Many law enforcement officers have retreated from any proactive policing for various reasons, including, notably, self-preservation. Law enforcement has been under attack from many quarters. Some criticisms are arguably justified, but, sadly, many more are wholly unjustified. Some reporters in the media, some unthinking politicians, and some community organizers have created a false story line attacking police officers in ways never before seen. Too often, the net result is that many patrol officers retreat and are no longer actively policing. They are no longer confident proactively engaging “suspicious persons” in a neighborhood to determine if they’re engaged in some criminality. Too many thieves and bad actors are left unchallenged, and, in many locales, property crime is on the rise as a result.1
Almost all crime prevention programs, include some type of community outreach or educational effort that seeks to establish positive interactions between the police and the many community groups that make up the neighborhood. But there also needs to be an arrest component within that crime prevention method to address those moments when crimes occur.
In the FBI National Academy, the community policing model places local police at the center of a hub that connects all elements of government and community services to address quality-of-life concerns. It is a philosophy on how to police and primarily focused on the community’s well-being. Problem-oriented policing (POP) is the practical application of that community policing philosophy. A POP arrest program can serve to remove serial criminals from neighborhoods when crime prevention efforts haven’t fully succeeded.
As mentioned previously, crime is again on the rise in some regions, including California.2 After the record high crime rates in the late 1980s to early 1990s, Californians enjoyed a precipitous drop in criminality that lowered crime stats to levels not seen in generations. Crime prevention strategies had a positive impact through many neighborhood watch and youth services programs. In addition, violent felons were aggressively pursued by law enforcement and criminals were removed from the community. However, for various reasons, crime is once again climbing in California. The most concerning increases have involved violent crime. But, in some Southern California counties, property crimes, both theft and burglary, are also on the rise.3
While it would be wonderful to find a solution to prevent this increase and for police officers to not have to make any arrests, that’s obviously unrealistic. In some cases, promoting a crime prevention strategy of increasing proactive police contacts with suspected offenders—like New York City Police Department’s “stop/question/frisk” strategy—has resulted in complaints from law-abiding folks who find themselves approached as suspicious persons by patrol officers. That approach has led to friction-laced letters of protest, lawsuits for alleged civil rights violations, and other negative results. Understandably, officers don’t want to upset the community members, and they don’t want to be accused of any misconduct or get sued. By stopping their proactive policing efforts, these officers are not helping to prevent crime. But senior police executives understand what’s going on, and they sympathize with their officers—they understand why proactive policing is in retreat.
To address this reluctance to engage with people on the street and to find out who is committing crimes in neighborhoods, an innovative electronic tracking approach is suggested. This tactic involves using GPS-laced bait items, strategically deployed around the clock in targeted areas, to increase arrests of the career criminals who are causing a crime increase. Private industry, both in the banking and retail sectors, have been employing this GPS loss-prevention strategy for more than a decade. with impressive results. In 2006, almost 7,300 financial institutions were robbed; by 2018 that number was reduced to just over 3,000.4 Many of the robbers arrested were caught because they left the bank carrying a GPS-laced cash pack.5
Some of the most violent robbery crimes, including jewelry store takeover robberies and cellphone store robberies, have all been effectively mitigated by using GPS clandestine trackers hidden inside the items stolen. That precipitous drop in bank robbery crimes, has been attributed in part, to the GPS-laced cash packs that have helped arrest thousands of serial offenders. Think of it in terms of arresting a single bank robber, which immediately interrupts their specific crime cycle. Ending that offender’s robbery series ultimately prevents future crimes by this—now in-custody—perpetrator.
Fighting Crime with GPS
For law enforcement, the GPS crime fighting process starts by partnering crime prevention specialists with crime analysts and joining them together with patrol officers and police detectives, to create directed arrest strategies to impact serial crimes. The crime prevention specialists provide neighborhood intelligence on crime, establishing the targeted areas for GPS deployment and what the community expects from this effort. The crime analysts provide the statistical data on areas where serial offenses are being reported, determine the probability of success with this directed effort, and establish what types of items are most often reported stolen (what should be the targeted items for GPS deployment). Crime prevention intelligence is critical at this point because many, if not most, of the neighborhood property crime offenses never make it to the police blotter. Crime prevention specialists get direct feedback from their community contacts that can help the police understand where underreported problems are happening in a neighborhood.
Patrol officers and detectives then select the neighborhoods or businesses to deploy clandestine GPS devices inside whatever happens to be the type of property that’s currently being stolen. The key is placing the GPS devices inside the “vessel of the day” that’s hot on the thieves list of items to steal. Once the thieves start getting arrested, and these offenders are removed from having the opportunity to commit additional thefts, the crime stats drop. It’s literally that simple—but it’s important to remember that no arrest can be made if a GPS device is locked up somewhere in the police station; the devices need to be deployed 24/7/365 like fishing with a net but looking to scoop up criminals.
