Policing and Crime Reduction

Dr Jacqui Karn

Police Effectiveness in a Changing World Project

Policing and Crime ReductionThe evidence and its implications for practice

AcknowledgementsThe Police Foundation is very grateful to the Dawes Trust for funding this report as part of the PoliceEffectiveness in a Changing World project.

The Foundation would also like to thank Jesse Donaldson and Jenny Holland for their assistance with theliterature search and review and John Graham and Jon Collins for undertaking a final edit of the report. It wouldalso like to extend its gratitude to Professor Ian Loader, Professor Martin Innes, Andy Feist, Stephen Roe,Rachel Tuffin, Dr Paul Quinton and Dr Amie Brown for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

About the Police FoundationThe Police Foundation is an independent think tank focused on developing knowledge and understanding ofpolicing and challenging the police service and the government to improve policing for the benefit of the public.The Police Foundation acts as a bridge between the public, the police and the government, while being ownedby none of them.

Layout / Design by TAW Design and Print – [email protected] – 01271 314996.

Policing and Crime ReductionThe evidence and its implications for practice

Dr Jacqui Karn, Senior Research and Development Officer,The Police Foundation

June 2013

Policing and Crime Reduction 1

Contents

Executive summary ...................................................................................... 3

Introduction .................................................................................................. 7

1. The role of the police in reducing crime ................................................ 9

Introduction ...................................................................................................... 9

What the police do .......................................................................................... 9

Does more police mean less crime? .............................................................. 10

What works in policing to reduce crime? ........................................................ 10

Traditional approaches to policing ................................................ 11

Targeted policing .......................................................................... 14

Maximising effective resource allocation ...................................... 18

Building relationships with the community .................................... 21

Summary and implications for the project ...................................................... 25

2. The challenges for local policing in a changing world ........................ 27

3. Meeting the challenges .......................................................................... 31

Neighbourhood policing: adapting to the changing world .............................. 31

Analysis and intelligence ................................................................................ 34

Conclusion .................................................................................................. 36

References .................................................................................................. 37

2 Policing and Crime Reduction


Introduction

The ‘Police Effectiveness in a Changing World’project was initiated at a time of rapid,fundamental changes both within the policeservice and beyond. New forms of policeaccountability, a renewed emphasis on fightingcrime alongside substantial cuts in budgetspresent considerable challenges at a time whenglobalisation, rapid developments in technologyand major changes in the way individuals, familiesand communities live their lives are substantiallychanging patterns of crime and victimisation.

The role and function of the police is changingaccordingly. The police mission has becomebroader and more complex, embracing functionsmore commonly associated with other agencies.Yet politicians and the public still expect anddemand a police service that focuses on fightingcrime. The ‘Police Effectiveness in a ChangingWorld’ project addresses these differentchallenges by identifying and delivering betterpolice-led approaches to reducing crime. Thispaper provides the evidence base on which theproject will draw.

Policing and crime reduction

Much police work is reactive and incident-focusedrather than proactive and strategic. Efforts to shiftpolicing towards a more effective and sustainableapproach to crime reduction have been few andfar between. Although the police do much morethan fight crime – responding to civil emergencies,maintaining order and even undertaking ‘socialwork’ – they still constitute the front line in tacklingcrime. And there is now a considerable body ofevidence on how effective they are at doing so,which this paper summarises.

Traditionally, the police have favoured a lawenforcement approach to crime control based onthe theory of deterrence. This is largely manifestedthrough random patrols, emergency response,stop and search, investigation and detection andintensive enforcement, all of which still dominatecontemporary policing activity. Evidence fromresearch, however, suggests these strategies arerelatively ineffectual in reducing crime anddetecting offenders. Increasingly however, policeforces are moving towards identifying andmanaging risk, which shifts resource allocationtowards specific individuals (prolific offenders andrepeat victims) and places (high crime areas) ratherthan relying on arrest, conviction and punishment.

The targeting of resources on the most riskypeople and places is characterised byapproaches to policing that identify hotspots ofcriminal activity, vulnerable individuals at risk ofbeing repeatedly victimised and serious andprolific offenders. Where resources are moreconcentrated in these ways, crime is more likelyto be reduced. However simply concentratingpatrols in crime hotspots, for example, isinsufficient. It is important to adopt the righttactics. Combining sensitive law enforcement withsituational and social measures, efforts to preventrepeat victimisation and the active involvement ofthe community helps to increase effectiveness.

Intelligence-led policing and problem-orientedpolicing are two of the most developedapproaches to maximising the effective allocationof police resources to reduce crime. The formerconstitutes the basis of the National IntelligenceModel, which has been adopted by all policeforces in England and Wales. Based on strategicassessments of targets and problems, it aims to

Executive summary


develop solutions to crime beyond recourse to thecriminal justice system. Intelligence-led policinghas not however been evaluated in terms of itsimpact on crime.

Not dissimilar to intelligence-led policing,problem-oriented policing emerged in response tocriticisms of traditional approaches to reducingcrime and approaches which simply focusenforcement resources on hotspots. It aims toreduce crime proactively and sustainably byfocusing on the most important problemsidentified by local communities, using carefulanalysis to define problems and informmulti-agency solutions. There is strong evidencethat problem-oriented policing reduces crime, butit is difficult to implement successfully.

The notion that communities have an importantpart to play in crime reduction initiatives isembedded in what is commonly referred to ascommunity (or neighbourhood) policing. Althoughnot as distinctively defined as intelligence-led orproblem-oriented policing, it has been widelyembraced both in North America and the UK.Community policing helps to reassure the publicand increase their confidence in the police, butthe evidence that it delivers sustained reductionsin crime is equivocal.

Effective community engagement seems to becentral to any locally-based approach to reducingcrime. It ensures the right problems areaddressed and that the police and their partneragencies are held to account for their actions.There are fewer calls to the police when localcommunities feel safer and have trust andconfidence in the police, and effectiveengagement may even help to reduce crime. Inpractice, however, community engagement too

often fails to embrace all sections of a localcommunity and/or take its views seriously.

The legitimacy of the police is important indetermining whether people are willing toco-operate with the police (reporting incidents,providing intelligence, acting as witnesses) andcomply with the law. By being fair, respectful andjust, the police are more likely to secure thatlegitimacy and be more effective in reducing crime.

Meeting the demands of a more globalised,culturally diverse and technologically connectedsociety with fewer resources represents asignificant challenge. Reliance on enforcing thelaw to deter offenders and protect localcommunities is limited in its capacity to respondto these challenges and to prevent and reducecrime. The evidence summarised here suggeststhat these limited resources should instead:

� Be targeted on high crime micro-locationswhere the risks of potential harm are greatest.

� Focus on connected problems rather than onindividual incidents and involve localcommunities in identifying and prioritisingthem and harnessing their own resources toaddress them.

� Be used to effectively engage with the localcommunity and harness the resources ofother agencies to deliver an integratedapproach to reducing crime.

� Be aware of the central importance ofsecuring police legitimacy in delivering a newand more effective approach.

Challenges for local policingin a changing worldNotwithstanding the internal reforms and budgetcuts affecting the police service, there are major


socio-economic, demographic and technologicalchanges affecting contemporary patterns of crimewhich demand new responses. The globalisationof goods and services, the rapid spread of newforms of communication, the increase in personalmobility and migration, growing income inequalityand the fragmentation of families andcommunities have created new threats and risksand new criminal opportunities. It no longermakes sense to tackle crime withoutacknowledging the extent to which it crosseslocal, regional and national boundaries.

These changes present considerable challengesfor the police, such as:

� Working effectively across local, regional andnational borders.

� Staying ahead of increasingly fluid criminalnetworks.

� Responding to new kinds of offences andnew ways of committing them.

� Engaging with increasingly transient anddiverse communities and with citizensconnected more through social media thanthrough the places where they live.

� Meeting increasing public expectations forsecurity and the demand for a visiblepresence at a time when resources aredeclining.

Faced with these and other challenges and askedto do more with less, the risk is that the servicewill retreat to familiar ground: reactive,response-oriented policing, with resources beingdeployed to respond to immediate demandsrather than more strategic, long term demands.Community engagement, neighbourhood policing,partnership working and problem-solving may all

be at risk as other agencies withdraw towardstheir core activities.

Targeting resources to deliver the most impact isnow more important than ever. In the new 21stcentury world of policing, the role of robustevidence of effectiveness will become increasinglyimportant at a time when it may becomeincreasingly difficult to generate. The introductionof Police and Crime Commissioners will haveimportant implications for resource allocation in anew commissioning environment that embraces awider range of providers.

Meeting the challenges

The police service faces a period of profoundchange. Neighbourhood policing, particularly intransient, culturally diverse communities, will needto develop new approaches to communityengagement and build collective efficacy aroundshared norms and values. Public expectations ofwhat the police can and cannot deliver will needto be carefully managed. And better sources ofcommunity intelligence on, for example, newtypes of criminal activity, hidden crime andinter-connected offences that cross borders willneed to be fostered.

Many of these changes will need a different styleof policing, one which fosters the trust andconfidence of local communities and meets theirconcerns and expectations. It will require a stepchange in information management, with moreeffective methods for gathering, sharing andanalysing intelligence to better inform tasking andstrategic decision-making. Developing these skillswill be crucial to effective problem-solving in highlydiverse and mobile communities such as Lutonand Slough.


Transforming information into intelligence toprovide a detailed, accurate picture of thechanging world and how the police shouldrespond to it will be key to improving theeffectiveness of policing in reducing crime. Inaddition to the sheer volume of information, thereare real issues concerning data quality and how itis used to inform tasking. The focus of crimeanalysis needs to shift – from tracking themovements of known offenders to identifyingpersistent problems and anticipating (rather thanreacting to) incidents or events. Crime analystsneed more sophisticated skills, better training andmore resources if they are to achieve the statusand influence the new world of policing urgentlyrequires.


