Fighting the fear of crime
December 19, 2021
One of the most difficult aspects of policing is reducing or eliminating the fear of crime. Here at the University of Miami (UM), we have a parking lot that is somewhat dark at night because it has many trees that are covering up the street lights. This lot is located on the edge of campus and is adjacent to two buildings that house most of our classrooms. We emphasize our patrol efforts in that parking lot yet people constantly tell us they feel unsafe, even though we have had nearly zero crimes there because of our police omnipresence. When I worked with the City of Miami Police Department, I came in contact with many citizens that felt safe yet they lived in neighborhoods that averaged hundreds of Part I crimes a month. How could that be?
In researching this subject and having access to one of the best libraries in the US, I found many articles written by Jihong (Solomon) Zhao, a professor at Sam Houston State University, on the topic of “the fear of crime.” What Zhao and his partners found worked best at reducing the fear of crime was intentional, non-enforcement, face-to-face contact between officers and citizens.[i] He conducted a great amount of research and collected much data that pointed to the fact that people feel safer and have less fear when they interact with police during a consensual, chance encounter not related to a law enforcement or crime associated police activity. So, the challenge for me was “how do I get my officers to conduct more of these encounters?”
In brainstorming with my staff about this topic, we discussed the Field Interview, or FI cards, that officers fill out when they interact with a suspect, suspicious person or prowler in a neighborhood. These FI cards are filled out by the officer when there is not enough probable cause for an arrest but they have some suspicion that the person was up to no good (have committed or about to commit a crime). The FI cards are used to build probable cause if the subject is encountered again or to identify or target possible suspects when another crime is reported in the same area. The FI card is a very valuable tool to law enforcement.
We took that same concept and created what we call a “Friendly Interaction”, or FI card for positive encounters. Every day, we hand out two cards to each of our officers and assign them two people that they must interact with during their tour of duty in a friendly, non-law enforcement, encounter or meeting. We select people from a list that includes previous victims of crimes, community leaders, top administrators, random UM populace, and outside resource partners. The card (see attached) includes a sample of the remarks the officer should make to the person during the encounter and the card has space for the officer to gather some information that we can later use for data mining or to send out additional crime information to the person or as a quality control tool.
Our Crime Prevention Manager, Alexandra Martinez, runs the FI program for us. She consults with us and suggests people that we would like for the officers to “encounter” during the week and she keeps a spreadsheet of all our contacts. The difficult part comes in the measuring the effectiveness of the program. Are we reducing the fear of crime or not? We feel that if we follow the recommendations of all the studies on this topic we will have a positive effect in reducing the fear of crime.
[i] (Source: Zhao, Jihong., Scheider, M., & Thurman, Q. (2002). The effect of police presence on public fear reduction and satisfaction: a review of the literature. The justice Professional, 15(3), 273-299.)
