Getting on the front foot

From tackling violent crime and drug driving offences, to enhancing the public perception of police, a new evidence-based policing project being trialled by Victoria Police is aiming to combat offending before it happens.

Based on scientific research into the patterns of their behaviours, repeat and violent offenders are being targeted in Operation Capesso.

Launched in January this year, the operation has been designed to capitalise on a slump in the occurrence rate of certain crimes as a result of Melbourne’s coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdowns.

According to the man leading the pilot program and the operation, Superintendent David Cowan, the COVID-19 environment has presented Victoria Police with an unprecedented chance to tackle crime differently.

“During the lockdown period last year, we saw a 19 per cent drop in assaults not related to family violence and a 24 per cent decrease in burglaries,” Supt Cowan said.

“It would be a missed opportunity not to jump on these drops and think about innovative ways we could target violent offenders before the offending picked up again.”

Supt Cowan, who is a member of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Evidence Based Policing, has spent years working on ways to incorporate more data-backed methods in everyday police work and used his wealth of knowledge in the area to develop Operation Capesso.

For the operation, 1000 people who were considered by police to be at a high risk of reoffending were selected. More than 70 per cent of the group had, on average, been involved in four crimes.

“These people have committed two or more violent crimes, such as armed robberies, home invasions and carjackings, in the past three years, which is why we view them to be a chance to re-offend,” Supt Cowan said.

Under the pilot program, police visited the homes of half the group of previous offenders and delivered a letter that had been designed in conjunction with a government behavioural unit.

The other half of the group didn’t receive a visit from police.

“The letter police delivered let the person know they had been identified as being at risk of future offending and even imprisonment. It urged them to use the pandemic as an opportunity to restart and turn away from crime,” Supt Cowan said.

Data gathered as part of the operation showed that many of the offenders included in the operation lived near several co-offenders, which, according to Supt Cowan, presented the possibility of a flow-on reduction in offences.

“By physically showing up at the homes of known offenders and making it clear they are known to police, we are creating a visible presence in that neighbourhood.

As a result, the co-offenders who live nearby may be deterred from offending as they don’t want to get themselves on the police radar,” he said.

Data on all offences committed by the 1000 people included in the pilot was collected as part of the operation, with results to be used to to inform future operations.

“We do have to take into account other factors such as the further lockdowns we’ve had throughout the year, which may have contributed to the low number of offences but these results are definitely positive," Supt Cowan said.

“We now have tangible data we can use to analyse the impact of proactive targeting of offenders.

“We can build on this and transfer the findings to other types of crime and other ways of tackling these crimes.

“We are already working with Road Policing Command to build a new operation, which uses the same evidence-based models of Capesso to proactively target people identified to be at a high-risk of drug driving.

“There are so many aspects of policing where we can use evidence-based models to come up with innovative ways of tackling crime before it happens.”

Editorial: Danielle Ford