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"Third-party policing" describes police efforts to persuade or coerce nonoffending persons to take actions which are outside the scope of their routine activities, and which are designed to indirectly minimize disorder caused by other persons or to reduce the possibility that crime may occur. The practice applies formal, noncriminal controls found in civil law as coercive tools against an intermediate class of nonoffending persons who are thought to have some power over offenders' primary environments. The police use coercion to create place guardianship that previously was absent, so as to decrease opportunities for crime and disorder. We link the theoretical bases of crime prevention to the theory of third-party policing, and examine gaps in traditional policing that have led to a formalization of policing through third parties. We examine third-party policing in two location-specific programs: the drug-abatement Beat Health Program in Oakland and the problemsolving RECAP Unit in Minneapolis. We conclude by discussing the potential ramifications of the third-party trend.
Third-party policing is our term for police efforts to persuade or coerce nonoffending persons to take actions which are outside the scope of their routine activities, and which are designed to indirectly minimize disorder caused by other persons or to reduce the possibility that crime may occur. In practice, third-party policing invokes formal, noncriminal controls imported from the regulatory wing of civil law. Though the ultimate target of police action remains a population of actual and potential offenders, the proximate target of third-party policing is an intermediate class of nonoffending persons who are thought to have some power over the offenders' primary environment. The police use coercion to create a place guardianship that previously was absent, so as to decrease opportunities for crime and disorder. Third-party policing is both defined and distinguished from problem- and community-oriented policing by the sources and the targets of that coercive power.
In community- and problem-oriented policing, the police assume an active quasi-enforcement and managerial role in addition to their more established, hortatory role as dispensers of expert advice (see Clarke 1992; Goldstein 1990). Traditional enforcement and prevention methods are augmented with a graduated scale of informal interventions by guardians who (at least theoretically) have a more consistent presence in, and influence over, the lives and behaviors of targeted...