IntroductionThe Police Foundation is currently undertaking afour-year independently funded project entitled‘Police Effectiveness in a Changing World’. Theproject is based in Luton and Slough, twoaverage-sized, ethnically diverse towns withoutespecially high rates of crime or deprivation overallbut with pockets of deprivation and highpopulation turnover. It is being delivered at a timeof considerable policy and organisational changefor the police service. In addition to the reductionin the central government grant to the policeservice by 20 per cent over four years, thecoalition government has introduced wide-rangingreforms to police accountability, in particular theintroduction of elected Police and CrimeCommissioners (PCCs), and re-emphasised thepolice role as being first and foremost to fightcrime. This stands in contrast to the previousgovernment, with its broader focus on communitysafety and, in its later years, the measurement ofpolice effectiveness in terms of public confidence.The introduction of PCCs may, at least in someforce areas, serve to reinforce this shift, as dopolice forces’ own targets, which continue toprioritise the reduction of crime.

At the same time, wider contextual changes –globalisation of markets for goods and services,the rapid expansion of information technology andsocial media, the growth of personal mobility andmigration, the fragmentation of families andcommunities and the ever-widening gap betweenthe rich and the poor – are changing patterns ofcrime. New threats create new forms of harm,particularly for the most vulnerable groups:children, new migrants, the elderly and the poor.Identity theft, people trafficking, investmentscams, internet fraud and other ‘emerging’ crimespose new challenges for the police, who must

also now work across local, regional and nationalboundaries to keep abreast of increasingly fluidcriminal networks and their changing modusoperandi. Meanwhile, personal relationshipsconstructed primarily in neighbourhoodscomposed of people sharing the same ethnic,social and economic circumstances are becomingincreasingly rare.

The role of the police

In the UK, preventing and detecting crime andpreserving the public peace have been the centralmandate of the public police since its inception. Inpractice, the police spend a large proportion oftheir time performing other roles – responding toemergencies, protecting vulnerable people,preventing terrorism – and are often called uponto deal with situations characterised as‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now!’ (Bittner, 1974). As graphically illustrated bythe 24 hour twitter experiment conducted byGreater Manchester Police in 2010, the PoliceService are very much the agency of first resort,with more than a third of all the incidents theyrespond to on a daily basis being social workrather than crime-related.

Ronnie Flanagan’s Review of Policing (2008)suggested that over the last decade or so, thispublic demand has resulted in “the police servicemission… becoming both broader and morecomplex”, requiring a response to issues thatmight otherwise be addressed by other agencies.This has also been accompanied by anunprecedented increase in police powers andresources. Yet the image of the police service aslargely engaged in crime control continues toshape public and policy expectations of police


1 See, for example, the Home Secretary’s speech to the National PolicingConference 29 June 2010 when she stated: “I couldn’t be any clearer aboutyour mission ... it is to cut crime. No more. No less.”.

2 The project is primarily concerned with the role of the public police service inreducing crime, not policing more broadly.

work 1 as well as rank and file understandings oftheir role (Reiner, 2010). So despite this widermandate and an expansion in its mission, thepolice service has been judged over the past 30years or so primarily on the basis of itseffectiveness in tackling crime and continues tobe so. The Police Effectiveness in a ChangingWorld project continues this trend by focusingprimarily on police effectiveness in reducing crime,which is the project’s main aim.

The purpose of this report

This report provides some background to theproject by summarising the evidence base onpolicing and crime reduction. It summarises thekey lessons from research on which the project willdraw in developing locally-tailored approaches toimproving police effectiveness and reducing crime,addressing some of the organisational andoperational challenges arising out of the changingsocio-economic context in which the policeservice2 currently operates. It does not explore theapproach to practice development that will beused during the project itself, but rather highlightsthe way in which existing knowledge about currentchallenges and effective practice might shape andinform the project.

The report is divided into three sections. The firstsection reviews the research literature on the roleof the police in reducing crime, drawing out someof the key lessons. The second focuses on thechallenges facing the police service in a changingworld, while the third section focuses on theimplications of the conclusions from the first twosections for the Police Effectiveness in a ChangingWorld project.


3 This has recently re-emerged in public discourse in response to the currentclimate of financial constraint and concerns about maintaining a visible policepresence on the streets.

1. The role of the police in reducing crime Introduction

Following a brief description of what is knownabout what the police do and the extent to whichtheir activity is (or is not) based on robustevidence, this section summarises the large bodyof research on the effectiveness of policing inreducing crime. Most of this evidence-base comesfrom the US, but some also comes from the UK.The review focuses primarily on those aspects ofpolicing commonly associated with uniform ratherthan plain-clothes or civilian officers – street patrol,crime prevention and routine detection rather thanless visible forms of policing such as covertsurveillance and forensics. It relies primarily but notexclusively on the findings of systematic reviewsrather than individual studies. The main aim is todistil from this review the key lessons for the PoliceEffectiveness in a Changing World project.

There are a number of ways in which thepresentation of this complex and considerablebody of work could be organised. There is no‘right’ way of doing this, particularly given thedegree to which specific models and approachesto policing are defined differently by differentscholars and sometimes overlap. The approachadopted here organises the evidence primarily interms of how different approaches utilise andallocate resources and, where possible, attemptsto differentiate strategic as opposed to tacticalmeasures. It concludes with a section on policelegitimacy, which is more about the ‘how’ ofpolicing rather than the ‘what’, but which, it wasfelt, is crucial to improving effectiveness.

What the police do

Popular perceptions of what the police do tend tofocus on their role in responding to a constant

stream of emergency calls, mostly from thepublic. As an emergency service, the policerespond to calls 24/7 on a case-by-case basis,dealing with each one individually. Commonlytermed ‘response policing’, it focuses on the hereand now, providing immediate help to victims and(potentially) arresting suspects. It constitutes whatpolice officers often refer to as ‘real’ policing.Although response policing constitutes the ‘breadand butter’ of everyday policing, there is in factvirtually no evidence on its effects on crime(Committee on Law and Justice, 2004).

Considerable research has been undertaken inthe past to establish the degree to which thepolice spend their time directly responding to orpreventing crime (see, for example, Bittner, 1990).This research, mainly undertaken in the 1970sand then 1980s, highlighted the large proportionof police time devoted to duties other than crimecontrol, including incidents not classified as crimeor leading to criminal proceedings, and time spentin processing cases and administration (Brodeur,2010). According to the British Crime Survey, onlya minority of contacts between the police and thepublic involve actual criminal incidents (Skogan,1990), although research also suggests that justover half of police work is in some waycrime-related (i.e. incidents that might involve orlead to a crime) (Shapland and Vagg, 1990). TheGreater Manchester twitter experiment referred toearlier suggests little has changed.

Research on the role of the police has consistentlyhighlighted their wider mandate and servicefunction in order maintenance more generally (forexample crowd control, responding toemergencies etc.) and the amount of time theyspend on front line, public-facing activities.3 A


recent National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA)study of neighbourhood and response teams in theUK found that public-facing work in the communityaccounted for about 44 per cent of officers’ time.This included responding to incidents, takingstatements, foot patrol and communityengagement. Administrative work accounted fornearly a third of officer time and a further quarter oftheir time was spent in the custody suite or atcourt, in training, briefings or meetings, travelling oron breaks (Mclean and Hillier, 2010).

A key issue raised by research exploring ‘what thepolice do’ has been the disjointed, incident-focused nature of police work, with incidentsbeing treated in large part as unconnected. Thisincident focus stems not just from the way inwhich the public report incidents but also from theway in which such incidents are dealt with (asissues which do or do not merit criminalprosecution). However this limits the capacity todevelop a more strategic picture, over time, of theinter-connectedness, persistence or escalation ofproblems and can be a key impediment todeveloping more long-term, sustainableapproaches to reducing crime. An approach moreable to develop that picture would require thedevelopment of new skills in front line officers (seeHer Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, 2012),but with the exception of various kinds ofproblem-oriented Policing (see below), this aspectof police work has been relatively neglected.

Does more police meanless crime?

Before looking in detail at how effective the policeare in reducing crime, it is worth looking briefly atthe evidence on the impact that increases or

decreases in total police officer numbers have oncrime rates. On the whole, the evidence thatadditional numbers of police reduce crime ratesis inconclusive (Bradford, 2011), although theabsence of any police presence (e.g. as a resultof strike action) has been shown to increasecrime (Sherman and Eck, 2002). Some studieshave suggested that increased police numbersmay be associated with lower property and otheracquisitive crime, with one study suggesting thatan estimated 10 per cent increase in officersleads to a reduction of around three per cent incrime (Levitt, 1997), but the evidence of anassociation between police numbers and violentcrime seems to be more ambiguous (Bradford,2011). Efforts to increase the speed of responseto urgent incidents have also been shown to havelittle impact on detection rates as the delay incalling the police tends to outweigh any increasein the chances of catching the perpetrator thatreduced response times might achieve (Skoganand Frydl, 2004). In practice, it is difficult toseparate out the effect of increased numbersfrom what these additional officers actually do.

What works in policingto reduce crime?

On the whole, the police service and its partnersdo not routinely use research evidence to informtheir practice in tackling crime. In a review of 150entries to the UK Tilley Award, which recogniseinnovative crime fighting projects, fewer than athird explicitly drew on evidence in developingtheir projects (Bullock and Tilley, 2009).Nonetheless there is now a significant, andgrowing, body of research on what works inpolicing. Much of this research has beenundertaken in North America, where policing and


the context in which the police perform theirfunctions differ from the UK, but there areimportant lessons to be learnt from this nowextensive body of research. This section draws onthe findings of a number of reviews of thisevidence and is divided into the following foursub-sections:

� Traditional approaches to policing.

� Targeted policing.

� Maximising effective resource allocation.

� Building relationships with the community.

Traditional approachesto policing

The traditional approach to policing tends toallocate resources across a jurisdiction and coverall crime types, is reactive rather than proactiveand favours deterrence through law enforcementrather than taking account of different patterns ofcrime across time and space. In terms of howtraditional policing impacts on crime, there areessentially four different strategies that have beenthe subject of research:

� Random patrol and response.

� Stop and search.

� Investigation and detection.

� Intensive enforcement.

