Vehicle Crime
Links between bus-related crime and other crimes
Examines the links between bus-related crime and other crimes, and the extent to which initiatives to tackle bus-related crime can provide a 'gateway' to apprehend the perpetrators of other crimes.
Title: Links between bus-related crime and other crimes
Author: Department for Transport on behalf of Crime Concern and Liverpool University’s Environmental Criminology Research Unit (ECRU)
Date published: October 2004
Number of pages: 8
Availability: Download full report PDF 156Kb
The study included a review of crime and disorder audits and strategies. A Home Office database provided access to a substantial majority of the crime and disorder audits and strategies prepared by the 376 Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships in England and Wales. It revealed that public transport crime was between 3 and 4 times higher in 2002 than in 1999 (rising from around 25 in 1999 to over 90 in 2002).
Results
Analysis of the crime statistics along sections of bus routes in South Yorkshire, Merseyside, London and Lancashire were undertaken and revealed:
Bus-related crime (to passengers, staff and vehicles) is positively correlated with levels of crime in the surrounding area. It is therefore suggested that bus crime reduction operations be integrated within wider crime reduction strategies.
The crime types related with bus crime were:
Criminal damage
Robbery/ Assault
Theft of/ from motor vehicle
Theft from person/ shoplifting/ handling stolen goods/ going equipped for theft
Disorder, and specifically youth disorder
Violence against the person
Routes that go through high crime areas with relatively high numbers of stops are at greatest risk of crime (multiple entry and exit points).
Bus route crime is concentrated by route and location, and by time of day and incident type.
There is a need to encourage good practice schemes that facilitate the reporting, capture and analysis of bus-related crimes.
Good practice in tackling bus-related crime
Case study 1: Merseyside
Operation Bream in Merseyside was a pilot for high visibility policing on a bus route in April/ May 2002. An evaluation revealed that arrest rates were 3 to 5 times higher during the operation. 325 stop and searches (of passengers without a valid ticket) were carried out, 18% of which resulted in an arrest. Of these, 28% were for possession of illegal drugs, 17% for theft, 7% for public disorder offences, and 8% for burglary, assault or robbery.
Case study 2: West Midlands
'Gateway Checks' are joint operations that demonstrate a unified police and revenue inspector presence on the West Midlands bus network. There were 171 'Gateway Checks' in 2003, with over 750,000 passengers checked, resulting in 255 arrests for 'other offences', including shoplifting, carrying offensive weapons, and drug dealing. It has been estimated that the average cost of a 'Gateway Check' with 6 police officers, 6 revenue inspectors and a vehicle is £1,410.
Case study 3: London
The Transport Operational Command Unit is a partnership between Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police. Revenue Protection Inspectors board buses to inspect tickets. If a passenger fails to produce a ticket and refuses to give their name and address, the police are called and the passenger is taken to a police station for fingerprinting and searching. In the course of 7.5 million passenger checks in 2003/04, over 13,500 penalty fares and 35,000 notices for prosecution were issued (including for theft, deception, handling stolen goods, disorderly behaviour, and drug offences).
More conclusions on good practice examples are given in the full report.
Effects tackling bus crime had on reducing other crimes
The main findings from this analysis were:
There was a reduction in all recorded crime in the action area in which Operation Bream took place. However, it was not statistically significant for the whole of Merseyside.
For all crime types (except for theft of vehicle and burglary non-dwelling), reductions were observed.
Reductions in the action area that were statistically significant were assault and theft from vehicle.
There were no significant changes to the levels of crime in the areas surrounding the action area, and this suggests that displacement of crime did not occur during the operation.
After the termination of the scheme levels of crime returned to their pre-operation levels.
The crime reductive effects of the scheme were observed in a zone that extended up to 400m from the bus route (crime data was collected up to 500m from the route).
Establishing the links
Recording bus related crime
Comprehensive and accurate data is a vital in identifying the relationship between bus-related crime and other crime, and measuring the impact of preventive measures.
For the purposes of this study, 'bus-related crime' was taken to include:
The 'walking' environment (walking from destination point to a bus stop, transferring between bus stops, or walking from bus stop to arrival point)
The 'waiting' environment (waiting at a bus stop)
The 'on-bus' environment (travelling on a bus itself)
To gain accurate information bus passengers and staff need to be encouraged to report all offences and should be kept informed of any action taken as a result.
Problems recording bus related crime
For Passenger Transport Executives (PTE's):
Dedicated staff are needed for the task of collecting, inputting and analysing data on bus-related incidents in order to ensure that operators complete and return incident-reporting forms correctly.
It is difficult to pinpoint the precise location of a crime if it takes place on a moving bus.
Crimes such as graffiti or a slashed seat may not be discovered until later in the day, and so it is not possible to define where or when they happened.
For the police:
'Bus crime' is not a crime type for police recording purposes and this may have important repercussions for analysis.
There is a difference between police recorded crime data and using logs of command and control incidents. The latter of these are not crimes per se but represent calls made by the public for police assistance.
Recorded crime data is susceptible to the problems of under-reporting of crime. The level of under-reporting varies by crime type.
Problems found with the geo-referencing of police data (e.g. the precise location of the incident is not known, so crimes may be recorded in areas or grids).
Analysing bus-related crime
If the location of a bus route can be plotted, together with the bus-related crime that occurred along that route and other crimes in the surrounding area, then a number of analytical techniques can be employed to analyse the relationship between these crimes.
Buffer analysis - can be used to examine the relationship between bus-related crime and other crimes in the area immediately surrounding the bus routes (for example, within 50 metres of the route), and then at distances further away from the bus route (up to a reasonable distance e.g. 400 metres).
User or predefined analysis - is useful to identify areas to target future preventive measures based on operational units (such as police beats).
Non-boundary defined analysis is an alternative technique to examine the distribution of crimes. It presents a more realistic representation of crime as it examines the patterns of crime without consideration to boundaries such as police beat areas. Buses of course will naturally pass through different police beats.
Last update: Monday, September 11, 2006