Is the policing prioritisation of and response to crime equitable? An examination of frontline policing deployment to incidents of violence-against-the-person

Bannister, Jon, Adepeju, Monsuru ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9006-4934 and Ellison, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9019-6582 (2023) Is the policing prioritisation of and response to crime equitable? An examination of frontline policing deployment to incidents of violence-against-the-person. In: Handbook of Crime and Inequality. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 9781800883598 (In Press)

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Abstract

There are stark spatial and temporal inequalities in the exposure to crime. Crime concentrates in particular neighbourhoods of cities and at certain times of the day. The novel contribution of this chapter rests in its attention to what happens next. In the context of constrained resource, the deployment of police officers to incidents of crime requires being prioritised based on the threat, harm and risk that they pose to the public. Responding equitably, by deploying police officers to crimes of a comparable severity in a consistent manner, is vital to the public’s confidence in and the effectiveness of policing. The chapter examines the equity of the policing prioritisation of, and response times achieved to, incidents of violence-against-the-person. It assesses the extent to which both prioritisation and response are associated with the characteristics of the neighbourhoods and the time of day in which incidents occur and / or related to the volume of the demand placed upon the police for service and the availability of deployable resource. It achieves this by integrating calls-for-service (incident) and deployment data from a large metropolitan police force with a range of place-based variables known to be associated with the incidence of crime, and through the application of a Logit Regression model. The research finds that the prioritisation of and response time achieved to incidents of violence-against-the-person depend upon where and when the call-for-service is made. Inequalities in the exposure to crime are found to be overlain by inequalities in the policing response to crime. The chapter concludes by outlining a future research agenda as well as identifying a set of implications for policing.