detroit are using the greater police presence to introduce wraparound services that help get people back on their feet financially or find a place to stay.

In Detroit, that means local police and federal partners helped people get their GED or apply for a driver’s license. Those resources, and others, were readily available to residents at a “Peacenic” held in each targeted precinct.

Chief Garcia in Dallas said he walks through the city’s troubled neighborhoods to get a feel for the quality of life issues they’re dealing with. 

Part of his crims-fighting solution might mean fixing a dilapidated playground or adding more lighting to illuminate dark areas.

To him, these small things all contribute to the behaviors that can lead to a life of crime.

“When people live in hopeless situations, they do hopeless things that we have to respond to,” Chief Garcia said. 

• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.