In most developed societies modern policing is premised on the idea of police presence. For at least the last twenty years, commentators have stressed the importance of what is dubbed "the reassurance factor." This emphasis assumes that people feel more secure and safe when they believe that a police officer is nearby. Such conventional wisdom is routinely reiterated in scholarly discussions of the impact of police patrol and claims about the potential impact of community policing. It also plays a central role in the politics of police resource allocation. The study being undertaken by Dr. Skogan focuses on the saliency of the reassurance argument for understanding perceptions as well as impacts of the police. Based on secondary analyses of multi- wave interviews with large panels of residents of 40 higher-crime neighborhoods in ten cities over the course of a decade, this research tests several hypotheses linking police contact with citizen reassurance. The project offers an operational definition of the "reassurance factor" along such dimensions as fear of crime, perceptions of crime trends, beliefs about the defensibility of city neighborhoods, and satisfaction with the quality of police service. These dimensions will be related to citizen encounters with a variety of kinds of policing (e.g., motorized patrol, foot patrol, community organizing efforts). Through an altered replication design (in some instances aggregating across studies and in other instances replicating across multiple sites), the impact of both police visibility and actual encounters with diverse policing efforts will be assessed. This work holds promise of a major advance. While using extant data sets, the study brings them together in original ways and adds to fundamental knowledge about the actual impact of visible policing and the assurance it provides. Also, the research will yield estimates of the impact of alternative policing strategies. In addition to theoretical and empirical contributions, the project is important in policy terms. It should yield a fresh basis for organizing routine police activities and selecting policing tactics and strategies in light of scarce resources for years to come.
