Police Patrol Strategies: 4 Tips for Improving Outcomes

Why Patrol Management is Getting More Complex

Over the years, police patrol has become more complicated for three main reasons.

First, agencies across the U.S. are experiencing significant retention and recruitment challenges. Fewer officers mean more work for the ones who are serving, so agencies are looking for ways to maximize their existing workforce without overloading it. This has created a need for more precision in how patrols are directed—placing officers in the right place at the right time for greater impact.

The second reason is about policing tactics. Deciding what tactics to use and when often falls on the officer on patrol. This creates inconsistency and a lack of visibility into patrol activity. With so many situations that can happen on patrol, training officers on the right tactic can be daunting and difficult to follow.

The final reason patrolling has become more difficult is increasing community pressure for accountability. This includes managing the widespread misconception that police patrols are occupying neighborhoods by over-policing instead of protecting them. Agencies need to find a way to change this perception, and it all starts with the patrol strategy they deploy.

Types of Traditional Police Patrol Strategies

Law enforcement agencies use varying terminology, but generally, there are three main buckets of police patrol strategies: Gut-based patrols, predictive policing, and hot spot analysis.

#1. Gut-Based Patrol 

Gut-based patrol is simply when officers drive around their community and patrol where they believe they should be based on personal intuition and prior experience.

The rule of thumb is to never do the same thing twice. If you turn left one day, turn right the next. This is the easiest approach and prevents negative community perceptions that you are following a pattern.

However, this puts pressure on officers to direct themselves. Instead of using data or statistics, they’re just going off their intuition—potentially opening the door to bias. Because officers make subjective decisions, there is no transparency or tools for accountability or auditing.

#2. Predictive Policing 

A step in the right direction, some agencies use historical data of crime events and offenders to predict where future crimes may occur.

While well intended, this method relies solely on historical data, including low-level crimes subject to enforcement bias, such as drug arrests and disorderly conduct. This strategy also has no protections to limit police oversaturation and still lacks transparency into what patrols are actually doing when they arrive.

#3. Hot Spot Analysis 

Lastly, there’s hot spot analysis, which uses clusters of past crimes to determine what areas police should patrol.

Hot spot analysis, which is closely related to predictive policing, faces the same issues. Plus, it creates less accurate risk assessments that generalize an area police should patrol. In practice, patrol plans are updated every few weeks or months instead of daily.

Is There A Better Option? 

Unfortunately, these traditional patrols do not give agencies the tools they need to align their strategies and tactics with crime prevention efforts in the community because of their inherent bias and lack of true visibility. Agencies feel stuck with these strategies. But what if there was another option?

With the right solution supporting your agency, you can take the benefits of data-driven policing strategies to put officers where they need to be—while leaving the risks of over-policing and bias behind.

This means using technology to incorporate risk forecasts based on different measures—beyond historical crime data—including risk terrain factors such as weather, time of year, bus stop locations, and more, and then sending patrols out accordingly. This gives agencies more precise locations to patrol than general hot spots.

Thanks to the technology available today, agencies can accomplish this strategy with unmatched precision. Here are the next steps your agency can take.

4 Tips for Improving Community Outcomes

When managed properly and with the right supporting software, agencies can send out patrols that help significantly reduce crime and improve community relations. Agencies can also use the data to bring in many city and county departments and nonprofit resources to speak to community members and link them to health and human service resources (such as after-school programs, healthcare, job training, trash collection, etc.) Here are the four biggest actions your agency can take.

#1. Follow Pre-Approved Non-Enforcement Tactics or Activities

Consistent use of high-visibility, non-enforcement policing activities can still maximize crime deterrence while keeping community harm to a minimum. Simple visible presence, like driving through an area, walking the street, or even parking in a visible area to the public and doing paperwork in the car, all have an important deterrent effect but with a much lower level of community dissatisfaction related to over-policing.

