Page 20 - 1Proactive Policing

Pro-Active Policing

A reassurance function for policing was first considered by American psychologist Charles Bahn
(1974: 338) as ―feelings of safety that a citizen experiences when he knows that a police officer or

patrol car is nearby.‖ This idea was taken forward in Britain by Martin Innes and colleagues in the
early 2000s through the development of a signal crimes perspective. At this time, British policing
implemented a National Reassurance Policing Program (NRPP) where local policing priorities

were decided through consultation with local communities. The impact of reassurance policing
has since spread and the approach has also been considered in Australia, Belgium, the

Netherlands, and Sweden.

Reassurance policing‘ was developed in Surrey initially, to address the gap between the public

perception of rising crime and the falling crime rate. The idea grew from a paper written on behalf
of the Association of Chief Police Officers – Civility First – which first identified a ‗reassurance

gap‘ between the delivery of crime reduction and the perception of crime increasing on the part of
the majority of the public. The policing approach then developed through collaborative work
between Surrey Police and the University of Surrey, drawing on the ‗signal crimes‘ perspective

developed by Martin Innes. This perspective held that some crimes and disorders were more
important to individual members of the public than others and would act as signals which the
police needed to target if they were to reduce feelings of risk and increase perceptions of safety.

The NRPP grew out of trials of An evaluation of the impact of the National Reassurance Policing
Program x ‗reassurance policing‘ in Surrey Police and the Metropolitan Police Service, led by the
Chief Constable of Surrey, Denis O‘Connor and Assistant Commissioner Tim Godwin.

Crime and Anti-Social Behavior:

 Across the sites, there was a positive program effect on self-reported victimization,
according to the survey. The decrease in victimization was five percentage points greater

for respondents in the trial sites compared to the control sites.
 Two of the six sites had significantly greater reductions in total recorded crime than their

control sites, while three sites saw reductions in individual crime types.
 Across the pair matched sites, there was a positive program effect on perceptions of five
of the eight types of anti-social behavior measured in the survey. Three of the six

individual sites showed reductions compared to controls.

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