Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

• Why are you not providing the same funding as for the Street Crime Initiative?

• What support is available from the Home Office to tackle robbery?

• What are you doing to tackle robbery of mobile phones?

Why are you not providing the same funding as for the Street Crime Initiative?

The Street Crime Initiative was introduced at a time when robbery was much higher than it is now, despite the rise this quarter.

It was planned as a three year programme aimed at reversing the upward trend in robbery between 1999 and 2001. The Initiative achieved this.

The SCI cost £80m. This level of additional funding cannot be sustained, and the task is now to mainstream the SCI lessons in the day to day business of CDRPs and the contributions of key agencies that comprise them.

 What support is available from the Home Office to tackle robbery?

Robbery is part of Serious Acquisitive Crime, and a range of measures are planned to reduce levels yet more over the next PSA period. This work will focus on those areas which are ‘worse than their peers'

These include:

• support to key delivery partners, including Local Operational Reviews on specific crime types;
• support to CDRP/CSPs through Partnership Support Programmes, improving their overall effectiveness;
• working in partnership with Prolific and other Priority Offender (PPO) and Drug Interventions Programme (DIP), ensuring clear working relationships, to manage offenders and maintain a focus on prevalent offenders, particularly drug misusing offenders;
• Continuing to advocate a problem solving approach to tackling robbery by means of in depth analysis of partnership information not just police recorded crime statistics stats and partnership information from schools and transport providers re crime hotspots and specific problems etc.
• Improving performance in the forensic approach to crime reduction, increasing detection; and
• Increasing the capacity of partners to reduce crime, through encouraging use of the Effective Practice Database launched this year.

We will also be working to improve problem solving approaches through central support.

Performance management arrangements will ensure that the significant gains made to date in this area are sustained. We have provided CDRPs with ‘Hallmarks of Effective Practice', the implementation of which will ensure ongoing focus on driving up performance. For example, effective leadership will ensure that all partners work towards clear objectives.

What are you doing to tackle the robbery of mobile phones?

We are continuing to provide funding to the National Mobile Phone Crime Unit (£500,000 in 2008/09) so that it can be innovative and fight mobile phone crime on a local, national and international level and to help encourage the mobile phone industry to make continual improvements to mobile phone security. The work of the unit is mainstreamed amongst key police forces where robbery is a key priority. The Metropolitan Police Service continues to provide a substantial level of funding and receive a good deal of benefit in view of the fact that nearly half of all robberies occur in London. Recent tests have indicated that networks are achieving their Mobile Industry Crime Reduction Charter target of blocking 80% of stolen mobile handsets within 48 hours of them being reported stolen across all networks

Last update: Tuesday, February 24, 2009