Patrolling objectives shouldn’t be centered around making an arrest. They should be about deterring or preventing crime. Likewise, a lack of arrests shouldn’t indicate a failure on the officer’s part but rather that they’re doing exactly what they should be. The goal is to make fewer arrests because fewer crimes are committed and not because officers are being soft on crime.

To interact with the public in a non-enforcement way, patrol officers can check in on businesses to introduce themselves, see how safe they feel, and start-up or maintain community relations. When residents see officers following consistent, non-enforcement activities like these, they tend to perceive the protection aspect of their presence rather than view it as intrusive and intimidating. The police officer becomes the community’s partner and guardian Instead of an officious government agent.

#2. Track Officer Statistics 

To eliminate the problems that traditional police patrol strategies create, agencies need to leverage a tool that prioritizes visibility into officer activity. Tracking officer statistics helps agencies optimize patrols and ensure officer accountability.

Statistics you should track include:

• Which directed patrol the officer was assigned
• Amount of time officers spent in the directed patrol
• What specialized activities officers use to deter crime
• How much time was spent on each activity
• Information on what the underlying causes of problems are in the area

Many of these stats can be found by patrol metering. A meter is 15 minutes spent in a directed patrol. So, if you ask an officer to do three 15-minute directed patrols, you should be able to verify whether or not they’re doing it and what they’re doing during those patrols.

Again, this is more than just hot spot data. Visualizing officer activity in this way can inform other policing tactics or bring about necessary changes to your approach moving forward. Both will lead to better community outcomes.

#3. Share Non-enforcement Activities with the Community

With non-enforcement activities established and real officer statistics now at hand, you can be more transparent with your community.

Agencies benefit when communities can assume goodwill. Data on different strategies and activities makes this possible. Review your pre-approved, non-enforcement activities with the community and be transparent about any changes you decide to make over time.

You may also bring together non-law enforcement municipal, county, and state resources to speak to community members and link them to health and human service resources. This implements a multi-prong, multi-agency, place-based intervention that intentionally includes social, economic, human, and health services specifically designed to address the root causes of violence and crime in the area that needs holistic quality-of-life resources in addition to law enforcement patrols.

The main objective of this police patrol strategy is crime prevention. So, educate your officers on crime prevention strategies such as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and Problem-Oriented Policing, and have those officers teach those practices to the community. Including the community you serve in the public safety conversation will improve your relationship and create a more positive impact.

#4. Assign Objective Patrols

Finally, this enhanced patrol strategy, driven by the tools you leverage and the data you collect, allows you to focus on objective assignments, mitigating issues like bias and over- or under-policing.

Start by assigning your patrols based on historic non-officer-initiated crime data along with other sources, like risk terrain modeling and non-personally identifiable information. Then, after the directed patrol area has been chosen, limit durations to reduce over-policing or increase it if an area has been under-policed. Numerous agencies use the Koper Curve to guide officers on the amount of time and frequency to be in a directed patrol area.

Conclusion

Law enforcement professionals are increasingly turning to CPTED and problem-oriented policing, aligning police patrol strategies with crime prevention efforts. This means police patrols need to focus more on solving core community problems instead of just going to high-crime rate areas without a long-term plan to reduce crime.

For example, an officer can notice that the streetlights are out, which causes people to congregate in the dark and creates more crime opportunities. You can fix the lighting and see if crime dissipates as a result.

Putting officers in an area to see what other issues might be happening—and then figuring out why crime is happening—will create the best results for your police-community relationship and overall safety. To accomplish this, you need the right technology that supports your patrol, collects more data, and helps you make the best decisions for you and your community.

ResourceRouter™ is a community-first patrol management solution that uses AI to direct officers to high-risk locations to prevent crime before it occurs. With ResourceRouter, you can create objective patrols to put your officers in the right place at the right time, equipped with a list of low-touch non-enforcement tactics to promote community trust. Command staff can access a robust suite of reports on officer statistics to help optimize patrol strategies and ensure officer accountability.

Get in touch today and learn how you can reduce crime and positively engage your community with tools that give you more visibility into patrol.