Extra cash to tackle violence
POLICE WILL RECEIVE SHARE OF £4.1M FUNDING
EXTRA funding to help increase policing in violent crime hotspots will be given to the police.
The Home Office is giving Leicestershire and 17 other forces a share of an additional £4.12 million to increase policing in towns and cities plagued by violent crime.
The funding is being granted after the Essex force successfully piloted a tactic where officers were put on 15-minute long uniformed patrols in crime hotspots at targeted times.
The force saw a 73.5 per cent drop in violent crime and a 39.1 per cent fall in street crime on days when patrols visited, compared with the days they did not.
The Home Office is giving Leicestershire and forces funding to implement the tactic.
Detective Chief Inspector Lewis Basford, of Essex Police, said officers targeted 20 hotspots, each of 150 metres by 150 metres, with short, high-visibility patrols during a pilot in Southend last year.
During the pilot, where officers conducted patrols for three days in a row, the effect lasted in the area for a further three days, with crime increasing on the fourth day without a patrol, he said.
Det Chief Insp Basford designed the “hotspot policing” as part of his Masters degree in criminology at Cambridge University.
He said: “This is about putting a police officer in an area for the shortest amount of time for the highest residual benefit on crime.
“We’re getting the presence of the police, we’re giving back to the public a visible police presence, but we’re doing it at sporadic times, the right times, the right place, driven by data – driven by the inconsistencies of when we’re there.”
He said the funding would help deploy officers, pay for environmental changes such as CCTV cameras and cutting back foliage, and help with outreach schemes.
Policing minister Kit Malthouse, pictured, said: “One of the chief missions I’ve been set by the Prime Minister is to get violence down and particularly violence in the public realm.
“This kind of data-driven scientific hotspot policing is showing fantastic results in dealing with that problem so we’re investing in it across 18 areas of the country that are most plagued by this kind of violence and hopefully we’ll see significant falls over the months to come.
“In Southend, they’re proving this smart approach to hotspot policing, done consistently, can have a massive impact, but we want to see that across the rest of the country.”
He said the drive to recruit 20,000 extra police officers by 2023 is “ahead of schedule”, currently being almost halfway. He said: “We’ve got a lot more to go but the pipeline of applicants is looking really strong”.
Free anti-crime devices, Page 27.