Jerry H Ratcliffe
Biographic Data
| ID | 3424299 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jerry H Ratcliffe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jerry H |
| FAMILY NAME | Ratcliffe |
| SIGNATURE | RATCLIFFE J H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Temple University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0730-6761 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 240 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Connected to the end: The deterrence/identity continuum in online criminal networks
Aiding or enabling? Officer perspectives on harm reduction and support services in an open-air drug market
Police officers are stationed on the frontlines of open-air drug markets and regularly intervene in issues resulting from public drug consumption and overdoses. Police departments are increasingly being asked to adopt harm reduction approaches to deal with the health and safety consequences of drug use. As officer buy-in is essential to intervention success, it is important to assess officer attitudes towards their evolving duties. This study dra…
Like aspirin for arthritis”: A qualitative study of conditional cyber‐deterrence associated with police crackdowns on the dark web
Research summary Crackdowns are law enforcement strategies based on the principles of deterrence theory, which stipulates that offenders are rational actors who will refrain from crime if perceived risks are higher than perceived benefits. Studies have shown that the effects of police street drug crackdowns are mostly short termed and followed by considerable displacement. In the early 2010s, an important part of illicit drug trades moved online …
The disproportionate impact of post-George Floyd violence increases on minority neighborhoods in Philadelphia
Was the pope to blame? Statistical powerlessness and the predictive policing of micro‐scale randomized control trials
Research Summary Hinkle et al. (2013) highlighted a statistical powerlessness problem in hot‐spots policing experiments in midsized cities with moderate property crime rates. The current work demonstrates that this problem is less readily resolved than previously suspected. It reviews results from a predictive policing randomized control trial in a large city with property crime rates higher than Chicago or Los Angeles. It reports, for the first …
Conflicts and congruencies between predictive policing and the patrol officer’s craft
In what ways does the introduction of micro-grid crime prediction technology conflict with or align with patrolling officers’ craft? We investigate this question using qualitative data collected during a randomised experiment carried out in a large urban police department in the U.S. The current investigation responds to earlier scholars lamenting the ‘meaning gap’ in works examining police technology adoption. Researchers rode along with officer…
Intelligence-Led Policing
This paper is timely, given that is currently going through a period of significant change in both operational tactics and organisational structures. New ideas in crime reduction and changes to short- and long-term strategies are underway. Intelligence-led represents a recent approach and is one of the more prevalent of the current shifts in crime control philosophy and practice (Maguire 2000). Surprisingly, given the wide distribution of the ter…
Aligning policing and public health promotion: Insights from the world of foot patrol
Foot patrol work is rarely described in relation to public health, even though police routinely encounter health risk behaviors and environments. Through a qualitative study of foot patrol policing in violent ‘hotspots’ of Philadelphia, we explore some prospects and challenges associated with bridging security and public health considerations in law enforcement. Noting existing efforts to help advance police officer knowledge of, and attitudes to…
Place Matters: Criminology for the Twenty-First Century
Over the last two decades, there has been increased interest in the distribution of crime and other antisocial behavior at lower levels of geography. The focus on micro geography and its contribution to the understanding and prevention of crime has been called the 'criminology of place'. It pushes scholars to examine small geographic areas within cities, often as small as addresses or street segments, for their contribution to crime. Here, the au…
Testing for Temporally Differentiated Relationships Among Potentially Criminogenic Places and Census Block Street Robbery Counts
This study examined street robbery patterns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from the years 2009 to 2011 to determine whether the effects of potentially criminogenic places are different across different periods of the day. Census block (N = 13,164) street robbery counts across four periods (6:45 a.m . to 9:59 a.m., 10:00 a.m . to 4:29 p.m ., 4:30 p.m . to 9:14 p.m ., and 9:15 p.m. to 6:44 a.m. ) were modeled with 12 different potentially criminoge…
Does What Police Do at Hot Spots Matter? The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment
Policing tactics that are proactive, focused on small places or groups of people in small places, and tailor specific solutions to problems using careful analysis of local conditions seem to be effective at reducing violent crime. But which tactics are most effective when applied at hot spots remains unknown. This article documents the design and implementation of a randomized controlled field experiment to test three policing tactics applied to …
Central American police perception of street gang characteristics
This article examines the characteristics of Central American street gangs perceived as successful from the perspective of police officers working in high concentration gang areas. About 126 officers from seven Central American countries prioritised a list of characteristics adopted from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Sleipnir matrix. Results suggest some regional commonalities but also significant local variation in numerous characteristics…
