THE KANSAS CITY FOOT PATROL PROJECT: AN EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FOOT PATROL IN VIOLENT CRIME MICRO-PLACES

Abstract

The Kansas City Foot Patrol Project is a replication of the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment (Ratcliffe et al. (2011). The current study was conducted in Kansas City, Missouri and evaluated the effectiveness of foot patrol in violent crime micro-places. Specifically the goal of foot patrol was to reduce incidents of aggravated assaults and robberies in the micro-places. For a period of 90 days 8 pairs of rookie officers patrolled on foot in violent crime micro-places. The foot patrols operated Tuesday thru Saturday from August 1, 2011 to October 31, 2011. The number of reported aggravated assaults and robberies in four target areas were compared pretreatment, during treatment, and post treatment for within group variance. Repeated measures t-tests were conducted to determine the statistical significance of any observed differences in reported incidents. The current study found a significant reduction of targeted offenses in the target areas during treatment. During the first 6 weeks of treatment an especially significant reduction of reported aggravated assaults and robberies occurred. Then as treatment continued the reported incidents returned to pretreatment levels even while treatment continued. Policy implications and areas for future research are discussed.