Random patrol and response

A considerable body of early research on policeeffectiveness in reducing crime was devoted toexploring the effectiveness of random patrol inpreventing and detecting crime, either as a generaldeterrent or by answering calls in the shortestpossible time (Skogan and Frydl, 2004). Thisresearch demonstrated the very small chance that

random patrols will come across an incident inprogress. It was famously estimated that, on thebasis of burglary rates (in the 1980s) and evenlydistributed patrol, an officer in London couldexpect to pass within a hundred yards of a burglaryin progress once in every eight years (Clarke andHough, 1984). In practice, random patrol is lessabout deterring or catching offenders and moreabout providing a symbolic presence thatproclaims a state of order and reassures the public.

The research evidence on foot patrols does notseem to coincide with public perceptions, whichsee patrols as principally synonymous withpreventing crime and securing communitysafety (see for example Noaks, 2000).According to the British Crime Survey (2002/03),when prioritising different aspects of police work,the public place foot patrols third afterresponding to emergency calls (placed first) anddetecting and arresting offenders (placedsecond). When asked to rank which measureswould most improve community safety, the publictend to place ‘more police patrolling on foot’ wellabove any other measure (Wakefield, 2006). Thishelps to explain why politicians from all partiesare keen to maintain or better still increase thenumber of ‘bobbies on the beat’.

Research also shows that the public expect policepatrols to do more than just prevent crime. Acommunity survey undertaken as part of thePolicing in London study carried out in 2002found that two thirds of respondents (67 per cent)thought patrols should focus on detecting andpreventing crime, but half (49 per cent) wantedthem to focus on reassurance, a quarter (25 percent) on work in schools and a further quarter (24per cent) on gathering local intelligence (FitzGerald


et al, 2002). A fifth (20 per cent) cited dealing withdisturbances and 15 per cent mentionedproviding advice on crime prevention.Furthermore, the public believe that the numberand/or visibility of officers are more effective intackling crime than any other intervention,including addressing the root causes of crime(Wakefield, 2006).

In reality, the evidence on the deterrent effect ofthe visible presence of officers on foot is mixed.Early research showed that on the whole neithercar patrols (Kelling et al,1974) nor foot patrols(Kelling, 1981) reduced crime rates, although thelatter was found to improve community relationsand reduce (to a small extent) fear of crime (Pate,1986). Despite notable exceptions in relation tospecific crimes – in the US, directed patrols havehelped to reduce the carrying of illegal weapons(Koper and Mayo-Wilson, 2006) and in the UK,additional foot patrols have reduced personalrobberies (Jones and Tilley, 2004) – the generalview is that foot patrols do little to reduce crimeoverall. However, where directed patrols aredeployed as one of a number of tactics to reducecrime in hotspots (or better still micro-locations) oras part of a problem-oriented policing initiative,the impact tends to be more positive (Ratcliffe,2011). The most encouraging evidence comesfrom the Philadelphia foot patrol experiment,where targeted foot patrols were found tosignificantly reduce violent crime (Ratcliffe et al,2011). The key ingredients seem to be dosage –the more focussed or concentrated patrols are,the more likely they will have a suppressive effect– what officers actually do on patrol to increasethe risk (or perceived risk) of apprehension andhow patrols are combined with other tactics toaddress wider problems.

Stop and search

Stop and search powers enable the police to allayor confirm suspicions about individuals anddetect, for example, those suspected of carryingweapons, stolen goods or going equipped forstealing. In practice, the law requires theexecution of such powers to be based on fact,information and/or intelligence and not on thesubjective whim of individual officers. Researchshows that only a small minority of searches resultin an arrest (see The Police Foundation, 2012),with variations according to the reason for thestop. Arrest rates for those suspected ofpossessing stolen property tend to be higher thanthose for carrying drugs (primarily cannabis).

A low detection rate alone does not necessarilyundermine the use of stop and search powers forcrime prevention if their use disrupts and deterscriminal activity rather than simply detecting it(House of Commons Home Affairs Committee,2005). However research shows that searchesreduce the number of ‘disruptable’ crimes by just0.2% and its use in disrupting drug markets islargely ineffectual as officers primarily target usersrather than dealers (Miller et al, 2000). Blanketenforcement crackdowns on neighbourhood drugmarkets may even be counter-productive, withviolence actually increasing following marketdisruption as new organised crime groupscompete for territory (Weisburd and Eck, 1999).Research does however suggest that searchesmay be more effective in deterring crime whenused intensively in a particular location over ashort period of time (Miller et al, 2000).

Investigation and detection

Analysing drug or stolen goods markets is arelatively recent development in crime control


4 Although zero tolerance policing was greeted with scepticism by British policeprofessionals sensitive to the impact of such an approach on police-communityrelationships, the influence of the related ‘broken windows’ rationale has beenevident in the development of policy and practice to tackle antisocial behaviourin the UK. To date, there is no evidence to show that this approach has led to areduction in related crime.

generally and in criminal investigation morespecifically. Traditionally, the deployment ofinvestigative resources amounted primarily toresponding to crimes reported to the police(largely by the public) and identifying theperpetrators of an offence. The main aim was togather evidence, such as witness statements,fingerprints or CCTV images, which could beused in court to secure a conviction. Thisapproach is based on a deterrence modelwhereby offending is discouraged by increasingthe chance that an offender will be caught.

Catching offenders is a core function of detectivework, but research suggests that detectives fail toclear up most cases. The vast majority of propertycrimes and a significant proportion of violent crimeare unsolved (Telep and Weisburd, 2012). On thewhole, if a suspect is not caught at the scene ofthe crime, then he/she is rarely identified.Detectives are however a potentially useful sourceof intelligence, particularly in relation to repeatoffending, and it has been suggested that theycould be used more proactively, such as helpingto identify the future plans of known criminalnetworks. This would amount to a shift fromproducing evidence to secure a convictiontowards a role that is more about producingknowledge or ‘intelligence’ about suspects andtheir associates and information about thecircumstances of their current and futureoffending behaviour (Maguire, 2008).

In today’s rapidly changing world, wherecommunities are more diverse and fragmented,governments are increasingly concerned withidentifying and managing risk. This requires morelasting solutions that prevent behaviour beingrepeated by or against specific individuals (i.e.

offenders or victims) or in certain places (i.e. areasof high crime) rather than relying on arrest,conviction and punishment (Maguire, 2008). Thismore strategic approach to targeting lawenforcement resources requires relativelysophisticated forms of data sharing across anumber of agencies and is discussed in moredetail in the section below on targeted policing.

Intensive enforcement

Commonly referred to as either a ‘zero tolerance’(see Weatheritt, 1998) or ‘broken windows’(Wilson and Kelling, 1982) approach to lawenforcement, intensive forms of law enforcementare often associated with tough crime-fightingrhetoric. 4 In practice, however, these approachesare based on the idea that respondingimmediately and consequentially to incivilitiessuch as vandalism, street drinking andprostitution, will avert a downward spiral ofdisorder, which occurs when communities, in fearof more serious offending, start to withdraw theirwillingness to intervene (Wilson and Kelling,1982). While the link between incivilities and moreserious crime has been challenged (Taylor, 2001),focusing police resources on incivilities (morecommonly referred to as antisocial behaviour inthe UK) has become a popular governmentresponse to a legitimate public concern.

In general, intensive enforcement activity (andany deterrent effect it may have) is not onlyunsustainable in the longer term but in itssimplest form does not, on the whole, reducecrime or incivilities (Skogan, 1992). However, itseffectiveness depends largely on what tacticsare adopted and how they are deployed(Skogan, 1990). The best known example ofintensive enforcement was introduced in New


York, where its impact has been a source ofconsiderable contention.

The New York experienceDuring the 1990s and beyond, the crime ratein New York fell sharply. A series ofcommentators have attempted to explain thisfall, including a succession of City Mayorsand Police Commissioners. The maindifficulty lies in separating out the effect ofintensive/aggressive enforcement activityfrom a number of other changes introducedat the same time. One of these was theintroduction of CompStat, which focuses onincreasing the accountability of individualofficers for their performance in achievingcrime reduction targets (Bratton, 1998). Inpractice, CompStat scrutinises real-timecrime data and focuses police activity inspecific hotspots and therefore goes beyondthe intensification of enforcement activity.

Although the evidence suggests that thetargeted work created by CompStat mayindeed have contributed to reductions incrime in New York, the evidence of its impactin other American cities is mixed. CompStat’suse can also lead to an over-emphasis onholding officers to account for performancetargets (and the manipulation of data that thiscan incentivise) rather than solving problems.

Explanations for the reduction in overall crimein New York remain strongly contested. Inaddition to policing, it has been attributedvariously to drug market changes, high ratesof imprisonment and increased supervision ofpersistent offenders. The claims for thesuccess of the specific style of policing in the

city have also been undermined bysimultaneous falls in crime in other NorthAmerican and European cities, wheredifferent approaches have prevailed.Importantly, the use of focused enforcementactivity to tackle crime and disorder in NewYork was also criticised for resulting inincreased complaints about policemisconduct and a loss of public trust.

Targeted policing

The limited impact of random patrol, reactive andintensive enforcement on crime rates led toattempts to improve the effectiveness of thepolice in reducing crime by concentratingresources on specific crimes, criminals, victimsand places. This led to the development of muchmore focused resource allocation through, inparticular, hotspots policing, tackling repeatvictimisation and focused deterrence. These arediscussed in turn.

Hotspots policing

Initiatives that take account of the unevendistribution of crime between and withinneighbourhoods and target resources onmicro-locations (a small number of streets, ablock of flats or even two or three addresses) arecommonly referred to as ‘hotspots’ policing(Weisburd and Braga, 2006). The influentialMinneapolis Hot Spots Experiment, for example,found that 50 per cent of calls for service camefrom only 3.3 per cent of locations and advocatedfocusing interventions (in this case increasedpatrol) on such micro-locations rather than wholeneighbourhoods. It delivered clear, if modest,general deterrent effects as measured by


5 In the British context, this tends to be particularly influenced by social housingprovision and housing allocation practice (Bottoms, 2012).

reductions in crime calls and observations ofdisorder (Sherman et al, 1989), as have othersimilar initiatives (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995).

