Kansas City Gun Experiment, National Institute of Justice, and Youth.gov are all related.
The Kansas City Gun Experiment was a police patrol project that was aimed at reducing gun violence.During 1992–93, the Kansas City Police Department focused extra patrols in gun crime hot spots in the city.Extra patrol was provided in rotation by officers from the Central Patrol Division.7 days a week, the officers on overtime worked from 7 pm to 1 a.m.They were asked to concentrate on gun detection through proactive patrol, and they were not required to answer other calls for service.In 1991, the site had the second-most drive-by shootings of any patrol beat.The Kansas City Gun Experiment was based on the idea that gun seizures and gun crime are related.As gun seizures increase, gun crime should decrease.Deterrence and incapacitation can explain the relationship.If it were known that law enforcement would seize guns, illegal gun carriers would be less likely to carry guns in the area.Increasing patrol visibility will generally deter crime.The gun experiment suggests that if guns were taken from potential gun criminals in the area, they would not commit gun crimes until they got a new gun.The goal of the experiment was to reduce gun crime because the area had the second-highest number of drive-by shootings.The KCPD implemented three different strategies for increasing gun seizures: door-to-door solicitation of anonymous tips, training police to interpret gun-carrying signals in body language, and field interrogations.The extra police patrol in hot spots areas was part of the third strategy.They included searches of individuals under arrest on charges other than gun crimes, plain-view searches, and safety frisks of people who had been stopped in their cars for traffic violations.Some of the methods used by officers to seize guns are shown in the following examples.
A breakdown of the methods used by the patrol officers to seize guns during the experimental period: 21 percent plain view, 34 percent frisk for safety, and 45 percent search upon arrest.In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the issue of safety frisks, which allowed officers to pat down the outside of the suspect's clothing to check for guns.The Supreme Court didn't try to articulate the substantive basis for police officers' suspicions.The court places on the officers the responsibility of explaining a reasonable basis for frisking an individual but accepts the facts cited by police as reasonable (Sherman, Shaw, and Rogan 1995).
The effectiveness of the Kansas City Gun Experiment was studied by Sherman and Rogan.The target area had high rates of violent crime, including drive-by shootings and homicides.The Metro Patrol District has an almost-identical number of drive-by shootings.The target area had 4,528 people who were 53 percent female, 92 percent nonwhite and had a median age of 32 years.The comparison area had a population of 8,142 people, of which 56 were female, 85 were nonwhite, and the median age was 31 years.The target area was different from the comparison area.The comparison area had three times the land area and had slightly higher housing prices.The hot spots were identified by analyzing all gun crimes in the area.Any offense report in which the use of a gun is mentioned was defined as gun crime.The officers in the target area worked a total of 200 nights.The primary measures of interest were police activity and crime, but there were no funds available for extra patrol time.Booking was required for the extra patrol hours because they were funded by the federal government.In addition, evaluators accompanied the officers on 300 hours of hot spots patrol andcoded every shift activity narrative for patrol time and enforcement inside and outside of the area.Property room data on guns seized, crime reports, calls for service, and arrest records were all analyzed for the target and comparison area.The data was analyzed using four different models and it showed that a gun was used in the crime.The primary analyses assumed that the gun crime counts were random from the beats examined before and after the intervention.The model estimated the magnitude of the effect of hot spots patrols on gun crime by looking at the mean weekly rates and the standard two-tailed t–tests.A second model assumed that the weekly gun crime data points were correlated serially and needed a Box–Jenkins ARIM test of the effect of an intervention in a time series.A third model looked at Homicide and drive-by shootings aggregated in 6-month totals on the assumption that those counts were independent.The t–tests compared weekly gun crimes for all 29 weeks of the phase 1 patrol program.Before and after the beginning of phase 1 the weekly counts were extended by the ARIM models.The year after phase 1 was added by the ANOVA model.
The Kansas City Gun Experiment appeared to have a significant effect on gun seizures.The hot spots patrol officers found 29 guns in addition to the 47 guns seized in the target area by other police officers during phase 1, increasing the total guns found by 65 percent over the previous 6 months.In the first 6 months of 1992 there were 46 guns seized in the target area, and 76 guns were seized over the last six months.There was no real change in the number of guns seized during the first 6 months of 1992, compared with the last half of the year.In the comparison area, there were more guns seized before patrols than during patrols.The decline is 49 percent with 83 fewer gun crimes.The change was statistically significant using two different models of analysis.There was a slight increase in gun crimes in the 29 weeks before the hot spots patrols began.There was no significant increase in gun crime in the seven neighboring beats.There was evidence that the program benefits were spread to two of the other beats.During the 6-month period when hot spots patrols were active, drive-by shootings declined compared with the periods without patrols, though the difference was not statistically significant.There were no significant differences in the beats surrounding the targeted area compared to when the patrols were not active.There were no significant differences in homicides across those time periods in the comparison beat or any of the contiguous beats.It appears that the target area hot spot patrols were limited to gun crimes.