A functional integration of various groups/levels of police force could and should certainly increase the efficiency and effectivness. It is of course of great importance that the 'right' group is able to get there in time to do the required job. Utoya sadly docet.


I did reflect a bit on the 'hot spot' approach to policing which was brought up in the cited NYT article. The idea behind it might be surprisingly simple and quite easy to model.

Think of a crime hot spot as an efficient market of crime, where the costumer meets the supplier and the competitor the other. Staying out of that area of criminal exchange will hurt your bottom line or make it harder to get your drug or sex fix. If the police starts to turn up a lot at irregular but often narrow intervals and interrupts that efficient exchange of goods and violence it will induce some criminals to stay away and to shift away to another spot.

The key success from a police point of view is that this disrupts many supply chains and criminal nets which take some time (if at all) to reach the old efficiency in new hot spots. When you look at the big picture with many hot spots forced to undergo this process it is clear that those drops in efficiency can lower the overall crime rate by a good degree.

(Some violence, like inter-gang one, might increase after the shift away from the hot spot, as they might fight over the new territory. It depends of course on the relative gains and falls. )