While there is evidence that focusing resources inhotspots reduces crime, initiatives that simply relyon using patrol and law enforcement in thesehotspots tend to be less effective (Taylor et al,2011), the impact tending to be small andshort-lived (Koper, 1995). The effectiveness ofhotspots policing clearly varies according to theapproaches and tactics that are used; it is rarelysufficient simply to concentrate police patrolresources in specific locations (Rosenbaum, 2006).

A frequent component of hotspots policinginitiatives is the introduction of measures thatreduce the opportunities for committing crime.Commonly known as ‘situational crimeprevention’, such measures include installingbetter locks on doors and windows (targethardening), increasing surveillance through forexample installing CCTV cameras and looking afteror altering the environment by for examplecleaning up graffiti, removing abandoned cars orimproving street lighting. There is nowconsiderable evidence to support the effectivenessof situational crime prevention (which cannot bereviewed here), which where included partiallyhelps to explain the convincing body of evidencethat broadly supports the strategic targeting ofmicro-locations (see also Bottoms, 2012).

Reducing the opportunities for crime is sometimescontrasted with approaches that attempt tochange the socio-economic context of high crimeneighbourhoods. This school of thoughtacknowledges the importance of developinglasting solutions (Rosenbaum, 2006) based on adetailed understanding of the multiple and

persistent problems commonly found in suchcommunities. 5 Such problems include:

� High concentrations of poverty and ill-health.

� A poor physical environment.

� Low-income families.

� Poor performing schools.

� Limited neighbourhood resources andinformal control.

� Active drug markets.

� Barriers to offender resettlement.

Although often characterised as polarisedapproaches, researchers have begun to highlightthe potential for a more integrated approach thattakes greater account of the social context ofhotspots, in particular the need for greaterrecognition that it is the social characteristics ofhotspots that account for their longevity(Weisburd, 2012). This suggests that there maybe some potential for more targetedsocio-economic interventions in micro-locations.

As yet little is known about why hotspots areattractive targets to offenders and what role, if any,residents’ ‘collective efficacy’ plays in this. The term‘collective efficacy’ is used to describe the degreeto which neighbours know and trust one anotherand are willing to intervene (together or individually)to protect their neighbourhood from crime andrelated problems. It acts as a protective factor inneighbourhoods that might otherwise experiencehigh levels of crime (Sampson and Raudenbusch,1999). Recent research, which has begun toexplore whether collective efficacy is also protectivein micro-locations (Bottoms, 2012; Weisburd,2012), suggests that offenders are aware of thewillingness of local residents to intervene or watchout for each other. Thus a street, for example, with


greater collective efficacy may be a less attractivelocation for committing offences than another, evenwithin a high crime neighbourhood. This suggeststhere may be potential benefits in strengtheningcollective efficacy in micro-location hotspots(Bottoms, 2012), particularly in areas of highpopulation turnover, where length of residence,social organisation and mutual trust, may beconsiderably less.

Although the evidence on hotspots policing isencouraging, there are a number of issues thatneed addressing. For example, little is known aboutthe degree to which sustained targeting results inoffenders engaging in other forms of crime. Also,analyses of hotspots based on reported crime dataare limited in terms of identifying patterns that arenot location-specific (for example e-crime andfraud) or are under-reported (for example, domesticabuse and hate crime) (Rosenbaum, 2006). Thereare also limits to the degree to which managinglocalised crime hotspots can address criminalitythat transcends local, regional or even nationalboundaries. However, research has shown thatfeared displacement effects – whereby the problemmoves to other neighbourhoods – are rarely aproblem and indeed in some instances can havethe opposite effect of reducing crime inneighbouring areas (Braga et al, 2012; Bowers etal, 2011). This absence of displacement has beenexplained by the fact that crime hotspots also tendto be hotspots of offender residence and thatoffenders are reluctant to commit offences inunfamiliar areas (Weisburd et al, 2006).

Focusing resources on places for which there isevidence of concentrated demand has anoperational logic that is appealing to many policemanagers, but most studies have tended toneglect the reaction of the community to

concentrated crime control efforts. Whilecommunity members may generally support theconcentration of resources to address crime, careneeds to be taken to ensure that hotspotspolicing does not become overly enforcement-focused (Rosenbaum 2006). Although arrests willalways be a central element in policing, theaggressive use of enforcement approaches toaddress problems that are not considered themost damaging in a community, or in ways thatappear heavy-handed or unjust, can have lastingconsequences for police-community relations(Karn, 2007) and ultimately police legitimacy. Suchapproaches can also disproportionately increasethe entry of predominantly low-income, oftenminority ethnic men into the criminal justicesystem. Political pressure for short-term gainstherefore needs to be carefully consideredalongside the potential risk that particular types ofhotspots policing can undermine the long-termstability of neighbourhoods (Weisburd, 2012).

A thorough understanding of the dynamics of thesocial context in which resources are beingdeployed may help to mitigate some of theselimitations. Some of the most promisingapproaches to hotspots policing integratesocio-economic interventions and social andsituational crime prevention measures to reducecrime with measures that increase the resilience oflocal residents. They also incorporate the strongbody of evidence that shows that what matters isnot just whether more police resources areassigned to hotspots, but what resources are bestdeployed (from what agencies/ professions/sectors) to address a well-understood problem andhow (Rosenbaum, 2006). This more integratedapproach, more akin to problem-oriented policing,is discussed further below.


Tackling repeat victimisation

A further approach that aims to focus resourcesmore effectively is based on research thathighlights the increased risk of beingre-victimised. Repeat incidents account for a highproportion of the total number of most categoriesof offences: one per cent of people experience59 per cent of personal crimes and two per centexperience 41 per cent of non-vehicle-relatedproperty crime (Pease, 1998). The risk ofre-victimisation also tends to increase with eachexperience of crime. Targeting repeat victims istherefore seen as an effective way to reducecrime, and has been shown to be particularlyeffective in reducing the rate of repeatvictimisation for burglary (Grove et al, 2012).

Research also shows that in the short term, crimerisks increase for near-neighbours as well as thevictim and that, at least for burglary, the offencesare often committed by the same perpetrator(Burnasco, 2008). As a result, in the mid-1990s allpolice forces in England and Wales were obligedto develop strategies to reduce repeatvictimisation (Nicholas and Farrell, 2008) and morerecently a number of forces in the UK, includingGreater Manchester Police and the MetropolitanPolice Service, introducing so-called ‘SuperCocooning’ projects, which focus activity onpreventing repeat and near-repeat victimisation.This is intended to allocate resources according torisk while giving victims (and potential victims)practical help and support (Nicholas and Farrell,2008). In line with the available evidence (Grove etal, 2012), it has been claimed that they have hada significant impact (Chainey, 2012).

Work to prevent repeat and near-repeatvictimisation is a form of predictive policing, which

uses data from a range of sources to predictwhere and when crime is likely to take place in thefuture. This approach is most commonlyassociated with work by the police in Los Angeles(LA) in the US, where patrols are deployed on thebasis of a victimisation risk assessment. It buildson a hotspots approach by offering morespecificity in time and place and thus enablingpolice officers to use problem-solving approachesin the right place at the right time. In LA, themodel focuses on burglary and theft of, and from,a motor vehicle, but in Memphis, for example, apredictive approach has also been used to tackleviolent crime.

The crime reduction effect of predictive policing isyet to be rigorously tested (Telep and Weisburd,2012), although in the US the National Institute ofJustice has funded a programme of work tomeasure its impact that will contribute to theevidence base in due course (US Department ofJustice, 2009). Within the UK, in addition toexisting initiatives to tackle repeat victimisation, apilot project based on the LA model was launchedby Kent Police in December 2012 andsubsequently rolled out across the force(Whitehead, 2013).

Focused deterrence

An alternative to targeting repeat victims is tofocus resources on repeat offenders. In the US,some initiatives have adopted a focuseddeterrence or ‘pulling levers’ approach, which hasdemonstrated significant reductions in crimethrough targeting multi-agency resources on asmall number of high risk/prolific offenders (Bragaand Weisburd, 2012). The approach is based onincreasing the certainty, swiftness and severity ofpunishment by directly engaging offenders and


potential offenders and offering incentives tocomply with the law as well as clearconsequences for not doing so (Kennedy, 2009).The findings from these studies add to theevidence in support of the deterrent effect ofpolice enforcement activity that heightensoffenders’ perceived risk of apprehension (Durlaufand Nagin, 2011), but also stress thatcomplementary crime reduction mechanisms alsoplay a key role in contributing to the large effectson crime rates observed (Braga and Weisburd,2012). These include:

� Reducing the situational opportunities forviolence.

� Deflecting offenders from crime.

� Increasing access to social services,employment opportunities, housing and drugtreatment.

� Increasing collective efficacy and naturalsurveillance within communities.

� Treating offenders with respect and dignity toencourage greater compliance.

The evidential success of ‘pulling levers’approaches has led to a new model of crimereduction in the US termed the New CriminalJustice.

Maximising effectiveresource allocationEconomic and political pressures to increaseefficiency, improve performance and reduce costshas led to more strategic approaches or ‘models’of policing, in particular intelligence-led policingand problem-oriented policing. Drawing on someof the more targeted approaches discussedabove, they constitute a more strategic approachto crime reduction.

Intelligence-led policing

Intelligence-led policing aims to reduce crime by:

� Collecting relevant and reliable informationfrom a variety of sources to provide a clearand accurate picture of the most pressingcurrent and future crime problems.

� Prioritising them and planning targetedresponses to them.

� Implementing the plans and evaluating theprocess and the outcomes.

� Feeding back the knowledge and experiencegained (Ratcliffe, 2011).

Four intelligence products are created: strategicassessments, tactical assessments, target profilesand problem profiles. Regular meetings of Taskingand Control Groups (TCGs) are held to decidehow to best target resources to priority people(e.g. prolific offenders), places (e.g. crimehotspots) and activities (e.g. night time economy).