Cops as treatment providers: Realities and ironies of police work in a foot patrol experiment
Experimental research on policing is inspired by the public health analogy of officers as treatment providers. A randomised violence reduction experiment in Philadelphia recently used foot patrols as place-based interventions in violent city spaces during a hot spots policing experiment, and a 23% reduction in violent crime was observed. This paper reports on field observations of foot patrol officers involved in this experiment, which were desig…
Need drugs, will travel: The distances to crime of illegal drug buyers
Foot Patrol in Violent Crime Hot Spots: The Longitudinal Impact of Deterrence and Posttreatment Effects of Displacement
This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman's (1990) concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multilevel growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a de…
The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots
Originating with the Newark, NJ, foot patrol experiment, research has found police foot patrols improve community perception of the police and reduce fear of crime, but they are generally unable to reduce the incidence of crime. Previous tests of foot patrol have, however, suffered from statistical and measurement issues and have not fully explored the potential dynamics of deterrence within microspatial settings. In this article, we report on th…
Space–Time Patterns of Risk: A Cross National Assessment of Residential Burglary Victimization
Roles of neighborhood race and status in the middle stages of juror selection
Nonresidential Crime Attractors and Generators Elevate Perceived Neighborhood Crime and Incivilities
Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about the impacts of local nonresidential land uses on perceived incivilities. This study advances work in this area by developing a land-use perspective theoretically grounded in Brantingham and Brantingham's geometry of crime model in environmental criminology. That focus directs attention to specific classes of land uses and suggests relevance of land uses beyond and within respondents' neighbo…
A Temporal Constraint Theory to Explain Opportunity-Based Spatial Offending Patterns
This article will examine the evidence supporting the notion that a proportion of offending is driven by the availability of opportunities presented in the routine activities of offenders’ lives. It then proceeds to summarize Miller’s time measurement theory in order to describe a basic language with which to discuss the movement of people through time and space. Armed with a notation for space-time interactions, the article explores the criminol…
The Effectiveness of Police Intelligence Management: A New Zealand Case Study
Intelligence‐driven policing strategies are coming to the fore in many countries around the world. This is evidenced by the espousal of the term in the mission statements of police services in Australia and New Zealand, the recent adoption of the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan by the US government, and most notably by the legal commitment to the National Intelligence Model in the UK through the Police Reform Act of 2002. This paper c…
GIS and Crime Mapping
GIS and Crime Mapping is the definitive text to support readers with the fundamental theory, scientific methodologies, analysis techniques, application design, and management processes for implementing and developing crime mapping. The book includes a comprehensive presentation of GIS, crime mapping and geographic crime analysis solutions for operational, tactical, investigative, and strategic policing and crime reduction purposes. Topics in this…
Geocoding crime and a first estimate of a minimum acceptable hit rate
Spatial crime analysis relies not only on accurate geocoding but also the achievement of a high level of geocoding success. Geocoding is the task of converting locations, such as the addresses of burglary victims, into grid coordinates and is a task performed regularly by many crime analysts. Data sources include police offence and incident databases where the quality of geographical references can vary. The reality of dealing with this real worl…
The Hotspot Matrix: A Framework for the Spatio‐Temporal Targeting of Crime Reduction
The growth of intelligence‐led policing has placed even greater emphasis on the clear identification of crime hotspots as well as the choice of the crime reduction or detection strategy identified to combat a problem. Crime hotspots are becoming central to policing strategy in many locations, as they enable an operational commander to focus resources into the areas of highest need. This paper outlines the techniques used to identify the spatial a…
Damned If You Don't, Damned If You Do: Crime Mapping and its Implications in the Real World
A small but growing North American trend is the publication of maps of crime on the Internet. A number of web sites allow observers to view the spatial distribution of crime in various American cities, often to a considerable resolution, and increasingly in an interactive format. The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to map crime is a rapidly expanding field that is, as this paper will explain, still in a developmental stag…
The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots
Originating with the Newark, NJ, foot patrol experiment, research has found police foot patrols improve community perception of the police and reduce fear of crime, but they are generally unable to reduce the incidence of crime. Previous tests of foot patrol have, however, suffered from statistical and measurement issues and have not fully explored the potential dynamics of deterrence within microspatial settings. In this article, we report on th…
