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Research of Edward Maguire
Center for Justice Leadership Continues Support of Police Reform in Trinidad and Tobago
The Center for Justice Leadership and Management, part of George Mason University’s Administration of Justice Program, received an additional $1.4 million award to continue providing research and technical assistance to the Ministry of National Security of Trinidad and Tobago.
Over the last year the Center has been leading a consortium of universities, firms, and consultants to assist the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service in accomplishing a comprehensive overhaul of its organization and practices. The Center’s faculty and outside collaborators have assisted in developing plans to improve the Police Service’s performance management system, its disciplinary process, the prosecution of criminal cases, recruit training, and the promotion of integrity. GMU faculty have taught seminars and short courses on strategic crime control, and those courses have produced crime reduction plans that the Police Service will implement. A pilot project is underway to improve the quality of crime reports that police make.
The Center has an ambitious agenda for the next year. With the Center’s guidance the Police Service will launch a series of initiatives to reduce crime. It will establish an interagency working group to reduce the nation’s homicide rate by implementing the principles of problem-oriented policing. It will establish several smaller working groups to focus on other types of offenses, such as kidnapping and robberies. A special unit will be created and trained to support these efforts with sophisticated crime analysis and crime mapping technologies. And a demonstration project will be initiated that joins innovative police strategies with a grassroots movement to reduce crime in a gang-ravaged community.
The GMU team will also assist in other organization-building efforts to improve management, increase organizational efficiency, develop a comprehensive in-service training program, and create a command college for supervisors and upper-level administrators.
During the next year two people will be located full-time in Port of Spain to coordinate the project’s efforts, while other researchers will make frequent trips to the twin-island nation, located a few miles off the northeast coast of Venezuela.
Stephen Mastrofski, Professor of Public and International Affairs, is the project’s principal investigator, and Edward Maguire, Associate Professor of Administration of Justice, is co-principal investigator. Other ADJ faculty involved are Catherine Gallagher, Jon Gould, Devon Johnson, Cynthia Lum, and David Wilson. Outside partners include the Justice and Safety Institute at the Pennsylvania State University, Justice and Security Systems (a consulting organization in the D. C. area), and consultants from Arizona State University West, Bowling Green State University, Harvard University, San Francisco State University, and University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Local experts on crime and social problems in Trinidad and Tobago will also participate.
Police Contributions to the Drop in Violent Crime
A Research Summary
Violent crime in the United States rose dramatically through the 1980s and then began to drop throughout the 1990s. Experts and members of the general public have offered a number of explanations for why crime dropped, ranging from changes in economy and demographics to imprisonment practices and policing tactics. A recent book entitled The Crime Drop in America examined these different explanations. Ed Maguire, an Administration of Justice Professor at George Mason University, coauthored a chapter (together with John Eck from the University of Cincinnati) that examined the evidence on the effects of police in producing decreases in violent crime.
Eck and Maguire examined several changes in policing that might have affected violent crime rates: increases in the number of police, community policing, zero tolerance policing, directed patrolling strategies, gun interdiction patrols, retail drug enforcement, and problem-oriented policing. Eck and Maguire found little evidence to support the role of most of these factors in reducing violent crime during the 1990s. Evidence against these explanations was of four main types: (1) previous research shows that some of these strategies do not have a causal effect on crime, (2) crime began to drop before some of these strategies had been implemented, (3) crime dropped both in places where these strategies were and were not implemented, and (4) some of these strategies were not widely implemented throughout the country. The authors conclude that most of the evidence for the effects of police in reducing violent crime during the 1990s is overstated.
Although there was not strong evidence to suggest that changes in policing had a major effect on the drop in violent crime throughout the 1990s, Eck and Maguire found the strongest evidence for focused policing strategies. These include efforts by the police to focus their efforts on those people, places, offenses, and times responsible for generating the greatest number of offenses. At the same time, however, the authors caution that there is a need to balance these efforts with careful attention to human rights and police-community relations.
Eck, John E., and Edward R. Maguire (2000). "Have Changes in Policing
Reduced Violent Crime?" Pp. 207-265 in The Crime Drop in America, edited
by Alfred Blumstein
and Joel Wallman. NY: Cambridge University Press.