Intelligence-led policing was first pioneered in theUK by Kent Police Service in the early 1990s. Inpractice however, cultural resistance and thesignificant reorganisation of officer roles andfunctions meant that Kent’s embracing ofintelligence-led policing remained an exception tothe rule until the introduction of the NationalIntelligence Model (NIM) a decade later (Maguire,2008). NIM is the major vehicle for deliveringintelligence-led policing, variations of which arenow being used in all forces. Introduced in part asa response to the increasingly sophisticated,transnational and mobile nature of criminality, theNIM has institutionalised intelligence-led policing.Based on strategic assessments of current andpredicted crime threats and tactical assessmentsof targets and problems, its aim is to develop


solutions to crime problems outside the criminaljustice system, such as disrupting criminal marketsand the criminal networks that control them.

With less than a quarter of all recorded crimeleading to detection and a sanction, findingalternative ways to fight crime outside the criminaljustice system should be a key priority. Butalthough the NIM is seen by most officers assuccessful in tackling the main problems in an area(Maguire and John, 1995), it has, likeintelligence-led policing, not been independentlyevaluated in terms of its impact on crime (Maguire,2008) let alone how relevant it might be in tacklingnew, emerging crime patterns. Embracing partnerswho focus on risks and problems identifiedthrough the analysis of multiple sources of datarelating to patterns of crime, as piloted in GreaterManchester (known as Greater ManchesterAgainst Crime), would help to shift the NIMtowards a more problem-oriented approach,which is discussed below.

Problem-oriented policing

A recent review of hotspots policing initiatives bythe Campbell Collaboration provides convincingevidence that while, overall, hotspots policingstrategies can be effective in reducing crime, theyare more likely to do so where interventions alterthe characteristics and dynamics of hotspotsthrough problem-oriented policing interventions.Problem-oriented policing emerged as a moreproactive alternative to traditional responsepolicing and more effective than simply focusingenforcement approaches on hotspots. While stillidentifying problem hotspots, problem-orientedpolicing places more emphasis on understandingthe connections between problems and why theyare occurring, tackling problems identified by local

communities that have been resistant to other,more conventional responses (Goldstein, 1990).To an extent a problem-solving approach isembedded in the National Intelligence Model (andpotentially in some investigation practice), and isevident, in particular, in the way analysis isintended to inform multi-agency tasking meetings(Maguire and John, 2003), so problem-solving hasbecome part of policing practice.

Problem-oriented policing requires a thoroughunderstanding of the problems and theeffectiveness of strategies to address them. Thisinvolves an analysis of their causes, identifyingstrategies for intervention (beyond lawenforcement) and involving other agencies andthe community in delivering them. It also requireschecking whether the intended benefits haveaccrued (Tilley, 2010). The main intention is toreduce crime and disorder proactively andsustainably by dealing with recurrent orconnected problems, rather than respondingincident by incident, and improving communityconfidence in the effectiveness of agencies byresponding to their immediate and most pressingconcerns. The capacity for problem-solvingapproaches to reduce local crime rates inhotspots is now widely accepted, especially whendriven by community concerns (Tuffin, 2006),although their effectiveness has in the pastsuffered from implementation failure (Quinton andMorris, 2008) and a tendency for the police to‘rush to solution’ before securing a fullunderstanding of the problem and how best toresolve it (Myhill, 2006).

A recent systematic review concluded thatproblem-oriented policing initiatives built on sounddata analysis and research have had ‘an


overwhelmingly positive impact on crimerates’ (Weisburd et al, 2010), although theevidence is less clear about how and why theyhave worked in some circumstances but not inothers (Tilley, 2006). Unfortunately, in practice thepolice and their partners often fail to conductsystematic, in-depth problem analysis (Telep andWeisburd, 2012), revisit problems and learnlessons highlighted during implementation, oreffectively implement evidence-basedinterventions (Tilley, 2010). The effectiveintegration of multi-agency information andinterventions also remains a significant challengeand analytical capacity remains one of thepotentially weakest elements in theimplementation of a problem-solving approach.

Scanning, Analysis, Responseand Assessment

Scanning, Analysis, Response andAssessment (SARA) is the model most oftenused to guide the design and implementationof multi-agency, problem-solving crimereduction initiatives. The model comprises aniterative process of:

� Identifying community and organisationalconcerns (scanning).

� Investigating priority problems, such asexploring in depth what, where, when,who, how and why the problem ishappening (analysis).

� Developing tailored, evidence-basedinterventions to address the problemsidentified and their causes (response).

� Evaluating the implementation andoutcomes achieved (assessment) andthen redefining and refining those

problems and strategies in response to attempts to address them.

SARA has been criticised for beingover-simplistic (Bullock and Tilley, 2009), butit nevertheless provides a logical stepwiseapproach to embedding evidence inproblem-oriented policing.

The growth in the analysis infrastructure within UKpolice forces, using software for the collection,mapping and analysis of crime and disorder dataand other local information to inform anunderstanding of local problems, has beenassisted in part by the recognition of the need tounderstand better the connections betweenincidents. There have been successful initiativesthat share data between police and partneragencies, bringing together different kinds ofinformation to supplement recorded crime data.An initiative in Cardiff Accident and EmergencyDepartments in hospitals, for example, activelycollected data from victims of violence to developbetter responses to tackling violence (includingunreported incidents) (Florence et al, 2011).However, attempts to replicate this elsewherehave struggled to create the conditions for thesuccessful provision and use of similar qualitydata (Davison et al, 2010).

Partnership working

A crucial component of problem-oriented policingis the role of partners in deliveringproblem-solving interventions. The police do notpossess all the information needed to assess allthe problems and their causes, nor all the meansto coordinate and deliver sustainable solutions.This realisation has been a key driver in the


development of multi-agency partnershipapproaches to crime reduction. Sucharrangements recognise the complexity of crimeand disorder problems and the greater capacitythat a number of agencies working together canbring to bear on them. In England and Wales thisapproach has been embedded in legislation since1998 when the Crime and Disorder Actintroduced Crime and Disorder ReductionPartnerships (now referred to as CommunitySafety Partnerships) and other partnerships suchas the Drug Interventions Programme andIntegrated Offender Management initiatives.

Although it is difficult to identify the particularcontribution of partnership mechanisms toeffective crime reduction, a recent assessment ofpartnerships largely set up to reduce violence inthe US concluded that partnership working iseffective (Berry et al, 2011). On the basis of thisbody of evidence, the most effective initiativesseem to be those that focus collaborative workaround well-defined problems, develop commonvalues between agencies, embed researchers inpartnerships and provide robust data analysis toguide decision-making (McGarrell, 2010). In theUS, there are concerns about whether partnershipworking is sustainable without any statutoryunderpinning; partnerships have crumbled withoutfollow-up funding (Klofas et al, 2010). In contrastin the UK, where there is a statutory basis forpartnership working, such arrangements aresustained over the longer term (Home Office,2011), although recent reforms in probation,education and health along with cuts ingovernment expenditure may well begin toundermine this.

Building relationshipswith the community

The fourth and final part of this section exploringthe role of the police in reducing crime focuses onthe role communities can play.

Community policing

The concept of community policing firstemerged in the 1970s, and has subsequentlybuilt up widespread support. Problem-orientedpolicing (see above) and communityengagement (see below) are both central toeffective community policing, which is builtaround the idea of enhanced localaccountability. Community policing tends tomean different things to different people andlacks a clear definition, while the termcommunity is itself ‘notoriously slippery’(Tilley, 2008). And as with other models ofpolicing, there is considerable overlap.

As Fielding (2009) argues, to some communitypolicing is simply an alternative to anenforcement-based approach whereas toothers it is an approach that actively involvesthe public in crime control and improvescommunication between the public and thepolice. Despite this, the principlesunderpinning community policing have beenwidely adopted and community policing hasbecome, in the US at least, ‘a new orthodoxyfor cops’ (Eck and Rosenbaum, 1994).


The Chicago AlternativePolicing Strategy

A well-known example of community policingin the US is the Chicago Alternative PolicingStrategy (CAPS), where the community andits concerns are at the heart of the approachand where priority setting andproblem-solving is devolved to local residentsand neighbourhood level officers (Skogan,2006). CAPS was set up in 1993 in five policedistricts in Chicago with diverse populations interms of race, ethnicity and socio-economicstatus. Based on the premise that to reducelocal concerns about crime the police need towork together with partner agencies toaddress issues identified by communitymembers, CAPS aimed to bridge the gapbetween police understandings of problems –or their organisational tendency to redefinethem as non-crime-related – and theunderstandings of local citizens. It comprisedseveral key components:

� The integration of crime control andprevention, incorporating authoritativeand impartial law enforcement and rapidresponse with proactive problem-solving.

� Teams of response and beat officersengaging in proactive problem-solving.

� Police officers working the same beat onthe same watch each day to ensurecontinuity.

� Involvement of the community at all levelsto identify local issues and problems andhelp set priorities.

� Formalisation of problem-solving, withofficers creating a beat profile of the

district’s characteristics and chronic

problems and identifying resources to

address them. Together with other

agencies and the community, the police

prioritise problems, identify strategies and

measure success.

� All officers, together with their

supervisors, receive training in

problem-solving, interpersonal

communication, partnership working

and leadership skills.

� Neighbourhood level data is analysed to

map crime hotspots and track other

neighbourhood problems, which is

shared with local residents.

� Continuous communication with the

community through newsletters,

meetings, surveys, focuses groups and

hotlines, to secure feedback and

suggestions for improvement.

� Identification of the components of

change needed to fully implement the

strategy with concomitant action plans.

� Independent process and outcome

evaluation.

CAPS has produced sustained

improvements in confidence in the police,

particularly among black and Hispanic

communities, as well as reductions in fear of

crime and victimization, but has been less

obviously successful in delivering sustained

reductions in recorded crime rates (Skogan

and Frydl, 2004).


Community policing has also become prominentin England and Wales in recent years, first asreassurance policing and subsequently asneighbourhood policing (Fielding, 2009).Reassurance policing was introduced at a time ofincreasing concern about low levels of confidencein the police. Its main aim was to address whatwas termed ‘the reassurance gap’, which iswhere public concern about crime continued tobe high despite a falling crime rate. The NationalReassurance Policing pilot, implemented across16 sites in England between 2003 and 2005, wasalso guided by an understanding that certainincidents of crime and disorder can act as‘warning signs’, particularly in public spaces,about the perceived levels of risk to which localresidents may be exposed (Innes, 2004). It taskedlocal teams with:

� Building a familiar, visible and approachablepolicing presence in communities throughtargeted foot patrol.

