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>The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of the proactive policing of disorder on crime-related calls for service (CFS) in Houston, Texas. A principal feature of the organizational structure of the Houston Police Department is the strategic deployment of a Differential Response Team (DRT) at the patrol division whose task is to target and take action against social and physical disorder (without prioritizing arrests) >This study was a partial test of broken windows thesis by examining the association between disorder policing activities and crime-related calls in Houston. >There is an obvious difference between the current study and previous studies on testing the effectiveness of police intervention derived from the broken windows thesis. A review of the literature revealed that most studies on this topic have used one of two popular approaches. The first approach relies on the study of police intervention in a geographic area such as a patrol district (e.g., Hoover et al., 2016; McGarrell et al., 1999) or a block/intersection (e.g., Lawton et al., 2005). In these studies, the police intervention was often measured as the strategic allocation of additional resources to a given geographic area/location. Additional patrol officers, for example, were made available to enhance police presence and increase the number of arrests as a way of deterring crimes. Many of the intervention programs studied were supported by external grant funding received from federal, state, or local governments (e.g., Lawton et al., 2005). It is noteworthy that almost all of the studies were carried out in a short period of time from 1-day interventions (Nunn et al., 2006), 1-month interventions (Novak et al., 1999), to a period of 2 years (Caeti, 1999). The average range of period of intervention among these studies was about 12 months (e.g., Braga et al., 2015). Most recently, in a review of aggressive policing studies, particularly in hotspots, Nagin and Sampson (2019) noted that the short-time frame of intervention can lead to inaccurate research results regarding the effectiveness of a program. >Our findings suggest that the DRT overall did not produce significant effects on crime-related calls, with only one out of five space-time patterns showing demonstrable benefit. >The findings also suggested that overall, the DRT intervention process did not achieve the anticipated objective of a significant reduction in crime-related calls over the period of the study. Only DRT intervention in sporadic places—where the DRT activity is an on-again then off-again intervention—showed a statistically significant decline in crime-related CFS, and the DRT intervention in the rest of the four areas failed to yield any significant effect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10986111221092... |