Abstract
While police agencies have many responsibilities, their basic activities can be crudely categorized within a simple temporal framework:
past—criminal investigation;
present—patrol and order maintenance;
future—crime prevention.
In Self-Selection Policing, Jason Roach and Ken Pease outline an innovation that blends different elements from this structure. Self-selection policing (SSP) involves ‘an approach whereby active, serious criminals are identified by the investigation of the minor often “routine” offences that they commit’ (p. 5). By linking present events to past or future events, these minor crimes, known as trigger offenses, act as pointers to potential serious criminality. Individuals caught committing trigger offenses ‘volunteer’ themselves for further police investigation.
SSP trigger offenses philosophically resemble broken windows, terrorist planning, and predator hunts. Crime and criminality have structural similarities to icebergs, with most of the action happening beneath the surface. Criminology’s arctic explorers, Roach and Pease, explain the nature, origins, and utility of the ‘bummock’ (bet you didn’t know that’s what the part below the water is called). Too often we look at criminal incidents as isolated events, a perspective encouraged by the bureaucratic nature of society and the pigeonhole legal definitions we employ to delimit crimes. This myopia interferes with our perception of the fourth dimension and the temporal trails left by offenders. In the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, the book’s authors look for footprints to follow. (Some tangential trivia—over the course of his illustrious career as a consulting detective, Holmes followed hound, horse, cow, carriage, and bicycle tracks, in addition to footprints.)
The book begins by introducing the SSP concept; it then follows with a general discussion on how police currently identify criminal suspects and some limitations of these traditional approaches. The next chapter, the most substantial in the book, provides both the theoretical framework and a solid empirical base for the key assumptions of SSP—offenders are generalists, not specialists, and the versatility of serious criminals provides an opportunity for police to identify them. The following section is a brief literature review of related research. The results of two SSP relevant studies, the first analyzing minor offending committed by visitors to a juvenile prison, the second examining the potential utility of driving offenses as SSP triggers, are then presented. The final chapter concludes with a helpful discussion on strategies for introducing SSP and overcoming possible barriers; it also includes 10 commandments and a check list for assessing proposed trigger offenses.
The belief in criminal specialization is a flawed extrapolation from our experiences with mainstream occupational careers. We seek investment advice from financial planners, not nuclear engineers. Kindergarten teachers do not fly commercial jetliners. Plumbers are useful, professors less so. Criminality, however, is not an occupation. While it can generate income, it also often involves a certain anti-social attitude toward rules, both major and minor. If there is benefit to be gained and minimal risk in parking in a handicap-only parking space, then why not do it? For most of us, the reason we don’t is that we understand the need for rules and empathize with those the space has been set aside for. Criminals, who enjoy risk, aren’t constrained by rules, and lack empathy, will take advantage of this and similar opportunities. Identifying such situations is the idea of the trigger offense. Once recognized, they can point police toward people of significant interest.
One of the challenges to the implementation and effective operation of SSP is the issue of false positives. Ideally, trigger offenses can be identified that will orient police to active offenders and serious criminality. The reality is that many individuals of no interest to the police will also commit these same trigger offenses, partly because there are many more nonoffenders (if we exclude minor transgressions) than offenders. SSP practitioners have to figure out fast, effective, and efficient means of separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The authors warn, ‘Always remember that even the best trigger offence will identify more people who are not serious offenders than people who are so’ (p. 132). How best to maximize the true positive rate (sensitivity) is an issue that requires further research, evaluation, and experience.
Possible solutions may lie in the idea of clusters of trigger events, with each individual incident contributing to the overall probability of police interest. For example, a driver not wearing his seatbelt who runs a stop sign and is found without vehicle insurance clearly wants lots of police attention. While SSP eschews personal characteristics (e.g., race, ethnicity), there may be a valid role here for time and place. Research in the environmental criminology field has found spatial and temporal patterns in crime that might prove useful in the SSP context. As noted, more research is needed.
The book is balanced and modest in its approach; the authors make reasonable arguments and never claim to have all the answers. In a few places, they engage in interesting and informative side discussions on certain topics (e.g., life-course persistent offenders; the current preoccupation with randomized controlled trials). I quite enjoyed these.
Self-Selection Policing: Theory, Research and Practice is of interest to researchers in crime and security while also being relevant and accessible to police practitioners. The book is well written and easy to understand. Theories are clearly explained and arguments logically laid out. The two authors even occasionally let their sense of humor show through. All in all, the book is an enjoyable read on an important and timely topic.