Julie Hibdon

• PhD, Criminology, Law & Society
• Professor (Associate) at Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Many intriguing and socially significant policing research questions center on relatively rare events. Scholars may find few viable options to studying those rare events, limiting the development of research to support scientific knowledge and policy responses. The proliferation of body-worn cameras (BWCs) has produced a unique research opportunity...

Purpose The article first examines whether police hiring decisions represent a zero-sum game where hires from one under-represented group (e.g. White women) reduce the number of hires made from other under-represented groups (non-White men and/or non-White women). Second, we explore whether agencies that hire more members of underrepresented groups...

Security at U.S. airports has been a key priority since September 11, 2001. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was established shortly thereafter to oversee aviation security operations. However, there have been few rigorous evaluations of airport security strategies, and even less is known about how they are implemented in practice....

National victimization data suggest less than 50% of violent crime incidents are reported to the police. Official reports of crime to police, however, are often the only type of data used for the analysis of violence problems, the identification of geographic concentrations of violent crime, and the selection of targets for police and prevention re...

In this paper, we describe the assessment and planning phase of the Thrive community‐based initiative to reduce violence and address other determinants of health in a community in the Southwestern United States. Using community‐based participatory research (CBPR) and an implementation science framework, we engaged residents and other key stakeholde...

In recent years, many law enforcement agencies have found themselves in legitimacy crises, where police have difficulty winning the support and trust of the communities that they serve. One strategy suggested to improve legitimacy is developing personnel rosters that share demographic characteristics with a jurisdiction’s service population. This s...

Similar to concentrations of crime, mental health calls have been found to concentrate at a small number of places, but few have considered the context of places where mental health calls occur. The current study examines the influence of the physical and social context of street segments, particularly the role of service providers, land use featur...

Hot spots policing, in which police resources are directed toward small geographic areas with high crime levels, has been widely implemented and evaluated, but less is known about the effectiveness of nonpolice efforts to address high‐crime locations. Here, we examine the effectiveness of two hot spot interventions led by a community‐based nonprofi...

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...

Over the last several decades, campus crime, victimization, and incidents of violence have been a focal concern for campus administrators and have generated interest in the research community. Studies have provided insight into the nature of campus crime and victimization, as well as whether these concerns relate with fear of crime and perceptions...

There is a growing recognition that physical and social disorder and other neighborhood conditions play an important role in shaping the attitudes, behaviors, and well-being of residents. Most research that seeks to measure neighborhood conditions relies on census or survey data, yet systematic observation often provides a more objective measure of...

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...

Background: Recent technological advances have much potential for improving police performance, but there has been little research testing whether they have made police more effective in reducing crime. Objective: To study the uses and crime control impacts of mobile computing technology in the context of geographically focused "hot spots" patro...

Purpose – Although the use of license plate recognition (LPR) technology by police is becoming increasingly common, no empirical studies have examined the legal or legitimacy implications of LPR. LPR may be used for a variety of purposes, ranging from relatively routine checks of stolen vehicles to more complex surveillance functions. The purpose o...

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...

One of the recent developments in airport security has been the call for a more coordinated security apparatus. In 2009, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) revised and reimplemented its Comprehensive Strategy to Security at Airports, also known as “the Playbook,” to supplement and coordinate additional security at airports. The Playbo...

Objectives This randomized controlled experiment tests whether license plate readers (LPR) deter crime generally, and automobile crime more specifically in crime hot spots. The limited intervention tested here reflects one current likely use of LPR at the time of this publication. Methods We use a place-based block randomized experiment. Our subjec...