The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Bicycle Police

I ran across this interesting paper and I thought I would share. I have heard reports of how effective bike patrols are from IPMBA and other sources but I had no idea that Baltimore was one such experiment.

"Baltimore started experimenting with bicycle patrols in March 1972 because police cars had difficulty traveling through narrow alleys. Crime dropped 50% in six months of the four beats patrolled by bike from 8 AM to midnight (Bigart, 1972)."

I also found this of interest:

"Technology-dependent police officers became isolated from the communities they served.
...
A study by the Kansas City Police Department attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of randomized patrolling in marked police cars. They study found that increasing or decreasing the frequency of patrols had no significant impact on the level of crimes believed to be deterred by police patrols and the change in levels of patrolling was not noticed by citizens."
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We feel police are isolated from the communities they serve and is crime a problem. Gee I wounder what ever can we do to solve these issues?

<a href="http://www.ipmba.org/newsletters/ABriefHistoryofPoliceCycling.pdf">http://www.ipmba.org/newsletters/ABriefHistoryofPoliceCycling.pdf</a>;