Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Issue

Overall violent crime reduced by 31% since 1997.

Vastly improved knowledge about what works in tackling low-level violence and domestic violence.

But less impact on the most serious violent crimes compared with less serious violence.

Stronger focus on serious violence

• We will tackle violent crime by addressing the drivers of violence, intervening early to prevent it, preventing escalation, being robust in our response to violent offenders through the criminal justice system, being proactive in providing services for victims, and finding innovative solutions to difficult issues such as the use of knives in violent crime.
• We will focus both on reducing serious violence and the harm it causes, through the way in which victims are supported.
  
• A new violent crime strategy will be published towards the end of 2007, setting this stronger focus out in more detail.
• A new safer communities PSA proposal for 2008–11 includes specific measures of success for tackling violent crime and sexual offending.

Good evidence that the combination of enforcement and support is working to reduce anti-social behaviour.

Tools and powers for addressing anti-social behaviour are still relatively recent, and further support is needed to embed the approach thoroughly across the country.

Continued pressure on anti-social behaviour

• We will focus on bringing all areas of the country up to the standard of the best in tackling anti-social behaviour
  
• Government will provide active support to agencies, improving knowledge about the most effective and appropriate use of tools and powers.
• There will be a fresh drive on the use of supportive interventions, including parenting contracts that address the underlying factors contributing to anti-social behaviour, alongside robust enforcement.

Strong progress on improving the life chances of young people (e.g. reducing poverty) – but still too many young people left behind and either offending or at risk of starting to offend.

Comparatively little focus in the past on the needs of young victims of crime and reducing young victimisation.

Renewed focus on young people

• The new Department for Children, Schools and Families will focus on lifting more children out of poverty, re-engaging disaffected young people and raising standards. The Government will continue to implement the new Reaching out: An action plan on social exclusion (2006).
• Government will work with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the Youth Justice Board (YJB) and other partners to develop a youth crime strategy aimed at both young victims and young offenders.
• This will include strengthening the links between the police, schools and youth provision to ensure that the most effective provision is in place to improve young people’s safety, such as positive activities (including sport) and building on Safer Schools Partnerships, and a greater focus on the small minority of young people who end up involved in crime, violence or gangs.

Much good practice exists on how to design out crime locally.

Design solutions are usually found once a crime issue has emerged – there is potential to anticipate these problems earlier.

New national approach to designing out crime

• Government will work closely with the corporate sector to design crime out of new products and services (including the built environment) at an early stage, focusing on:
  
• creating an early warning system to identify quickly issues that are best tackled at national level; developing incentives for businesses to ‘think crime’; working with consumer groups to increase the demand for crime-free products and services; and supporting the inclusion of crime prevention in the professional training of scientists and designers, and creating an early warning system to identify quickly issues which are best tackled at national level
  
• the Government’s planned National Fraud Strategy will have fraud prevention as a key element.

More crimes are being detected and brought to justice, and reoffending rates are starting to reduce.

But more can be done to reduce reoffending, particularly by the most prolific offenders.

Continuing to reduce reoffending

• The Government will continue to strengthen the capability of the police, Crown Prosecution Service and other prosecutors, and courts and work to simplify criminal justice system (CJS) processes.
• The Government will continue to focus on the most prolific offenders, throughout the CJS, and on reducing reoffending (through the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), and programmes such as the Drug Interventions Programme, and the Prolific and other Priority Offenders programme).
• The Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Attorney General’s Offi ce will work closely together to ensure that our response to offenders covers the need to punish and deter, to rehabilitate, and to increase public confidence in the CJS.

Delivering crime reduction requires strong partnership and a new relationship between government, partners and citizens.

Greater sense of national partnership

• Government will bring together key partners at a National Crime Reduction Board to drive delivery and provide shared ownership of crime reduction.
• We will continue to build strong relationships between the police and local authorities, while seeking to strengthen other crucial relationships: between Government and Industry, and between Government and the Third Sector: the Third Sector has a crucial role to play in helping to shape services, as well as in delivering them.

Performance management and targets have driven strong performance.

There is now space to build on success and make these more sophisticated, more responsive to local priorities and underpin a more mature relationship between government and delivery partners.

Public confidence should be central to our understanding of how well we are delivering community safety and responding to the issues that most matter to the public.

Freeing up local partners, building public confidence

• Through a proposed new PSA to be published in the autumn, we expect that there will be fewer targets mandated from the centre, and greater flexibility to respond to local crime priorities.
• Performance assessment will be simplified. A single framework for assessing performance on community safety, streamlining three frameworks into one, will be developed during 2007/08 for implementation in 2008/09.
• Government will be more enabling, and less directive where there is already good practice and strong performance; Government will continue to monitor performance and provide support to partnerships where performance is consistently poor.
• Government will cut red tape and help to free up resource for the frontline. The independent review of policing led by Sir Ronnie Flanagan will look at reducing bureaucracy.
  
• Partnership working will be strengthened, to bring all up to the level of the best. National standards and related guidance will be introduced in late summer 2007, including standards on information collection, information-sharing between partner agencies, collective analysis and problem-solving, and consultation with communities.
• Building on the roll-out of Neighbourhood Policing, we will improve citizens’ opportunities to understand local crime issues and how they are dealt with, by ensuring crime information is published in a more accessible way, at a more local level, and more frequently – at least monthly. We will back this up with strengthened mechanisms for exercising local accountability.
• Partnerships will be held to account on how well they are engaging with communities to ensure that communities influence local crime and community safety priorities. Again, Neighbourhood Policing is key.