Nonresidential Crime Attractors and Generators Elevate Perceived Neighborhood Crime and Incivilities
Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about the impacts of local nonresidential land uses on perceived incivilities. This study advances work in this area by developing a land-use perspective theoretically grounded in Brantingham and Brantingham's geometry of crime model in environmental criminology. That focus directs attention to specific classes of land uses and suggests relevance of land uses beyond and within respondents' neighbo…
Testing for Temporally Differentiated Relationships Among Potentially Criminogenic Places and Census Block Street Robbery Counts
This study examined street robbery patterns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from the years 2009 to 2011 to determine whether the effects of potentially criminogenic places are different across different periods of the day. Census block (N = 13,164) street robbery counts across four periods (6:45 a.m . to 9:59 a.m., 10:00 a.m . to 4:29 p.m ., 4:30 p.m . to 9:14 p.m ., and 9:15 p.m. to 6:44 a.m. ) were modeled with 12 different potentially criminoge…
Does What Police Do at Hot Spots Matter? The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment
Policing tactics that are proactive, focused on small places or groups of people in small places, and tailor specific solutions to problems using careful analysis of local conditions seem to be effective at reducing violent crime. But which tactics are most effective when applied at hot spots remains unknown. This article documents the design and implementation of a randomized controlled field experiment to test three policing tactics applied to …
Intelligence-led policing and the problems of turning rhetoric into practice
Policing strategies, and the terminology that accompanies them, can now be rapidly disseminated around the world. New tactics that are seen to apparently work elsewhere are often demanded of local police before any real evaluation has taken place. This paper looks at 'intelligence-led policing' - currently seen as one of the more positive contributions that policing can make to crime prevention and reduction. In the context of policing in Austral…
Damned If You Don't, Damned If You Do: Crime Mapping and its Implications in the Real World
A small but growing North American trend is the publication of maps of crime on the Internet. A number of web sites allow observers to view the spatial distribution of crime in various American cities, often to a considerable resolution, and increasingly in an interactive format. The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to map crime is a rapidly expanding field that is, as this paper will explain, still in a developmental stag…
Foot Patrol in Violent Crime Hot Spots: The Longitudinal Impact of Deterrence and Posttreatment Effects of Displacement
This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman's (1990) concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multilevel growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a de…
Conflicts and congruencies between predictive policing and the patrol officer’s craft
In what ways does the introduction of micro-grid crime prediction technology conflict with or align with patrolling officers’ craft? We investigate this question using qualitative data collected during a randomised experiment carried out in a large urban police department in the U.S. The current investigation responds to earlier scholars lamenting the ‘meaning gap’ in works examining police technology adoption. Researchers rode along with officer…
The disproportionate impact of post-George Floyd violence increases on minority neighborhoods in Philadelphia
Cops as treatment providers: Realities and ironies of police work in a foot patrol experiment
Experimental research on policing is inspired by the public health analogy of officers as treatment providers. A randomised violence reduction experiment in Philadelphia recently used foot patrols as place-based interventions in violent city spaces during a hot spots policing experiment, and a 23% reduction in violent crime was observed. This paper reports on field observations of foot patrol officers involved in this experiment, which were desig…
Need drugs, will travel: The distances to crime of illegal drug buyers
Was the pope to blame? Statistical powerlessness and the predictive policing of micro‐scale randomized control trials
Research Summary Hinkle et al. (2013) highlighted a statistical powerlessness problem in hot‐spots policing experiments in midsized cities with moderate property crime rates. The current work demonstrates that this problem is less readily resolved than previously suspected. It reviews results from a predictive policing randomized control trial in a large city with property crime rates higher than Chicago or Los Angeles. It reports, for the first …
Aiding or enabling? Officer perspectives on harm reduction and support services in an open-air drug market
Police officers are stationed on the frontlines of open-air drug markets and regularly intervene in issues resulting from public drug consumption and overdoses. Police departments are increasingly being asked to adopt harm reduction approaches to deal with the health and safety consequences of drug use. As officer buy-in is essential to intervention success, it is important to assess officer attitudes towards their evolving duties. This study dra…
Like aspirin for arthritis”: A qualitative study of conditional cyber‐deterrence associated with police crackdowns on the dark web
