ABSTRACT
Researchers have long noted that characteristics of neighborhoods and communities have an influence on police decision-making and behavior. As Lum (2011) notes, while police innovation and intervention research has increasingly focused on micro place crime hotspots, which are often defined as particular addresses or street segments, there has been little research about whether aspects of the street segment environment also have an impact on police decision-making and activities. This paper extends neighborhood- and community-level perspectives on how the environment impacts police behavior to the place level. Hypotheses developed from community-level theories are applied to police behavior in a sample of street segments in Baltimore City, Maryland. Including place as a unit of analysis in studies of police activity can enhance community-level research, and point to new directions for theory and measurement of police behavior.