� Identifying the issues that mattered most topeople.

� Developing problem-solving approaches toaddressing local issues which might nototherwise be considered priorities.

The pilots delivered a net increase in publicconfidence of 12 per cent compared tocomparison sites as well as improvements inpublic perceptions of crime levels perceived levelsof antisocial behaviour and better levels ofcommunity engagement. The increases inconfidence were particularly associated with jointproblem solving, better community engagementand targeted foot patrol (Tuffin et al, 2006). Therewas little evidence of any reduction in recordedcrime rates, although overall crime did fall in two

sites, but there were significant reductions inself-reported victimisation rates, which is probablya better measure of impact than changes in therecorded crime rate (Tuffin, 2006). Importantlyhowever, the positive outcomes achieved in thepilot study were less discernible whenreassurance policing was rolled out nationally asneighbourhood policing. This was due in part tothe implementation difficulties encountered,although the evaluation of the national initiativewas also less robust (Quinton and Morris, 2008).

Community engagement

Central to the delivery of both problem-orientedpolicing and community policing is effectivecommunity engagement. By working togetherwith local residents, the police can increase theirsense of security, their resilience to crime and theirconfidence in the police (Lloyd and Foster, 2009).Effective community engagement ensures that thepolice respond to community concerns and areheld to account for their actions. Systematicreviews have produced strong evidence thatcommunity engagement reduces calls aboutdisorder and antisocial behaviour and increasespeople’s sense of safety (Myhill, 2006). Theevidence on its impact on recorded crime is moreequivocal, with some initiatives producingsubstantial and others more limited effects (Lloydand Foster, 2009). There is, however, consistentlystrong evidence of improvements inpolice-community relations and communityperceptions of the police, and fairly strongevidence of improvements in the attitudes andbehaviour of police officers, all of which help toimprove police legitimacy.

Efforts to reduce crime, whether throughproblem-solving or other approaches, emphasise


the importance of promoting trust and confidencethrough fair and equitable policing. Howeverengaging with communities to improve trust andconfidence requires substantial effort and takestime, particularly in areas where there have beenpoor relations with the police in the past (Myhill,2006). A common concern has been that beatmeetings, surveys and other conventionalengagement strategies only reach a particularsegment of the population and are resourceintensive (Lowe and Innes, 2012). They often failto build links with sections of the local populationthat may have more strained relationships with thepolice and hence adequately to take account oftheir (often quite different) needs. This raisesserious questions about setting local priorities.Nevertheless, they remain a key mechanism formanaging perceptions of insecurity, fosteringconfidence in the police, and increasing localcapacity to address problems and are significantin reducing calls to address incidents of disorder.

The development of specific methods ofengagement to establish the public’s concernsand understand how to respond to them haslagged behind the allocation of resources to doso, which can undermine police officers’confidence in their value (Lowe and Innes, 2012).Much community engagement only involves thosealready engaging with the police rather thanexplicitly targeting sections of the community withwhich the police might otherwise have littlecontact (Lloyd and Foster, 2009). Although therehave been a variety of initiatives to improve activelevels of participation in decision-making, such asthrough social and online media (Ray et al, 2012)or participatory budgeting (Greater ManchesterPolice, 2009), there is still a clear need forcontinued development of a variety of approaches

to engagement that enables crime reductioninitiatives to draw on a diversity of localknowledge and experience.

Legitimacy and police effectiveness

The relationship between the public and the policegoes beyond the former’s confidence in the latter.Also significant is the wider issue of legitimacy,which can be broadly defined as the right to ruleand the recognition by the ruled of that right(Jackson et al, 2012). While police legitimacy is initself important, it also goes hand in hand witheffectiveness in reducing crime by both enhancingcompliance with the law and promotingco-operation with the police (Mazerolle andBennett, et al, 2013; Myhill and Quinton, 2011). Ifpeople are reluctant to co-operate with the police,they are less likely to report incidents (which cancreate a climate of impunity for offenders,increasing the vulnerability of those living amongstthem), provide them with intelligence, act aswitnesses, or co-operate with them in other ways.Public mistrust of the police can also beinterpreted by officers as suspicious, which canfurther alienate them from their communities bycreating a negative spiral of mutual mistrust.

While the concept of legitimacy is ‘elusive andmultifaceted’ (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012), thereis now a growing understanding of how topromote it. Research consistently shows that thefairness, respect and dignity with which peopleare treated by the police, and the degree to whichpeople feel that their views are considered prior topolice decision-making, have considerableinfluence on whether people see the police asexercising legitimate authority, regardless of theoutcome of the interaction (Tyler, 2004; Mazerolleand Antrobus et al, 2013). Or, to put it another


way, ‘a little bit of being nice during police-citizeninteractions goes a long way’ (Mazerolle andBennett et al, 2013). This is in line with policeofficers’ experience; if you treat people fairly andwith respect, they are more likely to co-operate,follow your instructions and comply with the law(Myhill and Quinton, 2011). If, however, officers’actions do not coincide with how the public thinkthey should behave, their actions will be seen asillegitimate and their authority to enforce the lawwill be undermined. The primary issue raised incomplaints against the police, for example, is notthat the contact or action was unjustified but thatthe demeanour of the officer was unacceptable(Fielding and Innes, 2006; May et al, 2007).

This is not to say that effectiveness itself plays nopart in promoting legitimacy – for example arecent study based on a survey of Londonresidents concludes that the police must (amongother things) be seen to be effective to belegitimate (Tankebe, 2013) – but overall it seemsthat ‘effectiveness is a necessary but not sufficientcondition of legitimacy’ (Bottoms and Tankebe,2012). It is therefore essential that the police alsofocus on improving the quality of everyday contactand ensuring that they meet public expectationsof fair and legitimate behaviour. This applies notjust to contact with victims or members of thepublic. Behaving fairly and respectfully towardssuspects and offenders may also encouragegreater compliance with the law and co-operationwith the police in the future (Hough et al, 2010).The latter is particularly important given that manyoffenders are also victims.

The significance of how, and not simply whether,the law is enforced demonstrates the need todevelop approaches to crime reduction that are

sensitive to the way in which the police enforcethe law and the social context of enforcement.Given the potentially damaging effects of justfocusing resources on hotspots, how the policeenforce the law has significant implications fordeveloping local crime reduction interventions atmicro-locations as well as in improving servicequality at a wider level (Weisburd, 2012).

Summary and implicationsfor the project

While the evidence of effective policing practiceoutlined above is relatively compelling, questionsremain about the degree to which this model oflocal policing meets 21st century demands. Theexisting policing model has been put underconsiderable strain by the demands of a moreglobalised, culturally diverse and technologicallyconnected society. Meeting those demands withfewer resources will be a considerable challenge.However, this review suggests that focusingincreasingly limited resources on high crimemicro-locations can be effective in reducingvolume crime rates without resulting indisplacement. In contrast, blanket enforcement orintensive, highly visible policing in such placestends to have limited short term impact and, ifcarried out in ways that are insensitive tocommunity concerns or are perceived asheavy-handed, can have damagingconsequences for police legitimacy. Thissuggests that crime reduction initiatives shouldfocus on micro-locations and be especiallysensitive to how the police engage with thepublic and enforce the law.

This review has also highlighted the potentialvalue of being sensitive to the socio-economic


context of micro-locations, including the need tobuild collective efficacy. One of the strengths ofproblem-oriented policing is that it provides amore effective means of sustainably tackling crimeand the issues that may be driving it thantraditional enforcement approaches. Developingfocused, multi-agency approaches that addressspecific crime and disorder problems and theissues that drive them while supporting thedevelopment of collective efficacy inmicro-locations provides the potential for a moreintegrated (i.e. paying attention to the unequaldistribution, and social context of, crime anddisorder) approach to hotspots policing. In areasof high population turnover, this may offer apragmatic and effective means of building greatercommunity resilience. And in times of risingbudgetary restraint, such an approach maybecome increasingly attractive.

Lessons from reforms that emphasise the need todemonstrate responsiveness to communityconcerns have highlighted the importance ofproviding a service to communities that slowlybuilds confidence in the police, particularly whererelationships have been damaged. This suggeststhe need for innovation in public engagement.Research also highlights the dangers of a retreatfrom developments in policing that haverecognised the impact of crime and disorder‘signals’ on people’s sense of security.

On the basis of this review, the PoliceEffectiveness in a Changing World project shouldfocus on developing a thorough understanding ofthe problems in hotspots, using a variety of police,partnership and community sources, which willentail close working with police and partneragencies. It should also take account of the

increasing evidence on the degree to which theway in which policing is carried out is crucial toensuring that general everyday interactions, and inparticular targeted interventions, are experiencedas fair and legitimate. This reinforces the need forapproaches to be sensitive to the legitimacy ofpolice conduct, fostering future co-operation andcompliance. It may be possible in this way todeliver a sustained impact on crime.


2. The challenges for local policingin a changing world

The above discussion highlights the degree towhich research into effective policing practice inreducing crime has focused on the role of policingin prevention and deterrence, in tackling highlylocalised problems and in building relationships oftrust with localised communities. While thisresearch remains relevant to local policing, there isa growing concern that current policing practicemay not be attuned to, or meet the considerablechallenges thrown up by rapidly changing social,economic, political and technological changes. Itis therefore important that a project to improvepolice effectiveness and reduce crime is attentiveto these changing conditions and theirimplications for practice. The following sectionexplores the challenges for the police servicebefore looking at ways of responding to them.

The challenges for the delivery of local policing inthe UK are largely the result of socio-economicand technological changes over which the servicehas limited influence, with concomitant shifts inpatterns of crime and demands for security(Manning, 2010; Brodeur, 2010). In brief, thesechanges include:

� The globalisation of markets for goods andservices.

� The advent of fast communications, theinternet, new social media and the pace oftechnological change.

� New patterns of individual mobility andmigration arising in part, but not exclusively,from the expansion of the European Union.

� Growing income inequality and its influenceon patterns of urban development.

