Elizabeth R. Groff

Temple University | TU · Department of Criminal Justice

This study mined officers’ perspectives on whether body-worn cameras (BWCs) could change the behaviour of citizens and police. Officers reinforced themes from prior studies on the professionalizing effect of BWCs, the potential for passivity, and the concern with ‘second-guessing’. Officers also stressed the theme of ‘it depends’, where behaviour c...

Purpose To reduce overcrowding in prisons, California made two legislative changes: Assembly Bill 109 (AB 109) in 2011 and Proposition 47 (Prop 47) in 2014. Evidence suggests they were successful at reducing incarceration. However, there is limited understanding of how each of these changes, individually, affected crime and prosecution. Methods Us...

Objectives Examine changes in officer behavior, when wearing body-worn cameras, as revealed by pedestrian stops, vehicle stops, arrests, use of force, and citizen complaints during a pilot implementation in a racially diverse jurisdiction in the Northeast region of the USA. Methods A quasi-experimental approach was used to examine the initial impl...

This work examined the determinants of park crime, drawing together into one conceptual frame three threads from community criminology - community demographic structural crime determinants; community cultural crime determinants, focusing specifically on social cohesion; and park features that are potentially crime and/or disorder relevant. Generali...

Objectives Test the efficacy of swift resident notification for preventing subsequent burglaries within near-repeat high-risk zones (NR-HRZ). Methods The experiment was conducted in Baltimore County, Maryland and Redlands, California. As residential burglaries came to the attention of the police, a trickle randomization process was used to assign...

Objectives Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a type of computer simulation that creates a virtual society and allows controlled experimentation. ABM has the potential to be a powerful tool for exploring criminological theory and testing the plausibility of crime prevention interventions when data are unavailable, when they would be unethical to collect...

The space-time risk window associated with near-repeat burglary patterns would seem to present a natural opportunity for burglary prevention efforts. However, constraints associated with the reporting of, police response to, and space-time patterning of burglaries can reduce the crime prevention potential of such efforts. To better estimate the cri...

Methodological challenges have hampered a number of previous studies into the crime reduction effectiveness of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance systems. These have included the use of arbitrary fixed distances to represent estimated camera deterrence areas and a lack of control for camera sites with overlapping surveillance areas. The...

The implementation of body worn cameras (BWCs) is occurring at a rapid rate and with relatively little information about their potential impacts on both the police and the citizens they serve. The core assumption underlying this widespread adoption is that BWCs will increase self-awareness among police officers as well as citizens, which will in tu...

Objectives Prior research demonstrates that crime is highly concentrated at place and that these concentrations are stable from year to year, highlighting the importance of place to crime control and prevention. A potential limitation is that most studies only use one data source to diagnose these patterns. The present study uses data from both pol...

This study investigates how convenience stores and fast food restaurants influence crime patterns over time. Using sales volume data from fast food restaurants and convenience stores, we examine streetblock crime levels over a seven year period in Seattle using multilevel models. Results demonstrate that high sales volume links to high crime, even...

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing consensus among researchers that hot spots policing is an effective strategy to prevent crime. Although strong evidence exists that hot spots policing will reduce crime at hot spots without immediate spatial displacement, we know little about its possible jurisdictional or large-area impacts. We c...

Drawing from the concepts of optimal foraging theory, this paper presents and tests the assumptions of a foraging theory of police behavior during hot spots patrols. The theory explains why, over time, officers involved in hot spots policing interventions would leave the hot spots they are assigned to police and begin working within other locations...

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 c...

Objectives We explore whether the use of foot patrol, problem-oriented policing and offender-focused policing at violent crime hot spots negatively impacted the community’s perceptions of crime and disorder, perceived safety, satisfaction with police and their perceptions of procedural justice. Methods We report on a repeated cross-sectional survey...

Objectives: To examine whether information on where the police patrol drawn from automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems can be used to increase the amount of directed patrol time at high-crime police beats and crime hot spots, and whether such increases would lead to reductions in crime. Methods: In an experimental study with a block-randomized d...

