Kansas Experiment

Police patrol strategies are based upon two unproven but widely accepted hypothesis. One of the being that by seeing police around the streets it reduces the crime that is being occurred in the streets, and the other one is that people fear less about crimes occurring when there is police present. These strategies were made to reduce the crimes and make the public feel more safe in the street. The Kansas City Experiment started on October 1972 and continued to 1973 , it was administered by the Kansas City Police Department and evaluated by the Police Foundation. The Kansas City Experiment tested the use of preventive patrol on crime rates and citizens fear of crime. The police foundation divided Kansas into fifteen different areas, and those fifteen areas were divided into three groups of five. These areas or “beats”, were being patrolled differently. Five of the beats were patrolled in the usual way they would always do it, there was no change in those areas. In another groups of five beats, the activities of patrolling were doubled there was more police in the streets trying to prevent crime. The last group of five beats had no patrolling, and no uniformed officers entered that part of the city unless someone called them for an emergency or they received a call for help. This experiment was kept a secret for everyone, citizens didn’t notice the difference between the patrolled and unpatrolled parts of the city. The experiment revealed that the crime rates were not impacted by preventive patrol, and preventive patrol does not impact fear of crime. The 1974 study can be summed up in the words of the author of the final project: “The whole idea of riding around in cars to create a feeling of omnipresence just hasn’t work. . . . Good people with good intentions tried something that logically should have worked, but didn’t.” Crimes such as burglary, robbery, auto theft, larceny, and vandalism showed no significant difference in the rate between the three beats. The