Effects of One-a-Day Foot Patrols on Hot Spots of Serious Violence and Crime Harm: a Randomised Crossover Trial
| cam.issuedOnline | 2021-09-06 | |
| dc.contributor.author | Basford, Lewis | |
| dc.contributor.author | Sims, Chris | |
| dc.contributor.author | Agar, Iain | |
| dc.contributor.author | Harinam, Vincent | |
| dc.contributor.author | Strang, Heather | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-01-05T16:28:19Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-01-05T16:28:19Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-12 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2022-01-05T16:28:18Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:sec> <jats:title>Research Question</jats:title> <jats:p>Does one foot patrol per day (15–20 min) conducted in serious violence harm spots reduce street-visible crime harm and frequency relative to no foot patrol in the same hot spots, and if so by how much?</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Data</jats:title> <jats:p>We identified 20 hot spots of 150m<jats:sup>2</jats:sup> each on the basis of community violence defined as serious assaults, robbery, and drug dealing in the Southend-on-Sea area of Essex Police, with boundaries geo-fenced to collect GPS measures of foot patrol presence generated by hand-held electronic trackers issued to officers directed to perform patrols. All street-visible crimes were counted for each of the 90 days of the experiment in each hot spot.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Methods</jats:title> <jats:p>Daily random assignment of each hot spot to either control or treatment conditions (<jats:italic>N</jats:italic> = 90 X 20 = 1800 place-days) prescribed 720 place-days to receive extra patrols by Operational Support Group officers, which were compared to 1080 place-days with no extra patrols, using an intent-to-treat design, with 98% compliance with assigned treatments. Independent measures of other police presence in the area were tracked by the force-wide GPS telematics measures. All crimes were coded with the Cambridge Crime Harm Index for their CHI value.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Findings</jats:title> <jats:p>The 20 harm spots comprised just 2.6% of the geographical area of the Southend-on-Sea area, with 41% of all its Cambridge CHI crime harm in the year preceding the experiment. Background patrol presence was about 2 min per day on control days and 1 min per treatment day. Crime harm scores for serious community violence were 88.5% lower on experimental days with extra patrols (mean = 1.07 CHI per treatment place-day) than without it (mean = 9.30 CHI per control place-day). Crime harm scores for all street-visible offences were 35.6% lower on treatment days (mean = 7.94 CHI per treatment place-day) than control days (mean = 12.33 CHI per control place-day), while the mean count of all street-visible offences was 31% lower on treatment days (mean count = 0.09 crimes per treatment place-day) than on control days (mean count = 0.13 crimes per control place-day). The estimated effect of the 720 days with 15-min patrols was to prevent crimes with recommended imprisonment of 3161 days, or 8.66 years.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Conclusion</jats:title> <jats:p>The use of two-officer foot patrol can be highly effective at preventing serious violence in street-visible settings in small areas in which such violence is heavily concentrated.</jats:p> </jats:sec> | |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.17863/CAM.79481 | |
| dc.identifier.eissn | 2520-1336 | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 2520-1344 | |
| dc.identifier.other | s41887-021-00067-2 | |
| dc.identifier.other | 67 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/332034 | |
| dc.language | en | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC | |
| dc.publisher.url | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s41887-021-00067-2 | |
| dc.subject | 48 Law and Legal Studies | |
| dc.subject | 4805 Legal Systems | |
| dc.subject | 4402 Criminology | |
| dc.subject | 44 Human Society | |
| dc.subject | Violence Research | |
| dc.subject | Prevention | |
| dc.subject | Clinical Trials and Supportive Activities | |
| dc.subject | Mental Health | |
| dc.subject | Clinical Research | |
| dc.subject | 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions | |
| dc.title | Effects of One-a-Day Foot Patrols on Hot Spots of Serious Violence and Crime Harm: a Randomised Crossover Trial | |
| dc.type | Article | |
| prism.endingPage | 133 | |
| prism.issueIdentifier | 3-4 | |
| prism.publicationName | Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing | |
| prism.startingPage | 119 | |
| prism.volume | 5 | |
| rioxxterms.licenseref.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| rioxxterms.version | VoR | |
| rioxxterms.versionofrecord | 10.1007/s41887-021-00067-2 |
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