POLICE spent more than 4,000 extra hours patrolling crime hotspots in Avon & Somerset, making 62 arrests and seizing nine weapons in the last six months, the force’s top officer said.

Chief Constable Sarah Crew said officers and PCSOs worked overtime to carry out the additional patrols, paid for by government funding, which also resulted in 68 orders associated with antisocial behaviour.

Speaking during police and crime commissioner Clare Moody’s monthly police question time, the chief constable said: “We’ve been doing hotspot patrols for serious violence for three years.

“We’ve had extra funding for that and we’ve also had extra funding to target antisocial behaviour.

“It’s important to give a sense of why this is important.

“Lots of academic research from across the world shows that short, intensive, hotpot, highly visible patrols, engaging with people, maybe just in a very small area where our analysis says we are going make the most difference, can have a huge impact.

“It certainly does more than displace crime, it actually reduces crime, but not just at the time they are there but in the hours and days that follow.

“A worldwide research programme looked at this and they said that across 56 hotspot policing programmes from across the world, there was a 90 per cent reduction in violent crime, 16 per cent reduction in property crime and 20 per cent reduction in disorder and drug crime.

“It’s really significant, so it’s great that we’ve got the ability to do it.

“We are doing it in overtime so people can be really sure that it is over and above our normal service delivery.”

She said there were 37 anti-social behaviour hotspots and 34 serious violence hotspots across the Avon & Somerset Police area.

Chief Constable Crew said: “We don’t normally advertise where those locations are because we don’t want to put any stigma on those places.

“But if I look at our stats from the year to date from the end of quarter two, we spent 4,253 hours within our hotspot locations, 62 arrests have followed from that, nine weapons have been recovered, we’ve done 34 stop and searches.

“What’s important with stop and searches is not the number we do, it’s how appropriate and the outcome of those stop and searches, so we’ve seen a much higher positive outcome rate than we do of our force average of stop and searches – 60 per cent have had a positive outcome.”