Police abandon ‘bobby on the beat’ experiment
An experiment to provide a ‘bobby on the beat’ in a Yorkshire village has failed after it was found to increase people’s fear of crime.
The three-year project, by which the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRHT) paid £25,000 a year for an additional 24 hours of police time a week for New Earswick, near York, has now been abandoned a year early.
The scheme was arranged by the charity with North Yorkshire Police and aimed to increase people’s sense of security through a visible police presence.
The village of just 1,000 homes saw an initial drop in crime of five per cent during the first year of the project, but this almost doubled in the second. Much of the increase was in less-serious offences and corresponded with a rise in crime levels in surrounding neighbourhoods.
However, researchers at the University of Leeds found a rise in the number of residents in the village who said they felt unsafe outside after dark and a marked increase in dissatisfaction with local policing from 30 per cent to 40 per cent.
Professor Adam Crawford, co-author of the report, said: “One of the key lessons to be learned from this well-intentioned attempt to make residents feel more secure is that trying to tackle local order problems through policing and security alone can have the opposite effect.”
He added that the project had been unable to meet residents’ raised expectations.
Jacquie Dale, of JRHT which manages the village, admitted: “Residents’ expectations were never met and fear of crime levels did not diminish as had been hoped.”
The report on the ‘bobby on the beat’ project comes as the Conservative Party pledged to put an extra 40,000 police officers on the streets if elected to government.
