Home Office funding helps Force target violent crime with extra patrols

2 April 2025

Almost 3,000 extra patrols covering 26 Force hot spots were carried out during the year ending March 2023 through half a million pounds of Home Office funding.

The Force was one of 20 with the highest levels of serious violence given extra money for enhanced hot spot policing through the Grip programme. 

The Government initiative aims to deter serious violence through visible patrols while also adopting problem-oriented policing (POP) to address the root causes of violence.

An initial single-year grant for the hotspot policing ended on 31 March 2022 and a multi-year agreement was then put in place for the next three years.

The Home Office has now published its evaluation of the second year (year ending 31 March 2023) of the programme which showed it funded at least 90,000 patrols across the forces involved with more than 85,000 weapons collected, up 5,000 on the year before.

Violence

But, the results did not suggest the programme had a ‘statistically significant impact’ on the volumes of violence and robbery offences in the hot spots in the year ending March 2023. The previous year (year ending 31 March 2022) saw a seven per cent reduction reported.

The report says this may be because hot spot policing was not implemented as well in the second year or because the effects of such initiatives wane over time. Forces may also have put more effort into POP, researchers suggested. 

But the report did identify an impact on crime outcomes. ‘Positive outcomes’ for violence/robbery (a measure of the number of crimes solved) were up by 8.1 per cent in hot spots on days patrolled compared with days not patrolled. 

The report states: “Similar impacts were observed in other crime baskets, including all crimes minus possession, victim-based crimes and possession, with significant increases of 7.8 per cent, 8.2 per cent and 20 per cent on patrol days, respectively.

“This suggests the programme is resulting in more robbery and violence offences being solved and more weapons and drugs being found in the hot spots.”

Robberies

Simon Riley, chair of Nottinghamshire Police Federation, said: “We welcome any initiative that seeks to tackle the violent crime that is the scourge of our communities.

“While it is a little disappointing that the extra patrols don’t seem to have reduced the volume of violent crime and robberies, the fact that more of these offences are being solved, and more weapons are being taken from our streets is satisfying.

“It will be interesting now to see further analysis on the results of this initiative and to see how we can build on this in the years ahead.”

Twenty forces were involved in the Grip programme during the year ending 31 March 2023, with funding totalling £26,069,999, covering 92,126 extra patrols.

Nottinghamshire Police received £591,998 which funded 2,751 extra patrols initially in 17 hotspots covering 38.64 square kilometres.

Hot spots

According to the evaluation report, officers involved in the Grip programme patrolled about 17 hot spots each quarter but substituted several in and out, so 26 hot spots were patrolled in total.

The hot spots were the standard police beats of varying size but up to several square kilometres with the Force using a mixture of dedicated central teams and over-time to task patrols.

Officers aimed to patrol hot spots three times a week with patrols extending from one to eight hours to ensure good visibility.

The Force also began problem-solving activity in the year ending March 2023. This resulted in some patrol activity, which was captured in data returns and into the main patrol activity for the purposes of the crime-impact estimation.

READ MORE: Report finds police too overworked to investigate crimes properly.