What Works in American Policing Part 3—Hot Spots and Precision Policing: Putting Officers Where the Data Points

This is the third in a seven-part series examining the policing strategies that shape public safety in America, including what the evidence supports, what has fallen short, and what policymakers and practitioners should prioritize going forward.

Of all the strategies examined in this series, hot spots policing and precision policing rest on what may be the most replicated empirical finding in criminology: Crime does not spread evenly across a city. It clusters at a handful of specific locations—particular intersections, blocks, or even individual addresses—that generate a wildly disproportionate share of calls to police. The logic that follows is straightforward: If crime concentrates in predictable places, then police resources should concentrate there, too. The National Institute of Justice’s CrimeSolutions clearinghouse rates hot spots policing as “Effective” for reducing overall crime and “Promising” for reducing violent, property, public order, and drug and alcohol offenses. It is one of only a handful of policing strategies to earn those designations.

The Science of Crime Concentration

The intellectual foundation for hot spots policing was laid in 1989 when Lawrence Sherman, Patrick Gartin, and Michael Buerger published an analysis of 323,979 calls to police across all 115,000 addresses and intersections in Minneapolis over one year. Their findings were striking: Just 3 percent of places generated 50 percent of all calls to police. All robberies in the city came from just 2.2 percent of locations, and all rapes from 1.2 percent. The study coined the term “hot spots” and launched an entirely new field—the criminology of place—that shifted attention from why certain people commit crime to why crime happens where it does.

To understand why crime clusters so stubbornly in particular locations, researchers drew on routine activity theory—the idea that crime requires the convergence of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian at the same time and place. Certain locations bring these elements together repeatedly (e.g., poorly lit parking lots, high-traffic convenience stores, bars near transit stops). The places themselves generate conditions that attract or facilitate crime—and those conditions tend to persist without intervention.

Over the next two decades, researchers replicated this pattern in cities across the United States and around the world. In 2014, David Weisburd formalized these findings in his Sutherland Address to the American Society of Criminology, proposing a “law of crime concentration.” Across eight cities of varying size, Weisburd found that roughly 2 to 6 percent of street segments produced 50 percent of crime—a concentration so consistent that he argued it constituted a criminological law. Subsequent studies in Vancouver, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and cities across England and Wales confirmed the pattern. In practical terms, a remarkably small number of places generate an overwhelming share of any city’s crime problem and tend to stay hot year after year.

From Observation to Experiment

Knowing where crime concentrates was only the first step. The critical question was whether directing officers to those locations would actually reduce crime or if it would simply move elsewhere. The Minneapolis Hot Spots Experiment was the first randomized controlled trial to test that question. The 1995 study randomly assigned 110 high-crime address clusters to either receive doubled police patrol presence or maintain normal levels and then tracked outcomes over a full year using 7,542 hours of systematic observation. The results showed 6 to 13 percent reductions in crime calls at treated hot spots, with observed disorder cut roughly in half.

What happened next is what separates a single promising study from a genuine evidence base. Researchers replicated the experiment in city after city. For example, police in Lowell, Massachusetts, used crime analysis to identify the city’s highest-crime micro-locations and deployed tailored responses (e.g., better lighting, code enforcement, increased patrol, nuisance abatement) at those sites. A randomized controlled trial found a nearly 20 percent reduction in calls for service at treated locations, with no evidence of displacement.

By 2019, Anthony Braga, Brandon Turchan, and two of their colleagues had compiled 65 eligible studies containing 78 tests of hot spots policing interventions into an updated meta-analysis. Findings included a statistically significant overall effect favoring hot spots policing, with 62 of 78 tests reporting noteworthy crime reductions. Perhaps most importantly, the review’s analysis of displacement found that crime control benefits were more likely to diffuse into surrounding areas than to displace—meaning nearby blocks often became safer, too. The 2018 National Academies report on proactive policing reached the same conclusion: Hot spots policing is an effective approach for obtaining short-term reductions in crime and is supported by one of the strongest evidence bases in all of criminology.

The Emergence of Precision Policing

Hot spots policing tells agencies where to focus. Precision policing tells officers how to focus once they arrive.

The concept emerged from the New York City Police Department (NYPD)’s experience with Compstat, the data-driven management system launched in 1994 that made place-based resource allocation a standard practice across American policing. Compstat’s early iterations delivered dramatic crime reductions, but by the late 2000s, the enforcement-heavy model had produced over 685,000 civilian stops in a single year (2011)—a volume that a federal court ruled unconstitutional and that damaged police-community relations. The lesson was not that place-based policing was wrong, but that high-volume, indiscriminate enforcement was neither constitutionally sustainable nor operationally necessary.

