Fort Myers Police Department Strategies for Policing Innovation - Addressing Micro-Time Hot Spots using Technology

Strategies for Policing Innovation (SPI), Purpose Area 1: Supporting Innovation, provides resources to support projects to implement and test innovative approaches to operational challenges and violent crime reduction. SPI grant recipients will develop innovative, data-driven approaches to challenges currently confronting law enforcement agencies. Recipients must: 1) describe the innovative, data-driven approach to be implemented; 2) create an action plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach; 3) identify a specific violent crime problem to address; 4) develop a prevention, mitigation, or response strategy to address the problem; 5) evaluate the project; and 6) assess and report the results to BJA for public availability. The evaluation design must include outcome measures capable of informing a credible assessment of the effectiveness of the strategies.

Fort Myer Police Department (FMPD) will develop an innovative strategy to address micro-time hot spots of assault (i.e., shootings), robbery, burglary, and theft from motor vehicle. A micro-time hot spot will be defined as three or more incidents occurring in a 5 block or less area over the span of up to 14-days. A dedicated analyst will identify micro-time hot spots for each crime type separately. A bulletin for micro-time hot spots will be sent to the appropriate district commanders and distributed to patrol officers during roll calls where they will be asked to disrupt the patterns using marked and unmarked directed patrols, focused contacts with known prolific offenders, canvassing for investigative leads, covert investigations, and environmental changes as necessary. FMPD will also conduct both training as well as develop internal policies and processes for ensuring the sustainability of the strategy, including (1) a robust analytical process and department policy for identifying micro-time hot spots, (2) a process and policy for tasking patrol districts with disrupting micro-time hot spots, and (3) a process and policy for incorporating accountability measures into FMPD’s tri-weekly CitiStat meetings. FMPD will partner with the University of Cincinnati’s Institute of Crime Science (ICS) to implement the project. ICS will design and execute an independent randomized control trial using at least 50 micro-time hot spots to assess the overall impact of the project.
CA/NCF