Weed and Seed

Weed and Seed has three key components: Weeding, Seeding, and Community Policing. Weeding includes law enforcement efforts to remove violent offenders, drug dealers, and other criminals from the target area through enforcement, adjudication, prosecution, and supervision efforts designed to target, apprehend, and incapacitate. Seeding includes human services and neighborhood revitalization efforts to prevent and deter further crime. Community policing involves proactive police-community engagement to develop solutions to violent and drug-related crime. Activities concentrate on increasing police visibility and developing cooperative relationships between the police and citizenry in the target areas through foot patrols, problem-solving, victim referrals to support services, and community relations activities. A special emphasis is placed on addressing the needs of crime victims and minority communities that are disproportionately victimized by crime.

The goals of Weed and Seed are to control violent crime, drug trafficking, and drug-related crime and provide a safe environment where residents can live, work, and raise their families.

An evaluation compared the number of crimes (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft) committed in the year prior to program implementation with those that occurred during the 2nd year of Weed and Seed. The results found that across the eight sites, crime patterns varied widely. Of the nine target areas with available data, declined occurred in six. The evaluation also showed that changes in the drug arrest rates appear to follow the same pattern as overall changes in the crime rate. For example, among those six target areas for which arrest data is available, the four with decreases in crime from the year prior to Weed and Seed through the 2nd year of implementation all experienced initial high rates of drug arrests, suggesting an initial period of intense weeding activities followed by declining drug arrest rates. Assuming the level of enforcement as measured by police presence has remained somewhat constant, this trend reflects success in reducing drug activity.