Evaluation of Community-Oriented Enforcement Demonstration Projects

Decina, Lawrence E.; Alonge, Mark A · 2023 · ROSA P / United States. Department of Transportation. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

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Summary

This report evaluates the effectiveness of community-oriented enforcement demonstration projects aimed at improving traffic safety through data-driven enforcement and community engagement. Sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the study assessed two 15-month programs initiated in 2018: a seat belt use demonstration in Norman, Oklahoma (with Broken Arrow as a control site), and an alcohol-impaired driving demonstration in Joplin, Missouri (with Cape Girardeau as a control site). The research sought to determine whether integrating community-oriented policing with high-visibility enforcement (HVE) could increase community support for traffic laws and enhance the perceived risk of enforcement, thereby deterring unsafe driving behaviors. The methodology combined process evaluations with outcome measurements. Process evaluations documented program implementation, including enforcement activities, public outreach, and community partnership engagement. Outcome measures included public intercept surveys administered four times across all sites to gauge attitudes and awareness of enforcement, as well as seat belt usage observations in Norman and Broken Arrow. The seat belt observation study utilized a sample size of 2,000 vehicles, selected based on power analysis to detect small effect sizes, and employed mixed-effects logistic regression to attribute changes to the program rather than statewide trends. Enforcement data, including citations and arrests, were collected from police records for three years prior to and during the program period. The findings indicated that the community-oriented enforcement approach was ineffective in its primary goals. In Norman, the "Buckle Up Like a Champion Today" campaign failed to substantially increase occupant protection citations, though warnings nearly doubled. Despite active social media presence and 1,466 hours of enforcement, community participation was lower than anticipated, and survey results showed negligible changes in public attitudes. Furthermore, the program did not demonstrate a sustained increase in seat belt use. In Joplin, the "We Are Out There Too!" campaign suffered from staffing shortages, resulting in a 23% decrease in monthly impaired-driving arrests compared to previous years. Community partner engagement dwindled over time, and public attitudes toward impaired driving enforcement remained unchanged. The authors conclude that the implemented community-oriented enforcement strategies failed to build community support or increase the perceived risk of punishment necessary for HVE to be effective. Factors contributing to this lack of success included weak buy-in from community partners and enforcement strategies focused on specific areas identified by the Data-Driven Approach to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) model. This targeted approach may have failed to convey a universal risk of enforcement to the broader community. Additionally, resource constraints and communication gaps, such as slogans that omitted enforcement messaging, likely undermined the programs' impact. The report suggests that without strong community partnership and a perceived widespread risk of detection, data-driven enforcement alone may not sufficiently alter driver behavior or public attitudes.

Key finding

Community-oriented enforcement demonstrations were not effective in building community support for traffic safety enforcement or increasing the perceived risk of enforcement needed for high-visibility enforcement to be effective.

Methodology

mixed_methods

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via bulk_ingest_rosap on 2026-05-23 (6 acquisition events logged).

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.

• seat belt use
• dui enforcement
• public messaging
• regulatory evaluation

Information type

What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).

• Applied Guidance: countermeasure evaluation, policy recommendations
• Empirical Findings: observational prevalence