Innovative new scheme to tackle anti-social behaviour shows promising results

An innovative pilot scheme to deploy 'Street Outreach' workers in priority areas in Leicester City Centre has seen violent crime and anti-social behaviour reduce by 39% in those areas.

Leicestershire Police is working with local health and social care service provider, Turning Point, to test the concept that non-uniform outreach youth workers can engage, tackle, advise and divert vulnerable young people from anti-social behaviour or committing crime in the city centre.

The street outreach team patrol the priority areas in pairs between 2pm – 8pm on a five-day shift pattern.  They have time to engage with young people in the city; have a meaningful and detailed conversation about their circumstances and refer them on to other services if relevant.

The initial evaluation of the project, which has been carried out by the Cambridge Centre for Evidence Based Policing (CCEBP), has proved so positive that the funding has been extended until March 2025.  The project has been running for two years.

The CCEBP evaluation measured reported crime in the seven hotspot areas when they were patrolling and compared it to days when they weren’t.  They also looked at the number of crimes in the hot spot areas 11 months before the pilot, compared to the 11 months of the pilot. They found that the deployment of the street outreach service significantly reduced the number of crimes and harm caused by crime. There was a reduction in both the frequency and severity of crime; the number of crimes dropped by 39% from 416 to 252 incidents.

Inspector Mark Brennan from the Prevention and Problem Solving Hub said; “We know that policing isn’t the only solution to preventing crime - it needs a partnership approach to tackle the issues that may lead someone to commit crime in the first place.  The demand on police resources means officers don’t always have the time to get to the root causes of a young person’s issues and find a way to resolve them, but a team of specialist youth workers do have the right credibility and contacts to do that, as this pilot has shown. 

“Officers are of course still patrolling the city centre but we’re the first force in the country to work with detached youth workers in this way and have shown that a blended model of patrolling youth workers and police officers can make a difference.  We’re beginning to get interest from other forces about the pilot and the College of Policing has added it to their practice bank.”

The Team Leader for the Violence Intervention Project and Street Outreach Project, Bethany Shakiba, said; “Our Street Outreach workers aim to engage with young people by building a rapport with them and listening to their needs and opinions. We want young people to see our workers as capable guardians in spaces that they enjoy visiting so that they can feel safe, whilst at the same time be able to seek support and share their opinions on what they want from their community.”

The pilot, which started in October 2022, is funded by the Home Office’s Grip fund which is used to provide resources for the purposes of tackling violence in hotspot areas and long-term problem solving for violence prevention.  The funding has been extended to March 2025 and the project has been adopted by the College of Policing’s ‘practice bank’ as an example of an innovative project which could be adopted by other forces using non uniform, street outreach youth workers to conduct hot spot patrols in areas of violent crime to reduce crime harm and serious violent crime in those patrolled hotspots.