i have a problem with english sentence

Question

hi friends. im in doubt of understanding this sentence which i bold it...i appreciate any help:

‘In the olden days,’ Steyve Colgan, a retired Metropolitan Police officer, told me, ‘[patrols] were just geographic, you got the map, cut it up into chunks, and divvyed it up. You’re on that beat. As simple as that.’ Problem was, as one UK study calculated, a police officer patrolling their randomly assigned beat on foot " could expect to come within a hundred yards of a burglary just once in every eight years."

Answer 1

The article is saying that if police officers only patrol by foot, they are not likely to come across a lot of crimes. Because it takes longer to cover an area when walking, it would be unlikely that they would be in the right spot to catch a robbery.

Answer 2

The writer is saying, in effect: "In this situation, each officer on patrol was within a hundred yards of a burglary just once in every eight years (on average)."

The use of "could expect" may be what's confusing, and it's isn't strictly necessary; it changes the meaning, subtly, to something like "Imagine a person who has just joined the police force in this situation, and who is wondering about the probability of discovering a burglary in progress. If that person dug into the statistics, they would discover that the probability of them being within ..."

- Richard