Greater Manchester Police are soon to implement a Cambridge University initiative designed to reduce crime in cities by placing officers in ‘hotspots’ rather than on the beat.

The 12-month trial, led by Professor Lawrence Sherman and his team at the University of Cambridge’s Criminology Faculty, will provide invaluable results into the effectiveness of policing, targeted at a small number of high-crime areas.

Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, said, "We already know that a small number of areas account for a disproportionately high proportion of crime in Greater Manchester."

On the topic of these “high-violence micro-locations” in Manchester, Sherman told Varsity: “On one block of Canal Street [in Manchester], there were over 700 incidents of crime and disorder reported by citizens in just one year.”

Senior officers from Greater Manchester Police will meet with Sherman at the end of this week to confirm arrangements in which it is likely that a total of 200 hotspots will be chosen and divided into two groups. One group will be policed as usual but, in the other, police officers will be stationed within 100ft of crime hotspots for up to 12.5 minutes during times of high crime. Researchers will then compare reported crimes within both groups over the course of the year.

Despite concerns that the new ‘hotspot’ system will only displace criminals rather than deter them, Sherman remains positive, stating, “We believe that once we start targeting these pressure points, crime will fall significantly.”

Though new to the UK, the experiment was implemented by Sherman in Minneapolis in the late 1980s, after statistics from 1987 showed that 50% of calls to police in the city were connected to only 3% of street addresses. Similar schemes have cut crimes such as murder, theft, and assault by two-thirds at hotspots in parts of the United States.

Attempting to transfer such successes to the UK has proved challenging for Sherman’s team owing to different layout of streets. However, his most pressing concern has been with the practicalities of rolling out the scheme in an economically sustainable way.

According to him, “the key question for policing remains how to get the most crime prevention out of the patrol budget.” If the research does show a fall in reported crimes, Sherman hopes that cities across the UK and Europe will “replicate the experiment”.