Building on a research partnership with the Albany Police Department that dates to 1998, the Institute is taking steps that will strengthen and better institutionalize the collaboration. The partnership is organized in terms of a project working group and a steering committee – the new Research Advisory Council (RAC) – that sets direction for and exercises oversight over partnership work, and also serves as a forum for formal exchanges about research. The enhanced partnership has initially undertaken research designed to increase the efficiency of proactive policing, increasing the ratio of successful or other “high-value” stops to all stops. Proactive policing would thus be conducted more surgically, such that the stops that are made would have the greatest potential crime-reduction benefits, perhaps mitigating the adverse consequences of proactive policing without vitiating its crime control value. We conducted analysis designed to support efforts to direct proactive policing to high-crime areas at high-crime times and to high-risk people, and we are analyzing the practices of officers who are demonstrably successful in making high-value stops.
Supported by the National Institute of Justice [April, 2014 – December, 2018]
Publications, Reports and Presentations
Robert E. Worden, Andrew P. Wheeler, and Sarah J. McLean, 2016. “Smart Stops: Toward More Strategic Proactive Policing,” Paper Presented at the American Society of Criminology Meeting, New Orleans, LA. November.
Andrew P. Wheeler, Robert E. Worden, and Sarah J. McLean, 2016. “Replicating Group-Based Trajectory Models of Crime at Micro-Places in Albany, NY,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 32: 589-612.
Andrew P. Wheeler, Sarah J. McLean and Robert E. Worden, 2016. “Making Stops Smart: Predicting Arrest Rates from Discretionary Police Stops at Micro-Places in Albany, NY,” Paper presented at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Meeting, Denver, Colorado. March.
Sarah J. McLean, Danielle L. Reynolds, Robert E. Worden and Caitlin J. Dole, 2017. “The Skills of Proactive Policing,” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology.
Andrew P. Wheeler, Jasmine R. Silver, Robert E. Worden, and Sarah J. McLean, 2017. “Mapping Attitudes towards the Police at Micro-Places.”