Field Notes

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Analyzing Crime Displacement and Diffusion

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Analyzing Crime Displacement and Diffusion is Rob T. Guerette’s practitioner guide, number 10 in the Problem-Oriented Guides for Police Problem-Solving Tools series. It was published by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the US Department of Justice, with the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing. The preserved artifact is the 74-page COPS printing.

It is written for line officers, crime analysts, and police executives who need to answer the standard objection to a situational intervention: that the crime simply moved. The guide is the vault’s reference for Displacement and its complement, diffusion of benefits.

What it contains

The guide defines displacement, enumerates its five forms — temporal, spatial, target, tactical, and offence — and defines diffusion of benefits as the reduction that spreads beyond the targeted area, period, or crime type. It then reviews the evidence on how often each occurs, explains why displacement is not automatic, and supplies a measurement procedure: criteria for selecting a catchment area, formulas for computing displacement and diffusion relative to the treatment effect, and a worked example from a Herman Goldstein Awards finalist.

Why it is useful here

It is a secondary synthesis rather than primary research, and it is written to help practitioners defend their own projects, which is a stated purpose worth holding in view. It nonetheless carries the field’s headline empirical results with citations to their primary studies: Guerette and Bowers’s 2009 review of 102 evaluations, Eck’s 1993 review, Hesseling’s 1994 review, and the UK New Deal for Communities buffer-zone analysis.

Its most quotable contribution is the negative finding. The guide states that most problem-oriented policing projects never investigate displacement at all, and that universal claims that displacement occurs rest “on unfounded suppositions rather than empirical facts” — a caution that applies equally to advocates and critics of a restriction.

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