Proof bobbies on the beat will slash crime
CALLS have come for more bobbies on the beat after an experiment found that police patrols of just four hours a week cut crime by 21 per cent.
In a six-month trial led by Cambridge University, four fiveminute patrols were held each day for four days a week in 57 London Underground stations.
Now the researchers are recommending more patrols to reduce crime after it showed the longlasting effect of such short patrols.
Dr Barak Ariel, fellow in experimental criminology at the university, said: “The more that uniformed police have been there, and the more recently, the less likely the future crimes may be to occur.”
He concluded having more police patrolling the streets where trouble was likely could be more effective than officers driving to answer non-emergency calls. The strategy had long been recommended by the National Research Council.
Phantom
The Cambridge team was also amazed to find that 97 per cent of the fall in offences recorded at the stations came at times when officers were not present, dubbing it the “phantom effect”.
Criminals, fearing the officers’ presence, were less likely to strike.
Study co-author, Prof Lawrence Sherman, said: “The total crime prevention benefit of police patrols may be greater when they are absent than when they are present.
“In the London Underground experiment we see a huge residual effect of brief appearances by patrolling officers after they leave.
“This phantom effect suggests that crime declines when potential offenders are apprehensive about a possible police presence based on recent patrolling patterns – even when there are no police in the vicinity.
“In London stations, it may be that more professional kinds of offenders are particularly sensitive to changes in police presence, such as pickpockets and distraction thieves.”
He said the findings could have implications for debates on police priorities during austerity, such as the value of investigating past crimes versus preventing future crimes.
In the experiment 115 of the Underground’s most crime-ridden stations, like Russell Square, Oxford Circus and Earl’s Court, were chosen for the test, with 57 of those randomly chosen to get patrols between 2011 and 2012.
During the trial, 3,549 calls to police from the platform came from stations without patrols, compared to 2,817 from those with them.
The platform patrols were the first of their kind in the Underground’s 155-year history.
Researchers said choosing platforms gave them a glimpse of how effective patrols can be by using an “uncontaminated” environment.
Dr Ariel explained: “We wanted to measure what happens when police patrols are introduced into an urban environment for the first time.”
The team targeted crime “hot spots” where patrols could have greatest effect by ranking stations based on the previous year’s crime rates.
Emergency
Researchers also chose times when crime was more likely. Platforms experienced more incidents and calls to police from Wednesday to Saturday between 3pm and 10pm.
Twenty uniformed British Transport Police officers randomly patrolled the platforms on those days and during those times.
Each two-person patrol was allocated between three and five stations, and they walked the platforms for fifteen minutes, four times a day.
They were most effective at preventing platform crime during periods and days when patrols were scheduled – but just three per cent of that reduction came when officers were actually scheduled to patrol.
The researchers also found crime in the rest of the station fell almost as much as crime on platforms during the four days of regular patrols.
Dr Sherman added: “Our findings indicate that consistent patrols can cause large reductions in both crime and emergency calls in areas that have never before been proactively patrolled by police in this way.”