Research summary Crackdowns are law enforcement strategies based on the principles of deterrence theory, which stipulates that offenders are rational actors who will refrain from crime if perceived risks are higher than perceived benefits. Studies have shown that the effects of police street drug crackdowns are mostly short termed and followed by considerable displacement. In the early 2010s, an important part of illicit drug trades moved online …
Burglary, Victimisation, and Social Deprivation
Identifying Repeat Victimization With Gis
Until recently most attempts at identifying repeat victimization locations have focused on searching address fields in police records. Problem with inaccurate data entry and variation in address format make this method fraught with difficulty and time consuming to correct. This study of burglary suggests that a standard GIS package, searching geo-referenced crime locations can dramatically improve the time and accuracy of identifying repeats. The…
Burglary, Victimisation, and Social Deprivation
Damned If You Don't, Damned If You Do: Crime Mapping and its Implications in the Real World
A small but growing North American trend is the publication of maps of crime on the Internet. A number of web sites allow observers to view the spatial distribution of crime in various American cities, often to a considerable resolution, and increasingly in an interactive format. The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to map crime is a rapidly expanding field that is, as this paper will explain, still in a developmental stag…
Intelligence-led policing and the problems of turning rhetoric into practice
Policing strategies, and the terminology that accompanies them, can now be rapidly disseminated around the world. New tactics that are seen to apparently work elsewhere are often demanded of local police before any real evaluation has taken place. This paper looks at 'intelligence-led policing' - currently seen as one of the more positive contributions that policing can make to crime prevention and reduction. In the context of policing in Austral…
Geocoding crime and a first estimate of a minimum acceptable hit rate
Spatial crime analysis relies not only on accurate geocoding but also the achievement of a high level of geocoding success. Geocoding is the task of converting locations, such as the addresses of burglary victims, into grid coordinates and is a task performed regularly by many crime analysts. Data sources include police offence and incident databases where the quality of geographical references can vary. The reality of dealing with this real worl…
The Hotspot Matrix: A Framework for the Spatio‐Temporal Targeting of Crime Reduction
The growth of intelligence‐led policing has placed even greater emphasis on the clear identification of crime hotspots as well as the choice of the crime reduction or detection strategy identified to combat a problem. Crime hotspots are becoming central to policing strategy in many locations, as they enable an operational commander to focus resources into the areas of highest need. This paper outlines the techniques used to identify the spatial a…
The Effectiveness of Police Intelligence Management: A New Zealand Case Study
Intelligence‐driven policing strategies are coming to the fore in many countries around the world. This is evidenced by the espousal of the term in the mission statements of police services in Australia and New Zealand, the recent adoption of the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan by the US government, and most notably by the legal commitment to the National Intelligence Model in the UK through the Police Reform Act of 2002. This paper c…
GIS and Crime Mapping
GIS and Crime Mapping is the definitive text to support readers with the fundamental theory, scientific methodologies, analysis techniques, application design, and management processes for implementing and developing crime mapping. The book includes a comprehensive presentation of GIS, crime mapping and geographic crime analysis solutions for operational, tactical, investigative, and strategic policing and crime reduction purposes. Topics in this…
A Temporal Constraint Theory to Explain Opportunity-Based Spatial Offending Patterns
This article will examine the evidence supporting the notion that a proportion of offending is driven by the availability of opportunities presented in the routine activities of offenders’ lives. It then proceeds to summarize Miller’s time measurement theory in order to describe a basic language with which to discuss the movement of people through time and space. Armed with a notation for space-time interactions, the article explores the criminol…
Space–Time Patterns of Risk: A Cross National Assessment of Residential Burglary Victimization
Roles of neighborhood race and status in the middle stages of juror selection
Nonresidential Crime Attractors and Generators Elevate Perceived Neighborhood Crime and Incivilities
Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about the impacts of local nonresidential land uses on perceived incivilities. This study advances work in this area by developing a land-use perspective theoretically grounded in Brantingham and Brantingham's geometry of crime model in environmental criminology. That focus directs attention to specific classes of land uses and suggests relevance of land uses beyond and within respondents' neighbo…
The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Police Patrol Effectiveness in Violent Crime Hotspots
Originating with the Newark, NJ, foot patrol experiment, research has found police foot patrols improve community perception of the police and reduce fear of crime, but they are generally unable to reduce the incidence of crime. Previous tests of foot patrol have, however, suffered from statistical and measurement issues and have not fully explored the potential dynamics of deterrence within microspatial settings. In this article, we report on th…
Cops as treatment providers: Realities and ironies of police work in a foot patrol experiment
