Hampshire police gets share of £4.12m to tackle violent crime

The cash will help deploy officers to hotspot policing, pay for environmental changes such as CCTV cameras and cutting back foliage, and help with outreach schemes, the Home Office has said.

The county's force is one of 18 across the country to be given part of the pot, which includes the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester Police, and Essex Police.

It has not yet been revealed how much funding Hampshire will get.

It comes as Essex's policing force found that putting officers on 15-minute-long uniformed patrols in crime hotspots, at targeted times, helped cut violent crime.

The force said officers targeted 20 hotspots, each of 150 metres by 150 metres, with short, high-visibility patrols during a pilot last year.

The tactic resulted in a 73.5% drop in violent crime and 31.9% fall in street crime on days when patrols visited, compared with days they did not.

Policing Minister Kit Malthouse said: “One of the chief missions I’ve been set by the Prime Minister is to get violence down and particularly violence in the public realm.

“This kind of data-driven scientific hotspot policing is showing fantastic results in dealing with that problem so we’re investing in it across 18 areas of the country that are most plagued by this kind of violence and hopefully we’ll see significant falls over the months to come.

“Here in Essex, they’re proving that this smart approach to hotspot policing, done consistently, can have a massive impact, but we want to see that across the rest of the country.”

He said the extra funding is from £28 million won in the spending review last year to combat violence.

Mr Malthouse said the drive to recruit 20,000 extra police officers by 2023 is “ahead of schedule”.

“We’re just touching 10,000 police officers, almost halfway, about six to eight months ahead of where we should be, which is great news,” he said.

“We’ve got a lot more to go but the pipeline of applicants is looking really strong.”