Opioid overdoses are an important public health concern. Concerns about police involvement at overdose events may decrease calls to 911 for emergency medical care thereby increasing the chances than an overdose becomesfatal. To address this concern, Washington State passed a law that provides immunity from drug possession charges and facilitates the availability of take-home-naloxone (the opioid overdose antidote) to bystanders in 2010.

In this article, the authors report on the efforts of more than 200 foot patrol officers during the summer of 2009 in Philadelphia. The results suggest that targeted foot patrols in violent crime hotspots can significantly reduce violent crime levels as long as a threshold level of violence exists initially. The authors suggest that intensive foot patrol efforts in violent hotspots may achieve deterrence at a microspatial level, primarily by increasing the certainty of disruption, apprehension, and arrest.

In this article for the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (now JAMA Pediatrics), the author discusses two articles, by McCabe, et al. and Meier et al., but also raises two questions about the issues of opioid abuse and adolescents. He asks, "What is the role of parents and what is the role of the prescriber, and others, in educating parents about the potential hazards of opioids, the relative need for them, how to safeguard them at home, and the need to dispose of unused medications immediately?"

This paper reports on field observations of foot patrol officers involved in a recent experiment in Philadelphia, which were designed to capture officers' perceptions of, and experiences with the foot patrol function.