Crime is an ubiquitous part of society. The way people express their concerns about crimes has been of particular interest to the scientific community. Over time, the numbers and kinds of available communication channels have increased. Today, social media services, such Twitter, present a convenient way to express opinions and concerns about crime...

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 i...

Marcus Felson’s intellectual mind is much like a shotgun blast. The pellets are all aimed in a general direction, most of them are on target and a few are dead-on in hitting the bull’s eye. The most important of those that hit their mark are his development of Routine Activities Theory (Cohen&Felson, 1979) and his integration of this theory with th...

I can trace my interest in urban places back to childhood but my career path took several turns as I progressed from a geographer concerned about neighborhood change to a career studying why crime happens where it does. Along the way, I had the opportunity to experience the research process as a practitioner and an academic. This chapter traces my...

Although recent work has begun to identify factors associated with risk of treatment attrition for juvenile offenders, few of these studies have considered how community context is related to the completion of juvenile offender treatment. The current work examines the relationship between social distance and treatment attrition for juvenile offende...

Primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs that address opportunity or structural factors related to crime are usually delivered to entire cities, sections of cities or to specific neighborhoods, but our results indicate geographically targeting these programs to specific street segments may increase their efficacy. We link crime incident...

Objectives: The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (JRCD) has published important contributions to both criminological theory and associated empirical tests. In this article, we consider some of the challenges associated with traditional approaches to social science research, and discuss a complementary approach that is gaining popularity...

Geographically targeting law enforcement at drug hot spots is a common response to drug problems, but because they are generated with police data, they only reflect what the police already know about narcotics crime. In this study, we illustrate the importance of using multiple data sets to characterize the micro-spatial distribution of illicit dru...

Objectives: This note explores complications with standard methods to evaluate place-based policing interventions. It identifies and explains issues of boundary misspecification during evaluation as a result of boundary adjustment by police during an intervention. Method: Using geographic data gathered during post-experiment focus groups with offic...

Recent research on urban parks and crime in Philadelphia has shown that some parks have higher crime densities than other places within the city. Why that relationship exists is an open question. Here, field survey data collected through primary observation, along with official Philadelphia crime data from 2008 to 2009, is used to evaluate one poss...

Informal social control at micro-level places such as addresses, collections of addresses, and streetblocks is a critical factor in understanding crime patterns. Historically, informal social control has been associated with community-level theories such as social disorganization, systemic theory, and collective efficacy. This article reviews sever...

The intrametropolitan relationship between municipality-level physical environment and crime changes appears to have been overlooked by crime and environment researchers. The current effort focuses on permeability; suggests dynamics whereby permeability affects changing municipality-level crime patterns across a metropolitan area; selects and opera...

This paper argues citizens’ perceptions of police can aid in selecting appropriate hot spots policing tactics and models satisfaction with police as evidenced by respondents who live or work in violent crime hot spots. Survey data (n = 630) were collected by randomly sampling addresses within violent crime hot spots in Philadelphia, PA USA. The res...

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 la...

The prominent role of facilities in influencing ‘why crime happens where it does’ has been widely recognized and vigorously researched. Criminological theories which focus on opportunity such as routine activity theory and crime pattern theory have provided the basis for such inquiries. Some of these investigations have targeted the role of facilit...

Objectives Introduce and test the relative efficacy of two methods for modeling the impact of cumulative ‘exposure’ to drinking facilities on violent crime at street segments. Methods One method, simple count, sums the number of drinking places within a distance threshold. The other method, inverse distance weighted count, weights each drinking pl...

Objectives Use crime pattern theory to investigate the proximity effects of public housing communities on robbery crime while taking into account the presence of nearby nonresidential facilities. Method The study uses data describing 41 Philadelphia public housing communities and their surrounds. Surrounds are defined using two increments of stree...

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...