� The fragmentation of families andcommunities (Bauman, 2001; Wacquant,2007).

These characteristics of what has been variouslytermed the post-industrial or post-modern agehave created new criminal opportunities, threatsand risks. For example, a rise in the theft ofrelatively valuable metal from cars and variousdomestic, industrial and infrastructure sites hasbeen driven by a steep rise in the internationalprice of scrap metal driven by demand fromindustrial growth in China. This increase in metaltheft has put significant demands on the police,with the Home Office estimating that there werebetween 80,000 and 100,000 police recordedmetal theft offences in 2010/11 and that metaltheft costs the police over £20 million in staffingcosts (Home Office, 2012).

A further example is the explosion in the use ofcommunication technology. In 2012, 80 per centof households in Great Britain had access to theinternet compared to 55 per cent in 2005 and justnine per cent of households in the UK in 1998.Coupled with increased mobility/migration, thishas fundamentally changed the contemporarynature of social interaction and inter-personalrelationships, which in turn have altered:

� Patterns of organisation (‘flatter’ peer-to-peernetworks are preferred to more traditionalhierarchical organisations.

� Levels of trust (interpersonal and institutionaltrust tend to be weaker and more contingent).

� The nature of community (the increasingimportance of non-place-based affiliation).


6 This may affect forces differently depending on their reliance on central grantfunding and local precepts to supplement budgets. Community Safety Partneragencies also face considerable cuts to budgets which could increase thedemands on the police service.

� The construction of identity (people developmore complex conceptions of who they areand to what groups they belong) (see, forexample, Castells, 1996).

They have also affected patterns of crime,including the organisation (or otherwise) of seriouscrime, in enabling extended but often briefnetworks of association, the networking ofstrangers and the industrialisation of false andborrowed identities for fraud and other criminalpurposes (Levi, 2012). Although demand andsupply dynamics continue to be experienced atthe local level, this means that it no longer makessense to tackle crime in one locality withoutreference to what is happening in other places;global phenomena (for example human trafficking)increasingly impact on local communities (Bullocket al, 2009). These changes present considerablechallenges for the police service in terms ofinteroperability (i.e. working across borders,whether local, regional or national) and in stayingahead of increasingly fluid criminal networks andthe proliferation of new kinds of offences and newways of committing them.

These changes also have considerableimplications for the ways in which the policeengage with increasingly transient and culturallydiverse communities, and with citizens connectedmore through communication technology andsocial media – 61 per cent of UK adults werefound to be users in a 2011 survey – than throughthe places where they live. Although most crime,and of course most offenders, remaingeographically located, these changes haveconsiderable implications for developingrelationships of trust and for communicating with,and acquiring reliable information about criminalityfrom, the public.

One of the defining features of this changingsocial context, and in particular the so-called‘Information Age’, has been the unprecedentedsurge in the quantity of information produced,processed and consumed. This is as true for thepolice as it is for the public (Innes and Roberts,2011). These changes have been coupled withincreased demands for security and order, oftenplayed out in calls for more visible and accessiblepolicing (Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary,2011). The police are not only expected to be oncall 24/7, but are also expected to respondimmediately to an increasing range of problems(Fleming and Grabosky, 2009). Respondingeffectively to this volume and diversity of calls forservice as well as to an increasingly wide range ofcrime and disorder issues at local and crossborder levels, while attempting to meet publicdemands for a visible presence, presentssignificant pressures on police resources. Thereare concerns that 20th century strategies ofpolicing, based on local street-level knowledgeand local prevention/ deterrence andproblem-solving, do not fully meet these 21stcentury challenges (Innes and Roberts, 2011).

The police service also currently faces a period ofconsiderable organisational change as it adapts tothe immediate challenges of a 20 per cent cut inthe Home Office Police Grant between 2010 and2014 and the prospect of long-term localauthority budgetary restraint. 6 The police arerequired to ‘do more with less’, which is drivingforces to focus on improving efficiency andreducing costs, particularly staff costs (HerMajesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, 2011). Theneed to reduce spending (for example onservices, on non-warranted personnel or onmanagement costs) and ensure resources are


used efficiently to meet demand (for exampleensuring shift patterns match demand forimmediate/urgent response and focusingresource management on the most significantthreats and risks) is focusing minds on meetingorganisational goals more efficiently, often byadopting familiar managerial principles toorganisational change.

A key concern is that these pressures could resultin retrenchment to reactive, response-orientedapproaches, which may not be able to meet thechallenges outlined above. The concern is thatmanagers will attempt to deploy scarce resourcesin response to immediate demands bydisinvesting in specialist, proactive, investigativeand civilian analytical staff capable of contributingto more sustainable crime reduction (Karn, 2010).These challenges may also result in pressures toreduce the allocation of resources on communityengagement and neighbourhood policing aspolice personnel are moved to other duties.Equally, pressures on local authority and otherpartner agency budgets threaten the resourcesavailable for local problem-solving and forstrategic partnership work, despite anacknowledgement that these are needed tomaintain sustainable reductions in crime.

A parallel imperative within the currentgovernment’s police reform agenda is toencourage the public to undertake more socialcontrol work, for the police in effect ‘to do lesswith more’ (Innes, 2011). This reflects a widerreform agenda focusing on promoting greaterlocal accountability and voluntarism (evidentparticularly in the introduction of PCCs and theBig Society) while reducing state capacity.

The current government reforms demand a‘smaller, smarter and sharper style of policing’

(Innes, 2011), with fewer resources, better use ofhuman and informational assets and targetinginterventions to where they can make the mostdifference. But in the past, reform of policing hasbeen driven largely by failures or crises, such asthe murder of Stephen Lawrence, theHillsborough tragedy and the miscarriages ofjustice in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than policy(Reiner, 2010). It remains to be seen how farcurrent policy reforms will lead to real changes inoperational policing, given the cultural resistanceto change in the service.

As mentioned above, a key element of the recentreforms has been the replacement of PoliceAuthorities with directly elected PCCs alongsidePolice and Crime Panels. Their role is to set local(force level) policing priorities, plan policingbudgets and work with Chief Constables,community safety partnerships and criminaljustice agencies and community groups to delivercommunity safety and overall security in the area.

Until these changes become more established it isdifficult to predict their full implications. While theirintroduction may present some opportunities topromote a shift away from central (i.e. HomeOffice) accountability and greater responsivenessto local concerns, they may also expose theservice to greater political influence (Association ofChief Police Officers, 2011). Equally, whetherPCCs will be motivated to direct resources totackling crimes that are more hidden, such asorganised crime, and less likely to have popularappeal, such as domestic violence, family childabuse and hate crime, has been questioned(Innes, 2011). How responsive such arrangementswill be to their local population when structured atforce level, particularly in large force areas with bigand sometimes very diverse populations, is also


open to question. There has been very little focusto date on how PCCs will mobilise and engagecommunities in decision-making, or in less formalvoluntary activity, and rather more on their role as‘crime fighters’ (Innes, 2011).

PCC powers to commission services present aparticular challenge given the scope this givesthem to invite a wide range of providers to deliverpatrol or other community safety related services.This may present significant challenges forpartnership working and expose localarrangements to greater fragmentation, whichmay also make analysis of crime trends andpatterns more problematic. How responsive sucharrangements will be to national and internationalcrime trends and to using evidence of effectivepractice also remains to be seen. A key challengefor local level police commanders and theirpartners will be in juggling the demands of policemanagement, PCCs, Her Majesty’s Inspectorateof Constabulary (HMIC) and other new nationalarrangements (for example the National CrimeAgency and the College of Policing) as well aspartner agencies and local communities.


3. Meeting the challengesRapidly changing social, economic andtechnological environments, with new forms ofcriminal activity that increasingly transcend localand national borders, pose real challenges forneighbourhood policing, as well as for intelligencegathering, analysis and investigation. This sectionoutlines the implications of this context for policingpractice and in particular for the ‘PoliceEffectiveness in a Changing World’ project. Threeof the four high crime wards identified in Lutonand Slough on which the project will focus arecharacterised by transient, culturally diversepopulations and reflect the rapid populationgrowth contributing to a relatively youngpopulation profile in both towns. The fourth wardis a traditional white working class area, with lesscultural diversity but experiencing similarly highrates of crime and multiple deprivation, which inthe current economic climate, with high rates ofunemployment and cuts in public services andwelfare benefits, is likely to worsen.

Neighbourhood policing:adapting to the changing world

One of the challenges for neighbourhood policingis to foster and maintain trust and legitimacy inthose communities with more transient andculturally diverse populations. Neighbourhoodpolicing built around problem-solving approacheshelps build trust, reduce fear and encouragereporting, particularly if combined with flexibleapproaches to identifying residents’ concerns,understanding their expectations and involvingthem in developing effective responses. Suchapproaches might, for example, include innovativeforms of community engagement, tailored to avariety of groups, such as new migrants or youngpeople living in specific micro-location hotspots.

They may range from proactive attendance by thepolice at community events or meetings, to theinvolvement of community members in localdecision-making and using new forms ofcommunication technology and social media.With the introduction of PCCs, this is likely to bean opportune moment to focus on developingnew and better forms of community engagement.

Another challenge for the police (along with theirpartners) concerns building collective efficacy andtrust in multi-ethnic and culturally diverseneighbourhoods with high rates of deprivation andpopulation turnover. As these are usually highcrime areas with a history of police intervention,the lessons from insensitive enforcement-basedapproaches suggest the need for caution and inparticular an awareness of how such approachescan undermine resilience and trust. However,attempts to promote police-community dialogueabout problems and their solution inherentlyrequire an appeal to common values, which ismore complex in multi-cultural communities. It isnot possible for managers to appeal to thedominant norms of every cultural group but ratherto find common ground that reflects a moreuniversal morality (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012).

It has been suggested that in an increasinglyglobalised world, those in positions of power needto identify and articulate areas of shared moralityand negotiate their acceptance among a range ofcommunities with different normative cultures(Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). In practice thismeans that police managers and front line officershave to think about the legitimacy of their actionsin the eyes of a variety of audiences, often withconflicting interests. These may include verydifferent understandings of the priority issues and


how the police and/or partners should bestrespond to them (Huey, 2007). Effectiveengagement with different communities istherefore crucial to developing approaches thatare sensitive to a range of community concerns.

