Police patrols are the law enforcement practice of traversing a particular area to monitor and secure it. Police may conduct patrols either as a routine operation or in response to a perceived threat in an area.
Police patrols can use different means of transportation:
- Marked or unmarked vehicles.
- Foot movement.
- Helicopters, drones or surveillance planes.
Routine police patrols usually occur in extended perimeters around police stations. They serve to establish a visible police presence to deter potential criminals, and occasionally to catch unlucky criminals “red handed”.
If the police are made aware of a threat in a particular area which they consider to be worthy of investigation, they will send one or more patrols to investigate it. The time between when they are made aware of the threat and the arrival of the patrols depends on the distance between the area to investigate and the nearest available police unit. The police can be made aware of a threat by:
- A routine patrol stumbling upon a crime by chance.
- Guards or civilians.
- An alarm system (e.g. motion detectors inside a building), either directly or through a security company monitoring the alarm system.
- Police officers monitoring live CCTV footage.
- An infiltrator or an informant.
Used in tactics: Arrest, Deterrence, Incrimination
Mitigations
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Attack | The police can disturb an action. To mitigate this, you can distract them by launching a near-simultaneous attack on the other side of the neighborhood, or disrupt their communications by burning the cell tower used for police communications. The police can follow you after an action. To mitigate this, you can use tactics designed to stop them or slow them down, either preventively or during the pursuit: crow's feet or spike strips, gunfire, barricades, stones, fireworks, etc. |
| Careful action planning | You can carefully plan an action to take into account the risk of routine police patrols interfering with the action, a risk that is always present, except perhaps in remote areas. |
| Reconnaissance | Before an action, you can identify the nearest police station, their shift change schedule, and patrol patterns, and you can identify routes that are not visible to police patrols and that would make pursuit difficult (forests, railroad tracks, etc.). |