Back to SearchOur partners at the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-based Policing (CCEBP) have produced new research which identifies a way of pin-pointing violent crime with a lot more data than has been shown as unused so far.
The majority of violent incidents recorded by ambulance and emergency services are not reported to the police. As this article, which examined data from West Midlands, U.K., reveals, adding medical data could increase the number of identified violent offences by 15 to 20% to the totals recorded by police alone.
The study compared all incidents in the ambulance and emergency service data sets to corresponding locations and times in incidents recorded in police data sets. About 90% of cases in the medical data sets could not be matched to police cases.
CCEBP concluded that tracking ambulance data, which is collected automatically and includes location data for each call, could not only identify substantially more serious violent crimes but also increase the targeting of police and public health resources to prevent harm against victims at places and by offenders at highest risk of serious violence.
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