Objectives Test whether the exposure of street segments to five different potentially criminogenic facilities is positively related to violent, property, or disorder crime counts controlling for sociodemographic context. The geographic extent of the relationship is also explored. Method Facility exposure is operationalized as total inverse distanc...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe how the Philadelphia Police Department instituted a large‐scale randomized controlled trial of foot patrol as a policing strategy and experienced 23 percent fewer violent crimes during the treatment period. The authors examine whether activities patrol officers were conducting might have produced the...

Primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs that address opportunity or structural factors related to crime are usually delivered to entire cities, sections of cities or to specific neighborhoods, but our results indicate geographically targeting these programs to specific street segments may increase their efficacy. We link crime incident...

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 th...

The study of crime has focused primarily on why particular people commit crime or why specific communities have higher crime levels than others. This book presents a new and different way of looking at the crime problem by examining why specific streets in a city have specific crime trends over time. Based on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of cr...

Recent studies have shown that crime is concentrated at micro level units of geography defined as hot spots. Despite this growing evidence of the concentration of crime at place, studies to date have dealt primarily with adult crime or have failed to distinguish between adult and juvenile offenses. In this paper, we identify crime incidents in whic...

Primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs that address opportunity or structural factors related to crime are usually delivered to entire cities, sections of cities or to specific neighborhoods, but our results indicate geographically targeting these programs to specific street segments may increase their efficacy. We link crime incident...

The study of crime has focused primarily on why particular people commit crime or why specific communities have higher crime levels than others. In The Criminology of Place, David Weisburd, Elizabeth Groff, and Sue-Ming Yang present a new and different way of looking at the crime problem by examining why specific streets in a city have specific cri...

The important role of facilities in understanding crime patterns is widely recognized. Studies have demonstrated a connection between the presence of facilities such as bars, parks, schools and fast food restaurants and higher crime rates. Typically, these studies use a single distance threshold. Areas within the threshold are assumed to be related...

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...

Neighborhood parks in urban areas have long been seen as contested spaces. Because they are publically owned, they are at the same time everyone's and no one's. As public resources they have little intrinsic guardianship and thus are susceptible to being taken over for undesirable activities (that is, living spaces for the homeless, markets for dru...

Research on the nature and effects of violent criminal behavior has been influenced in large part by theories and methods developed within the fields of criminology and criminal justice. While criminologists have traditionally sought to advance biological, psychological and sociological perspectives on the nature of crime, scholars of criminal just...

Over the last 40years, the question of how crime varies across places has gotten greater attention. At the same time, as data and computing power have increased, the definition of a ‘place’ has shifted farther down the geographic cone of resolution. This has led many researchers to consider places as small as single addresses, group of addresses, f...

Recent studies have shown that crime is concentrated at micro level units of geography defined as hot spots. Despite this growing evidence of the concentration of crime at place, studies to date have dealt primarily with adult crime or have failed to distinguish between adult and juvenile offenses. In this paper, we identify crime incidents in whic...

“Crime Places” have recently emerged as an important focus of crime prevention theory and practice. Interest develops in part from the underlying assumptions of recent theoretical perspectives that focus on opportunity structures for crime. Building upon these theoretical innovations a number of studies beginning in the late 1980s show that crime i...

Yes Yes

IntroductionAgent-based modellingCreating a theoretically based simulation model to test routine activity theoryFindings and significance of the research – comparing a simulated environment to the principles of routine activity theoryComparing a simulated crime environment to realityImplications for practiceReferences

Routine activity theory identifies the routine activities of individuals as important to understanding the convergence of elements necessary for a crime to occur. Two recent studies have demonstrated how geographically aware agent-based models can be used to provide a virtual rather than empirical laboratory for testing theory. Those studies trace...

While essential, the process of developing and testing crime prevention strategies is currently an expensive and time-consuming process. In addition, there are some potential crime prevention programs that are either too costly or unethical to test empirically. What if we could test these strategies in an artificial world first? In a world of incre...

It is widely recognized that the spatio-temporal components of human behavior strongly influence where and when people converge in space and time. Routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson 1979) ties the frequency of convergence to crime rates. This chapter builds on an earlier agent-based model (Groff, in press-a) by drawing on geographic theory to...