A 2018 essay coined the alternative approach: precision policing. The concept combines two elements that traditional hot spots policing sometimes lacks: a focused investigative component that targets not just places but also specific people and networks driving the most serious violence, and a neighborhood coordination effort that pairs enforcement with outreach to build resident relationships in targeted areas. Under William J. Bratton’s second tenure as commissioner (2014–2016), the NYPD reduced stops by more than an order of magnitude and reduced arrests and summonses as well—all while driving crime down overall. The people-focused element of precision policing builds on principles similar to  focused deterrence, which delivers direct warnings to the highest-risk individuals and groups alongside offers of social services—an approach with its own strong evidence base. Focused deterrence centers on a communicated ultimatum to specific offenders, while precision policing is a broader operational philosophy that reorganizes how a department investigates, deploys, and engages with neighborhoods.

Constitutional Boundaries and Accountability

The strongest evidence base in criminology does not exempt these strategies from constitutional scrutiny. While these strategies do not inherently violate the Fourth Amendment, any approach can produce constitutional violations when officers make stops, searches, and arrests without the legal justification required for each individual encounter. This risk is especially real when agencies rely on aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics to achieve deterrence rather than place-based interventions that address underlying conditions.

The NYPD’s own history illustrates both sides of this equation. The department’s experience with mass stop-and-frisk showed what happens when place-based strategy devolves into volume-driven enforcement without adequate oversight: constitutional violations, eroded community trust, and federal oversight that continues to this day. The subsequent shift toward precision policing demonstrated that the same department could achieve better public safety outcomes with dramatically fewer enforcement contacts.

Agencies pursuing hot spots and precision strategies must build in accountability from the start: clear use-of-force policies, data transparency on enforcement activity at targeted locations, supervisory oversight of officer contacts, and public engagement in how hot spots are identified and policed. Tailored, place-based approaches that address the underlying conditions generating crime at a location produce greater effects than interventions that simply increase levels of traditional enforcement. A meta-analysis focused on violence found that these tailored approaches achieved a 35 percent reduction at treated locations (compared to 16 percent for traditional patrol alone). Agencies that build their strategies around problem solving rather than aggressive patrol are better positioned to reduce crime and maintain the community trust that effective policing depends on.

The Adoption Gap: From Big Cities to Main Streets

Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that only 27 percent of all U.S. law enforcement agencies used data for hot spots analysis as of 2020. While all agencies serving populations of 250,000 or more reported doing so, fewer than 10 percent of those serving populations under 2,500 did. Many perceive this strategy as a big-city solution to big-city problems; however, the law of crime concentration holds even in smaller jurisdictions, where hot spots still exist but may differ in size and severity.

But that perception is wrong. The Riley County Police Department in Kansas—a 105-officer agency serving roughly 71,000 residents—demonstrated what is possible when a mid-sized agency embraces the approach. Beginning in 2012, Riley County used crime analysis to identify micro-hot spots at the street-segment level and directed regular patrol visits to those locations—parking visibly, getting out of their vehicles, and engaging in positive community contacts rather than aggressive enforcement stops.  Officers integrated these visits into their regular routines with no overtime and no additional officers. An evaluation found that the hot spots targeting helped reduce crime not just at targeted blocks but across the entire city: citywide calls decreased 12 percent for disorder, 18 percent for property crime, and 41 percent for violent crime. No other hot spots policing study had ever demonstrated a citywide impact. Riley County proved that a mid-sized agency with the right culture, leadership, and research partnerships could implement and sustain the strategy without additional resources.

The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin has highlighted similar practical models for small agencies, including deployment plans that minimize geographic boundaries and maximize incident-based deployment—what practitioners call putting “cops on the dots.” Small jurisdictions can identify hot spots with something as basic as a pin map; the analytical sophistication can scale to meet the agency’s size. The key insight from both the research and from agencies like Riley County is that hot spots policing is not a specialized program requiring a dedicated unit—it is a way of organizing everyday patrol around data rather than tradition.

Assessment

The empirical support for hot spots and precision policing is among the strongest in the field. Both approaches produce statistically significant crime reductions at targeted locations with diffusion benefits rather than displacement. Operationally, concentrating resources on a small set of locations is inherently more efficient than distributing them uniformly—making these approaches highly compatible with the resource constraints that define contemporary policing. Neither strategy inherently violates the Fourth Amendment, though implementation carries real risks when agencies rely on high-volume stops rather than tailored, place-based interventions. And directing resources to documented hot spots is among the most cost-effective combinations available. Departments that can demonstrate crime reduction at targeted locations, with data transparency on what they did and where, are in the strongest position to justify public safety budgets to taxpayers and legislators.

Few policing strategies can match this evidence base. The challenge is not whether hot spots and precision policing work but whether agencies—particularly the smaller departments that make up the backbone of American policing—have the analytical systems, training infrastructure, constitutional guardrails, and community trust to implement them responsibly. How to get the targeting right while also getting the trust right is the operational question every department must answer.

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Next in this series: Part 4—Problem-Oriented and Intelligence-Led Policing: Diagnosing the Problem Before Deploying the Response