Abstract
Objectives: This study assesses the effectiveness of hotspots policing in a novel context – moving hotspots. We examine the impact of preventative police presence on high-crime-harm bus routes, known as ‘Hot Bus Corridors’.Methods: A pretest-post-test parallel groups randomised controlled trial (RCT) was conducted in London, UK, involving 556 ‘Hot Bus Corridors’ that were randomly assigned to receive either targeted visibility presence on buses or standard police presence, which served as the control group. Generalised linear models were used to estimate the treatment effect on crime levels, measured in terms of both crime counts and the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CCHI).Results: We observed a significant reduction in both crime counts and crime harm in the treatment bus corridors compared to the control corridors, with a more pronounced reduction during morning hours.Conclusion: This study extends the applicability of hotspots policing to mobile environments, demonstrating its potential to enhance public safety. High-visibility police patrols in moving hotspots can increase deterrence and, consequently, effectively reduce crime within the public transportation network.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Police Quarterly |
| DOIs | |
| State | Accepted/In press - 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Keywords
- crime count
- crime harm
- high-visibility police patrols
- hot bus corridors
- hotspots policing
- moving hotspots
- randomised controlled trial