It is widely recognized that the spatio-temporal components of human behavior strongly influence where and when people converge in space and time. Routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson 1979) ties the frequency of convergence to crime rates. This chapter builds on an earlier agent-based model (Groff, in press-a) by drawing on geographic theory to...

Many social phenomena have a spatio-temporal dimension and involve dynamic decisions made by individuals. In the past, researchers have often turned to geographic information systems (GIS) to model these interactions. Although GIS provide a powerful tool for examining the spatial aspects of these interactions, they are unable to model the dynamic,...

Achieving a more complete understanding of the behavioral aspects of homicide has great potential for developing more targeted intervention and prevention strategies. One avenue to increased understanding is through the study of the spatial behavior of the parties involved. Mobility triangles have been used to describe the spatial relationships and...

Achieving a better understanding of the crime event in its spatio-temporal context is an important research area in criminology with major implications for improving policy and developing effective crime prevention strategies. However, significant barriers related to data and methods exist for conducting this type of research. The research requires...

Thesis research directed by: Geography. Title from t.p. of PDF. Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2006. Includes bibliographical references. Text.

This research provides a comprehensive exploration of the spatial etiology of homicides in Washington, D.C. Three basic elements of convergence (victim’s home, offender’s home, and homicide location) and three associated measures—the relative distances between the locations—are analyzed. All six elements are explored both individually and jointly t...

The crime drop of the 1990s has been the subject of a large body of research, which has suggested juvenile crime was the major source of this decline. However, a satisfactory explanation for the crime drop remains elusive. While most of the work has focused on longitudinal studies of the development of delinquency in juveniles and macro-level patte...

The larger roles of the community in crime prevention and improvements in technology have increased police–citizen communication and the distribution of information from police departments to private citizens. Combined, these changes have led to the current movement among law enforcement agencies toward sharing both summary reports and maps of crim...

This research examines the distance traveled by offenders and victims to their involvement in homicide. Key research topics include (1) the differences in distance traveled by offenders and victims by homicide motive, (2) the differences in distance traveled by offenders and victims by sex and age, and (3) the relationship between street distance a...

This review is the second in a special annual feature in Police Practice & Research: An International Journal. It provides a cross-sectional analysis of the police literature for the year 2001 highlighting the substantive typologies that the literature falls under as well as publication mediums and methodological trends. In doing so, the authors pr...

While the use of mapping in criminal justice has increased over the last 30 years, most applications are retrospective -that is, they examine criminal phenomena and related factors that have al-ready occurred. While such retrospective mapping efforts are useful, the true promise of crime mapping lies in its ability to identify early warning signs a...

The use of geographic information systems (GIS) to understand spatial patterns of crime and criminal behavior has become more prevalent in recent years, but with a few exceptions these analyses fall short of serving as predictive tools. The recent introduction of user-friendly, raster-based mapping software, designed primarily for environmental and...

This document focuses on one of four major components of SACSI, the development of communities= analytic capacity through enhancement of their technology infrastructure. Because the project is ongoing, this document is meant to provide initial documentation of the initiative=s early progress. Section 1 describes the vision behind the initiative and...

Recent improvements in mapping software have made GIS applications to crime relatively inexpensive and effective. This has raised interest in mapping crime across borders and giving police managers the capability to see larger crime patterns. This capability suggests that Cross Boundary Crime Mapping Systems (CBCMS) have great utility. A CBCMS is a...

Until quite recently, the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the purpose of mapping crimes in the United States was limited to a small group of geographers with an esoteric knowledge of the mechanics of map digitizing and mainframe computer technology. In recent years, however, the marked reduction in the price of personal computer har...

The spatial distribution of crime has been extensively examined at both the point and areal levels, often without regard to environmental factors. However, the emergence of community policing demands a more holistic approach to crime analysis. The systemic nature of crime, requires that information systems supply data about the social and physical...