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Capacity and demand management
Capacity and demand management

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1 Criminological perspectives of demand

One way of understanding demand for much policing activity comes through criminology – the scientific study of crime. At the simplest level, it is useful to know what types of crime occur and how frequently they are committed. For example, crime statistics in England and Wales show the following most commonly reported crimes:

Described image
Figure 1 TCSEW estimated 3.1m theft offences in the last 12 months. (England and Wales, based on interviews conducted between May and December 2020.)
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The diagram is a bar chart that shows the frequency of crimes reported in a survey. The crimes are listed from left to right in decreasing order of frequency starting with fraud as the most common offence, with over 4 million recorded. The other crimes in order are theft, computer misuse, violence, criminal damage and robbery.

Figure 1 TCSEW estimated 3.1m theft offences in the last 12 months. (England and Wales, based on interviews conducted between May and ...

Activity 1 Crime statistics

Timing: Allow approximately 5 minutes

How do these crime statistics help plan policing capacity? What are their limits of how they help?

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Discussion

The crime statistics can act as a guide to what crimes police deal with and the skill sets needed within forces to deal with those crimes. The statistics are also useful when observed over time as trends in crime types can be observed. Planning can then address how to reduce or prevent these crimes or look at increasing particular skill sets.

There are a number of limitations. First the statistics themselves can only be a guide as much crime is unreported. Secondly, up to 80% of police work is not crime-related (Boulton, L. et al., 2017) so when we look at decisions such as numbers of police needed we are missing most of the workload. Thirdly, it does not usually tell us when or where officers are needed.

The next section looks at an alternative way of understanding patterns in crime.