Abstract
The objectives of this chapter are to understand the ways in which patrol resources and incident solvability affect arrest at or near the scene of domestic burglaries. It is based on an individual data sample of in-progress burglaries during a six-month period in a large UK police force’s jurisdiction . Catching burglars red-handed involves three patrols being close to and available to respond to burglaries. This depends on daily fluctuations in levels of incident demand, particularly those requiring an immediate response, relative to the numbers of patrols deployed per unit area. Patrol supply per unit area might be improved by deploying more officers in single-crewed units. Responses by additional patrols situated close to targets markedly increase the odds of arrests, but only at more solvable incidents. The solvability factors for in-progress residential burglaries are who made the alert, the burglary stage at which the burglar was seen or heard, the presence of daylight or darkness, and the number of suspects. Dog vans should be used as much for solvable daylight cases as for less solvable night-time ones. The study underlines the importance of matching patrol resources to the most solvable cases to maximise detections.
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Notes
- 1.
Sheldon, Birmingham, UK, switched to single-crewed deployment in the late 1990s; on- and near-scene arrests doubled.
- 2.
There were 32 operational command units in this large urban police force, whose jurisdiction had a population of 3 million.
- 3.
Findings from Blake and Coupe (2001) were used as the basis for a recommendation to deploy officers as single-crewed patrol units in the Police Reform Act 2002. [Editorial note: did you mean the Police Reform Act 2002 (Commencement No. 8) Order 2004? See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/913/contents/made]
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Coupe, R.T. (2019). The Organisation and Deployment of Patrol Resources: Cost-Effective On-Scene Arrest at Burglaries. In: Coupe, R., Ariel, B., Mueller-Johnson, K. (eds) Crime Solvability Factors. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17160-5_17
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