Perhaps we could swap officers between rural and urban areas and capture the issues leading to worse outcomes and solutions for them. I suspect budgets are the main issue, but possibly not the only issue.
One reason is less police as the force uses them in the crime focused areas. As leader of a rural council we knew there were only 6 police on duty across 50,000 people and they would all be in the military town on a Friday and Saturday night.
Could it be that most crime is committed by a small number of people, and as there is more opportunity for crime in a large area, there are necessarily more crimes to be investigated, leading or collapsing into a string of convictions? IOW, he gets caught on the tenth burglary which closes the investigation on the prior 9 with a similar MO? Even a small effect here could have a large impact on trends.
One thing that might be worth looking at it the composition of the criminals. There are career criminals committing crimes locally. There are career criminals who travel out of town to commit crimes there. And there are opportunistic crimes ... people who for some reason behave badly but aren't in the habit of doing so. People who commit crimes locally are easier to catch. There is a much greater chance that the people you are questioning "do you recognise this man? ..." do recognise the person. In Sweden, where I live, a good deal of rural crime happens when people break into people's vacation houses in the off season. The people doing this are local youths, looking for alcohol, and professional burglars. Unless the youths are discovered being drunk and stupid shortly after they commit their crime, or they brag about it, these criminals are almost never caught. The insurance company needs a police report but by the time the crime is reported it is months old, and nobody knows when it happened for sure. The other great way to get such crimes solved is to catch a criminal on some other job and get led to a location where stolen goods are being kept and identify something there from the vacation house burglary. In that case the crime is solved, but not by investigating _that_ crime. It would be good to have statistics on how often that happens. If the best places to catch thieves are at places where they store the stolen goods, then spending money getting RFID tags put on items that thieves target may improve the catch-rate. It could already be happening, with tagged bicycles which are more common in town being the source of many arrests. But this is just speculation ... see if you can get real data.
Could you explain this more: “The per capita allocation of our proposed 10,000 extra police would particularly help less urban areas - because it would level up rural forces proportionately more and reduce those gaps in the map above.”
One likely explanation for the gap is that police are judged at least partly on clear-up rates. Any entrepreneur goes where the best market is; likewise the most ambitious police leaders target the areas with the richest pickings.
Even if rural forces got proportionally more officers, it’s quite possible the extra resource would be deployed to the most urban places within that force area, repeating the problem.
Perhaps we could swap officers between rural and urban areas and capture the issues leading to worse outcomes and solutions for them. I suspect budgets are the main issue, but possibly not the only issue.
One reason is less police as the force uses them in the crime focused areas. As leader of a rural council we knew there were only 6 police on duty across 50,000 people and they would all be in the military town on a Friday and Saturday night.
Could it be that most crime is committed by a small number of people, and as there is more opportunity for crime in a large area, there are necessarily more crimes to be investigated, leading or collapsing into a string of convictions? IOW, he gets caught on the tenth burglary which closes the investigation on the prior 9 with a similar MO? Even a small effect here could have a large impact on trends.
One thing that might be worth looking at it the composition of the criminals. There are career criminals committing crimes locally. There are career criminals who travel out of town to commit crimes there. And there are opportunistic crimes ... people who for some reason behave badly but aren't in the habit of doing so. People who commit crimes locally are easier to catch. There is a much greater chance that the people you are questioning "do you recognise this man? ..." do recognise the person. In Sweden, where I live, a good deal of rural crime happens when people break into people's vacation houses in the off season. The people doing this are local youths, looking for alcohol, and professional burglars. Unless the youths are discovered being drunk and stupid shortly after they commit their crime, or they brag about it, these criminals are almost never caught. The insurance company needs a police report but by the time the crime is reported it is months old, and nobody knows when it happened for sure. The other great way to get such crimes solved is to catch a criminal on some other job and get led to a location where stolen goods are being kept and identify something there from the vacation house burglary. In that case the crime is solved, but not by investigating _that_ crime. It would be good to have statistics on how often that happens. If the best places to catch thieves are at places where they store the stolen goods, then spending money getting RFID tags put on items that thieves target may improve the catch-rate. It could already be happening, with tagged bicycles which are more common in town being the source of many arrests. But this is just speculation ... see if you can get real data.
A good thought - though as the decomposition chart above shows, differences in detection can only explain part of the difference…
Could you explain this more: “The per capita allocation of our proposed 10,000 extra police would particularly help less urban areas - because it would level up rural forces proportionately more and reduce those gaps in the map above.”
One likely explanation for the gap is that police are judged at least partly on clear-up rates. Any entrepreneur goes where the best market is; likewise the most ambitious police leaders target the areas with the richest pickings.
Even if rural forces got proportionally more officers, it’s quite possible the extra resource would be deployed to the most urban places within that force area, repeating the problem.
That is indeed a risk - which will grow if they create regional super forces as planned.
As is with anything provided to rural people, roads, electricity, and the like, who's paying for it?
Generally the people in rural areas and London pay more tax - https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Z0wTK/