Police and academics team up to tackle serious violence hotspots in Bedfordshire

Bedfordshire Police and Cambridge Centre for Evidence Based Policing (CCEBP) are working together on a new project to identify and target hot spots for knife crime and other serious violence in the county.

The work aims to use evidence and data to effectively target police patrols at hot spot areas for serious violence.

Early indications suggest that the right interventions in less than eight per cent of the county could prevent up to 41 per cent of relevant crimes in Bedfordshire.

It is based on analysis of lower super output areas, small local areas which are used for statistical analysis at an extremely targeted level.

This will enable the force to identify more precise locations where serious youth violence has consistently taken place in the past.

It is hoped that putting this level of police presence into some 28 of the 352 lower super output areas in Bedfordshire – less than eight per cent – will suppress some of the drivers of youth violence, such as gang activity or drug dealing.

GPS technology would then be used to track the level of deployments to the targeted areas, with supervisors being automatically notified if the level dips below that recommended under the model.

Bedfordshire Police Assistant Chief Constable Jackie Sebire, the national lead for serious violence, said: “This initiative offers a powerful opportunity to tie technology and world-class academic work together to prevent serious violence in a way that maximises the value of resources across the police.

“There is of course no substitute for local knowledge and we will continue to tap into our officers and our communities in order to understand what is going on.

“But we hope this project will provide us with some effective foundations to target our efforts at the right places and protect people from serious harm.”