In such areas, expectations of the police andwhether people feel able to trust them will varyaccording to their previous contact with police,whether in the UK or in their countries of origin.However, strong shared values of justice areimportant in shaping immediate judgments aboutthe legitimacy of contact with the police,irrespective of preconceived ideas of whether thepolice may be trusted in general (Bottoms andTankebe, 2012; Karn, 2007). This could havetransformative potential in the long term in that itcould shift expectations of policing even ifprevious experiences have been damaging. Inpractice this means improving public experiencesof contact with officers, and attempting toengender this among officers by appealing toprofessional norms that strike a chord with theirvalues (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). This may bechallenging to deliver and to succeed wouldalmost certainly need commitment from seniorand especially middle managers.

Developing intelligence throughstructured engagement

While much of the research on local policing hasfocused on fostering confidence and reducingfear of crime by tackling visible crime anddisorder, there has been less focus on the role ofneighbourhood and response policing in buildingtrusting relationships with those able to provideuseful information about more hidden criminalactivity. Notably, there is little evidence on thecapacity for local policing to contribute to an

understanding of criminal or incident‘connectedness’ beyond their local area. A styleof neighbourhood policing that attempts to buildlinks in fragmented communities and identifyconnections between local problems and issuesthat go beyond local boundaries is likely to requirea greater emphasis on intelligence-gathering andanalysis. A more structured, systematic approachto community engagement may be needed if thepolice are to gather ‘community intelligence’proactively from residents knowledgeable aboutlocal crime (Lowe and Innes, 2012). This wouldhelp to alert the police to growing problems inareas where they lack good contacts and toaccess reliable information not currently reportedto the police or their partners.

Public understanding of the police as the first portof call in dealing with problems in theirneighbourhood can mean that the service drownsin the ‘noise’ of information about relatively trivialbut highly visible incidents. This can result in failingto connect local knowledge to more serious (butoften hidden) criminal activity. This richerunderstanding of how low level disorder mayconnect with other less visible, but more harmfulactivity in an area is really only obtainable fromengaging residents knowledgeable about suchconnections. A more structured engagementapproach might also help to build relationships withlocal residents in a position to know about moreserious criminal activity. While covert humansources are one means of accessing suchinformation, improving the conduct of local officerscould potentially increase the amount and quality oflocal intelligence from offenders and victims withwhom they are in daily contact. This suggestsfostering behaviour that meets public (includingvictim, witness, suspect and offender) expectations


7 The NIM has three principle levels encompassing local policing, force level, andinter-force level.

of police conduct and developing officers’confidence to use their discretion, with integrity, tobuild relationships with, in particular, more‘suspect’ members of the community. As manyhotspots are also offender residence hotspots,these activities may in practice go hand in hand.

Contributing street-officer knowledgeto intelligence development

Greater police effectiveness and efficiency couldbe achieved if the information and intelligenceaspects of policing were organised differently(Innes and Roberts, 2011). Although street levelofficers are an important source of primaryinformation (Manning and Hawkins, 1989) andaccessing information from the public is implicit inthe functions of local policing, little is known abouthow neighbourhood officers work with intelligenceanalysts. Policing has always been ‘knowledgework’ (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997), but thedemands of the ‘Information Age’ pose new andquite specific challenges of informationmanagement. Effective intelligence-led orproblem-solving approaches to policing rely onthe effective acquisition, management and use ofinformation if it is to help forces adapt to change(Innes and Roberts, 2011). The limited degree towhich ‘bottom up’ intelligence has been fed intohigher levels 7 has, for example, been identified asa considerable weakness in the implementation ofthe NIM (Maguire and John 2003). In theory thismodel was meant to shape the way in whichinformation could be fed through to eachoperational level of policing, but in practiceidentifying what information should be fedupwards has proved difficult and NIM has tendedto be more top down than bottom up (Maguireand John, 2003). Similarly, opportunities to use

partnership information to contribute to a ‘bottomup’ intelligence picture, particularly in tacklingserious criminality, have been rare (Van Staden etal, 2011).

There are a number of challenges to improving thecapacity of local policing, working with theirpartners, to contribute to developing better, morerelevant intelligence beyond building goodrelationships with knowledgeable sources.Officers need to recognise whether informationthey acquire by just being present in theircommunities is significant or otherwise and makesure they routinely record it fully and accuratelyinto intelligence database systems (Cope, 2004).Observations of a Basic Command Unit (BCU) inLondon, for example, showed that a significantproportion of intelligence submissions were neverentered on the system (Innes and Roberts, 2011).Some officers can also be unwilling to share whatthey know with civilian analysts, whose civilianstatus within the policing hierarchy can beambiguous (Cope, 2004). These barriers limit theeffective conversion of primary information intouseful intelligence through analysis and underminethe credibility of analysis (and tasking based uponit) in the eyes of officers who are well aware of thelimitations of information entered on police forcedatabases (Innes et al, 2005).

The difficulties of converting experientialknowledge of street level policing into a form thatcan be used by analysts to create usefulintelligence to inform tasking is a good example ofone of the challenges facing the police inadjusting to a rapidly changing informationenvironment (Innes and Roberts, 2011). Whereoffences committed locally originate outside thelocality (or even the country), the task is further


complicated by needing to obtain informationfrom other forces or countries. It requires higherlevel skills in the use of IT and possibly additionalresources to access, for example, translationservices or knowledge about other countries’criminal justice systems. Developing these kindsof skills is crucial to effective problem-solving inhighly diverse and mobile communities such asthose in Luton and Slough.

Analysis and intelligence

Turning information into intelligence that providesa detailed, on-going picture of rapidly changingsocio-economic, demographic and crime trendsin ways that can contribute to actionableinterventions or investigations is a crucialcomponent of developing effective crimereduction approaches. The value ofintelligence-led policing has become accepted asa way of achieving more effective and efficient useof resources for predicting risks and threats andpreventing harm. However, recent researchsuggests there are systemic problems in theprocessing and use of information that limits thecapacity of the police to do this (Innes andRoberts, 2011).

A central role in the processing of information is toestablish its provenance – where and from whomdoes it come? Is the source reliable? Anincreasing challenge is dealing with the sheervolume of information in a timely manner, much ofwhich is limited in terms of quality. For example, inthe study of a London BCU intelligence unitreferred to above, 10 per cent of submissionswere graded as containing no intelligence orinformation and three quarters were notprogressed because they did not reflect the

force’s strategic objectives (Innes and Roberts,2011). While prioritising is clearly necessary, thislimits the force’s capacity to identify and respondto emerging risks and threats (Cope, 2004).

The focus of crime analysis on ‘gripping’ alreadyidentified problems mirrors the performanceculture in the police service, which is the contextin which crime analysis has developed. Theinfluence of geo-location mapping of crimehotspots has, for example, largely arisen from itsbenefits in terms of efficient resource allocation,but in practice mapping rarely goes beyond thedescriptive and is therefore limited in its capacityto inform tasking and problem-solving (Innes et al,2005). Crime mapping also tends to be used todrive resources towards managing highlylocalised, time-limited spates of criminal activity,rather than to exploring persistent problems or tomaking connections with out-of-area activity.

Crime analysis tends to be shaped by traditionalpolice understandings of crime, especiallytracking the movements or networks of the ‘usualsuspects’ (Innes et al, 2005). While this cancontribute to, say, the proactive investigation ofillicit markets, it tends on the whole to reinforceorganisational knowledge about ‘knownoffenders’ without necessarily establishing the realposition of individuals within a network or theoften fleeting nature of their relationships. Inconditions of increased population mobility andtransience and mediated relationships betweenstrangers, these techniques have their limits.

A recent report for HMIC found that informationgiven to officers at briefings usually related toincidents or events that had already happenedrather than what was anticipated, so they tendedto be reactive rather than proactive (Her Majesty’s


Inspector of Constabulary, 2012). The samereport found that officers did not know what kindof real-time intelligence would be of most use tothem and that their training failed to provide themwith the evidence-base they needed effectively toprevent crime. Furthermore, officers tend tocommission the simple collation of informationrather than more sophisticated prospective orpredictive analyses, while analysts remainsceptical about the degree to which their analysisis used to inform tasking (Innes et al, 2005).

To identify rapidly changing crime trends andmore dispersed patterns and networks of criminalactivity proactively requires a broad range ofanalytical and investigative skills. The essentialrole that analysis plays in problem-solving andsuccessful partnership working suggests thatadditional resources should be invested in crimeanalysis and that more attention should be givento improving the ways in which analysts work anddeveloping their status within the organisation.This is possibly one of the most urgent tasks thatneed to be addressed if higher quality intelligenceis to better inform effective approaches to policingin a rapidly changing environment.


ConclusionLong-term socio-economic and technologicalchanges, with concomitant changes in patterns ofcrime and demands for security, presentenormous operational challenges for the policeservice in working across borders (bothlocal/regional and national) and in keeping up tospeed with rapid changes in the modus operandiof criminals and their associates. Respondingeffectively to these developments while attemptingto meet increasing public and political demandsfor security, and adapting to the prospect oflong-term budgetary restraint and wider policereform, present some significant challenges forthe service. A key concern is that theseimmediate pressures could result in retrenchmentto reactive response-oriented approaches, likelyto be inadequate in meeting these 21st centurychallenges.

The ‘Police Effectiveness in a Changing World’project will draw on knowledge of effective,sustainable crime reduction practice, developingmulti-agency problem-solving approaches toaddress issues in micro-location hotspots. Theproject will also draw on the evidence of the valueof community engagement and procedural justicein securing sustainable reductions to persistentcrime and disorder issues in high crime areas. Itwill look to introduce good practice and innovationin helping to develop interventions to increasepolice effectiveness and reduce crime and identifyways of improving systems, processes, skills andtechniques in intelligence analysis andintelligence-led tasking. In this way the project willaim to develop the skills and infrastructure at thelocal level to improve the capacity of the policeand their partners to address crime in this rapidlychanging world.


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Policing and Crime Reduction

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