Law enforcement leaders should recognize that they need to establish pathways and provide tools for officers to return to some form of proactive policing and arresting robbers and burglars again. Using GPS devices to alert officers that a theft is in progress allows the police to target and engage criminal offenders and remove them from the community by making arrests precisely when a crime occurs. Using GPS devices allows officers to target criminals based on serial crime patterns. Then, when the crime occurs, officers are alerted to the GPS device’s location, and police personnel can track the device’s movement on their cellphones, their patrol cars’ mobile digital computer (MDC), or the dispatcher’s computer screen. Then by coordinating the police tracking event, the suspect is apprehended within minutes of the crime. Using GPS to track offenders will allow officers to maintain the tactical high ground as they locate criminals, make arrests, and recover stolen property—all in real time. Officers will again be confident because they are sure they are engaging felons; they’ll be making arrests unobtrusively and without public rancor or complaint; and they’ll be removing felons from the neighborhood, thus ending those particular offenders’ crime cycles and reducing crime rates.
Case Studies
Redlands, California
Redlands, California, located in San Bernardino County, is about 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Back in 2011, when many cities in California struggled financially, Redlands mandated a 26.5 percent reduction in the size of their police department. That reduction in personnel coincided with legislative changes and other factors that caused crime rates to rise. Property crimes, especially car burglaries, were clearly rising and Redlands Police Department (RPD) decided to use GPS technology as a solution to prevent crime increases by arresting serial offenders.6
In their first deployment, RPD detectives placed a small clandestine GPS tracker inside a laptop computer, which was left in a locked car that was parked at a fitness center. Within 45 minutes, the car’s window was smashed, and the GPS-baited laptop was stolen. Within 10 minutes, the GPS tracker led police to the thieves who were arrested. In addition, 10 previous car burglaries were connected to this pair. Crime prevention through directed arrests had a successful start in Redlands.
Nassau, New York
As the Redlands’ success was shared, other agencies followed suit. Nassau County, New York, located next to New York City, had a series of armed robberies at local gas stations that culminated in a robbery-homicide of one station’s employee. In the attempts to arrest this serial offender, the police had set up stakeouts that were costing thousands of dollars per watch, to no avail. The police commissioner analyzed the overtime cost of the stakeouts, and concluded he could cover 100 separate locations for a full year by deploying GPS cash trackers at each gas station. The financial numbers were easy to process: pay for detectives to stake out 20 gas stations for a few days or deploy 100 GPS trackers for less money and electronically stake out those gas stations for a full year. As expected, this serial offender returned to rob again, only this time his loot included a GPS tracking device that helped lead to his arrest. The offender was convicted of murdering the one station attendant, along with committing 10 additional gas station robberies and received a life sentence.7 Those GPS trackers are now being deployed to fight other crimes across Nassau County—with the re-use component an added value of the GPS strategy.
Miami-Dade County, Florida
Miami-Dade County Police were investigating a series of five-gallon propane bottle thefts from various retail outlets in South Florida. The FBI was also engaged in the investigation because of concerns these thefts may have a larger terrorist connection. Miami-Dade Police Department taped a GPS flexible tracker to the bottom of a filled propane tank and pushed it to the back of a storage cabinet outside a local market. Within a few days, the GPS-laced propane tank was stolen, along with 20 other tanks. Because of the GPS signal, the offenders were quickly apprehended. The theft was cleared by an arrest, and, more importantly, the suspicion of a possible terrorism link (using the hundreds of propane bottles for an IED-type weapon) was completely unfounded.8
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Police Department, always a busy crime fighting operation, was trying to address quality-of-life problems in its City Center district. Business commuters and college students who ride bikes downtown were suffering daily occurrences of bicycle thefts. With bike costs ranging from several hundreds of dollars up to several thousands of dollars, the police were clearly concerned. The crime analysts and crime prevention members provided solid intelligence on the “hottest” bicycle theft locations, and the detectives deployed several mountain bikes with GPS trackers hidden in the bike seats. From the first week of deployment, Philadelphia patrol officers started making arrests. After more than 30 offenders were arrested for felony bike theft, the crime rate dropped at City Center to zero.
San Francisco, California
San Francisco, California, Police Department (SFPD) had a serial robber who was attacking several downtown McDonald’s restaurants during the late-night and early morning hours. He was armed, had abused some employees, and always cleared out the store’s safe. High losses were mounting, and the danger to employees was clear. This same suspect was believed to be responsible for robbing other fast-food restaurants across the Bay Area. However, due to time, budget, and personnel constraints, initiating detective stakeouts wasn’t feasible. In a POP approach with the McDonald’s security team, SFPD arranged to deploy GPS cash-tracking devices in the cash drawers and safe in every McDonald’s in the city. Within about a week, the robber returned to attack the downtown McDonald’s. He hit the store at 4:15 a.m., held everyone at gunpoint, and fled with all the money in the store, including the night deposits from the safe. He also unknowingly left with the GPS cash tracker amid his loot, which led to his arrest as he fled over the Bay Bridge into Oakland.9 This felon was convicted of all the McDonald’s robberies, along with the robberies of several other Bay Area restaurants.
