Proactive Police Patrolling Can Reduce Gun Crimes, Study finds

A new study conducted by researchers from Sam Houston State University revealed that proactive police patrolling can significantly reduce gun crimes.

Researchers from Sam Houston State University found that when a concentrated, proactive patrol unit in the Houston Police Department made illegal gun possession arrests, gun crimes in that area significantly reduced. This led them to conduct a study to determine the link between police patrolling and gun crimes.

"These findings add to the growing evidence that supports the use of directed patrols to target illegal gun possession in high crime locations," wrote Dr. William Wells, who co-authored the study with Yan Zhang and Jihong Zhao at SHSU's College of Criminal Justice, in a press release. "An interesting phenomenon observed in Houston and in other cities is that relatively small numbers of additional gun seizures (and gun possession arrests in the current analysis) generate meaningful results."

Researchers of the study looked into data from Houston Police Department's Crime Reduction Unit (CRU), which mainly targets high crime areas with concentrated patrols, frequent contacts with suspicious individuals, and arrests for drug and weapons offenses. They found that the high volume of gun possession arrests made by the department had a "significant impact" on reducing crimes related to the firearms.

The department's Crime Reduction Unit was established Nov. 2007 and hence, researchers were only able to look at data ranging from that time to August 2008. According to the data, the unit made 197 illegal gun possession arrests and most of them were in areas with high crime rates.

The study, "The effects of gun possession arrests made by a proactive police patrol unit," was published in Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management and recently was presented the 2013 Outstanding Paper Award from the Emerald Literati Network.