The use of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index and the Peterborough cost-effectiveness results provides a like-for-like metric to challenge those who demand more PC or PCSO time in patrolling schools, low-crime neighbourhoods, or traffic accident hot spots.
- Lawrence Sherman
New research shows that targeting each crime ‘hot spot’ in a city with 21 extra minutes of daily foot patrolling by Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) could save the justice system hundreds of thousands of pounds through prevented crime.
Working with Cambridgeshire Constabulary to conduct a year-long experiment in Peterborough, researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge randomly allocated 34 crime-prone areas to get 21 minutes of extra PCSO patrols a day.
They compared offences before and after the experiment between 38 hot spots with no increased patrol and the 34 with the increase using the Cambridge Crime Harm Index: a new tool that measures “harm caused to victims” by modelling severities in sentencing for different offences, rather than just totting up overall crime figures.
The research team calculated that targeted patrol time equal to two full-time PCSOs would prevent 86 assaults a year, or incidents of the equivalent crime ‘harm value’, saving potential costs to the public of eight years of imprisonment.
The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, suggest that every £10 spent on targeted foot patrols prevents a further £56 in prison costs – a five-to-one return on investment.
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Image: PCSOs from West Midlands Police on patrol
Credit: West Midlands Police
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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