Hundreds of other forward-thinking police agencies have been using GPS-enabled bait devices to set up an electronic stakeout to locate and arrest thieves committing their crimes.
Results
Looking back to the Redlands’ success story, RPD analyzed the type of offenders they were arresting and then examined the local and regional crime statistics to determine the success of their electronic stakeout crime fighting. Starting from a modest deployment of three GPS-enabled devices per day, they’ve increased the number to 30 devices.10
RPD selected the following types of crimes for deploying GPS trackers to find and arrest serial offenders:
■ Convenience store robberies
■ Vehicle burglaries
■ Commercial safe thefts
■ Bike thefts
■ Tire thefts
■ Construction site thefts
■ Fire hydrant thefts
■ Pharmacy burglaries
■ Vending machine thefts
■ Metal and wire thefts
■ USPS, UPS, and FedEx mail thefts
■ Laptop thefts
■ Controlled narcotics deliveries
■ Organized retail crime
■ iPhone thefts
■ Credit card skimming
■ Cemetery burglaries
In the first year, 86 felons were arrested while committing crimes like the ones listed above. Of the 79 adults arrested, 77 had previous arrests, and 24 were currently out on parole or probation. In addition, 12 of these individuals had stolen property on them from other crimes, and 19 of them had outstanding warrants for their arrest. The 77 previously convicted felons had a total of 1,262 prior arrests, with an average of 16.4 arrests each.11 That is nothing short of a staggering number. Removing these career repeat offenders supports the theory that GPS crime fighting is a solid crime prevention strategy. It’s a cheaper, smarter, more fleet-of-foot policing approach, and it enhances the community’s safety by preventing all the crimes that surely would have occurred had the GPS tracking–enabled devices had not been used and the subsequent arrests not been made.
When Redlands analyzed their crime prevention success by reviewing their UCR crime stats, they found vehicle burglary was reduced by 36 percent from 2010 to 2014, while the regional increase was about 11 percent.12 Concurrently, while robbery crime was also on the rise in the region, Redlands had reduced their armed robbery offenses by 14 percent. A double-digit crime-prevention result for a fraction of the cost of other programs.
Conclusion
In the face of tight budgets, today’s law enforcement commanders are taking innovative approaches to preventing crime in their communities. Targeting repeat serial offenders for arrest prevents numerous future crimes. Preventing crime by arresting the small number of offenders who commit most of the robberies, burglaries, and thefts is a sound and reasonable approach to lowering the crime rates.
The IACP Crime Prevention Committee has identified the necessity of strong community trust, partnerships, enforcement, and environmental and situational awareness and education as the most cost-effective way of achieving success in reducing crime. Prevention is proactive—it is targeted, it addresses quality of life, and it is adaptable. And, part of that strategy can include applying GPS-enabled crime-fighting solutions to remove criminal offenders when prevention strategies fail to do so. Sir Robert Peel’s philosophy is as relevant to law enforcement today as when it was written, “It should be understood, at the outset, that the principal object to be attained is the prevention of crime.”13 Removing habitual offenders from the community through targeted arrests, and thus preventing them from committing additional crimes, is part of the modern-day community policing philosophy. d
Notes:
1 “Proposition 47 Linked to Increase in Some Property Crimes, But Not Violent Crime,” Public Policy Institute of California, June 13, 2018.
2 “Proposition 47 Linked to Increase in Some Property Crimes, But Not Violent Crime.”
3 Erica Sandberg, “After Proposition 47: Crime and No Consequences in California,” National Review, January 30, 2018; Timothy Williams, “Violent Crime in U.S. Rises for Second Consecutive Year,” New York Times, September 25, 2017.
4 FBI, Bank Crime Statistics 2006 (Washington DC: February 2007); FBI, Bank Crime Statistics 2018 (Washington DC: March 2019).
5 Richard Fuller and Phillip Grimm, “Follow the Money: Tracking System for Locating Stolen Currency,” InsideGNSS (November/December 2006): 22–35.
6 Travis Martinez, Using GPS Technology to Investigate Crime Trends (National Resource and Technical Assistance Center for Improving Law Enforcement Investigations, November 2017).
7 Bridget Murphy, “New Cassel Man Convicted of Killing Gas Station Clerk,” Newsday, February 15, 2017.
8 Juan J. Perez (director, Miami-Dade Police Department); Ed Bermudez (officer-in-charge, lieutenant, electronic stakeout).
9 McDonald’s Restaurant Robbery, SFPD arrest 2-3-16, San Francisco, California.
10 Martinez, Using GPS Technology to Investigate Crime Trends.
11 Sandra Emerson, “Redlands Police Made Hundreds of Arrests Using GPS Tracking Devices, Officials Say,” The Press-Enterprise, November 10, 2017.
12 FBI, “Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics.”
13 J. L. Lyman, “The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829: An Analysis of Certain Events Influencing the Passage and Character of the Metropolitan Police Act in England,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 55, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 153.
Please cite as
Richard T. Long, “Crime Prevention Through Targeted Arrest Strategies,” Police Chief Online, October 23, 2019.