Experimental research on policing is inspired by the public health analogy of officers as treatment providers. A randomised violence reduction experiment in Philadelphia recently used foot patrols as place-based interventions in violent city spaces during a hot spots policing experiment, and a 23% reduction in violent crime was observed. This paper reports on field observations of foot patrol officers involved in this experiment, which were desig…
Need drugs, will travel: The distances to crime of illegal drug buyers
Foot Patrol in Violent Crime Hot Spots: The Longitudinal Impact of Deterrence and Posttreatment Effects of Displacement
This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman's (1990) concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multilevel growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a de…
Central American police perception of street gang characteristics
This article examines the characteristics of Central American street gangs perceived as successful from the perspective of police officers working in high concentration gang areas. About 126 officers from seven Central American countries prioritised a list of characteristics adopted from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Sleipnir matrix. Results suggest some regional commonalities but also significant local variation in numerous characteristics…
Aligning policing and public health promotion: Insights from the world of foot patrol
Foot patrol work is rarely described in relation to public health, even though police routinely encounter health risk behaviors and environments. Through a qualitative study of foot patrol policing in violent ‘hotspots’ of Philadelphia, we explore some prospects and challenges associated with bridging security and public health considerations in law enforcement. Noting existing efforts to help advance police officer knowledge of, and attitudes to…
Place Matters: Criminology for the Twenty-First Century
Over the last two decades, there has been increased interest in the distribution of crime and other antisocial behavior at lower levels of geography. The focus on micro geography and its contribution to the understanding and prevention of crime has been called the 'criminology of place'. It pushes scholars to examine small geographic areas within cities, often as small as addresses or street segments, for their contribution to crime. Here, the au…
Testing for Temporally Differentiated Relationships Among Potentially Criminogenic Places and Census Block Street Robbery Counts
This study examined street robbery patterns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from the years 2009 to 2011 to determine whether the effects of potentially criminogenic places are different across different periods of the day. Census block (N = 13,164) street robbery counts across four periods (6:45 a.m . to 9:59 a.m., 10:00 a.m . to 4:29 p.m ., 4:30 p.m . to 9:14 p.m ., and 9:15 p.m. to 6:44 a.m. ) were modeled with 12 different potentially criminoge…
Does What Police Do at Hot Spots Matter? The Philadelphia Policing Tactics Experiment
Policing tactics that are proactive, focused on small places or groups of people in small places, and tailor specific solutions to problems using careful analysis of local conditions seem to be effective at reducing violent crime. But which tactics are most effective when applied at hot spots remains unknown. This article documents the design and implementation of a randomized controlled field experiment to test three policing tactics applied to …
Intelligence-Led Policing
This paper is timely, given that is currently going through a period of significant change in both operational tactics and organisational structures. New ideas in crime reduction and changes to short- and long-term strategies are underway. Intelligence-led represents a recent approach and is one of the more prevalent of the current shifts in crime control philosophy and practice (Maguire 2000). Surprisingly, given the wide distribution of the ter…
Conflicts and congruencies between predictive policing and the patrol officer’s craft
In what ways does the introduction of micro-grid crime prediction technology conflict with or align with patrolling officers’ craft? We investigate this question using qualitative data collected during a randomised experiment carried out in a large urban police department in the U.S. The current investigation responds to earlier scholars lamenting the ‘meaning gap’ in works examining police technology adoption. Researchers rode along with officer…
Was the pope to blame? Statistical powerlessness and the predictive policing of micro‐scale randomized control trials
Research Summary Hinkle et al. (2013) highlighted a statistical powerlessness problem in hot‐spots policing experiments in midsized cities with moderate property crime rates. The current work demonstrates that this problem is less readily resolved than previously suspected. It reviews results from a predictive policing randomized control trial in a large city with property crime rates higher than Chicago or Los Angeles. It reports, for the first …
Like aspirin for arthritis”: A qualitative study of conditional cyber‐deterrence associated with police crackdowns on the dark web
Research summary Crackdowns are law enforcement strategies based on the principles of deterrence theory, which stipulates that offenders are rational actors who will refrain from crime if perceived risks are higher than perceived benefits. Studies have shown that the effects of police street drug crackdowns are mostly short termed and followed by considerable displacement. In the early 2010s, an important part of illicit drug trades moved online …
Crime Patterns and Interventions (25 works) · Criminology (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (11 works) · Law (11 works)