Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

At a time when overall crime has been falling, robberies against the person have risen at an unprecedented rate, with the police recording almost twice as many personal robberies in 2001/2 as in 1997/8. These reports look at the strategies and tactics that have been tried in response to street robberies and suggest which of theses have been shown to be effective.

Title: Tackling personal robbery: lessons learned from the police and community partnerships
Authors: John Burrows, Helen Poole, Tim Read & Sarah Webb
Series: Home Office Development and Practice Report 5, Home Office online report 02/03
Number of pages: 10 (Development & Practice), 46 (online report)
Date published: January 2003

Interventions

The interventions that the police, partnerships and others can take to tackle personal robbery are very wide-ranging and the review found anti-robbery initiatives seldom focussed exclusively on one form of intervention. Typically, they incorporated a number of complementary strands, or a 'cocktail' of activities that could be summarised under the following headings:

• Identifying hotspots

• Offender targeting

• Improving surveillance

• High visibility policing

• Designing out crime

• Detection

• Crime prevention advice for higher risk groups

• Implementing longer-term social interventions

• Improving downstream criminal justice processes

These activities are not undertaken solely by the police and many rest on partnership work with a range of agencies. Transport companies, retailers, banks and local authorities, schools, education authorities and universities all have an important part to play.

There is no one activity that can be said to hold the key to robbery reduction. Although policing philosophies differ between the forces, there is general consensus that while high visibility policing may play an important part in deterring offenders from a 'hotspot' and reassuring those who live and travel around such areas, the cost of such activities is prohibitive – and their effects are very short-lived.

This understanding – accompanied by the simple recognition that offenders are not likely to be detained by uniformed patrols – largely explains police forces' readiness to look at a much wider array of tactics.

Analysis

Personal robbery is a complex problem that is diverse in nature. While it is important to describe patterns in personal robbery, where and when offences take place and the characteristics of offenders and victims, it is of equal importance to understand why these incidents occur. Effective analysis involves more than simple mapping. It also needs to explain why some victims are targeted and not others, or why some locations regularly appear as hot-spots. Analysis is reliant on good quality data, expertise in data analysis and the necessary computing (and other) facilities.

An important lesson from the review is the need for the police to extract as much relevant information as possible for their crime reports and, in order to yield an explanation of why a robbery occurs, analysis must consider the more qualitative information from victim statements alongside the hard coded data on time and location. As well as drawing upon their own crime information, the police should also make reference to the records kept by probation, local authorities, Youth Offending Teams, and drug agencies among others.

Strategies

The most effective crime reduction strategies have generally been identified as:

• targeting repeat or prolific offenders,

• targeting repeat victims and

• directed patrol.

While research on "what works" in tackling personal robbery is not extensive, that which does exist has emphasised the benefits of targeting resources on the basis of improved intelligence, the increased use of partnerships, the wider application of CCTV, publicity, increased training for police personnel and work based around improving community relations.

The current review identified seven key areas that should ideally be accommodated when designing a tactical response to the robbery problem.

• translate analysis and problem-solving into practical action

• identify offenders and target their related offences

• identify offender networks and reduce market opportunities

• get to incidents and victims quickly

• establish a presence through police activity and increase the level of surveillance in hot-spot areas

• engage with vulnerable groups

• actively engage partnership agencies

Download Tackling personal robbery: lessons learned from the police and community partnerships (development and practice report 5) PDF, 101Kb

Download Tackling personal robbery: lessons learned from the police and community partnerships (online report 02/03) PDF, 277Kb