The American Society of Criminology conference is next week and this is your annual reminder that most of the presentations will likely be 💩 Here are some ways to be less 💩 www.jerryratcliffe.net/post/i-want-...

This is a slide I use quite a lot when doing POP training for police. Even when an agency or individual wants to follow SARA properly, there are so many institutional pressures on them to skip steps.

Are you a PhD student working on a criminological topic (broadly construed)? If so, then please consider applying to the LSE's inaugural criminology PhD Symposium: www.lse.ac.uk/social-polic...

The fact that one of the two men arrested has now been cleared and released is a pretty huge "STOP" sign to everyone who's spent the last 24 hours rushing to interpret the attack. Facts, like trains, are sometimes slower to arrive than we'd like. But you just have to wait for them.

‘The CBI and Universities UK… said universities already subsidised research by £5.4 billion a year, largely through international student income. A levy would "accelerate contraction" in research and innovation, they warned.’ www.thetimes.com/article/95f2...

Take it from me, a real life police officer, NO ONE is giving out free drugs or fentanyl on Halloween That's not a thing. As a safety precaution, you should still check your kids candy. Not because of drugs but for gross candies like circus peanuts, necco wafers, and licorice.

Car drivers (🇦🇺) say they feel fixed speed cameras are more effective at deterring speeding, but that speed enforcement by officers on patrol has higher legitimacy. Note, though, the way participants were recruited may have biased the results.

OTD, when ARC Discovery outcomes are released, this may be appropriate. Unfortunately. #highered #resdev #academicsky #resdevmemes

Interesting podcast episode featuring @cassiarowland.bsky.social and @dannyshaw.bsky.social discussing the many current challenges facing the government over policing and the rest of the justice system. 

Today I was required to spend 45 minutes doing a formal risk assessment so I can get permission for students to sit on chairs in a room to watch a 20-minute presentation. Just in case anyone is wondering why it seems like academics can never get anything done.

One wonderful legal fact is that the provision effectively giving licence to agent to commit crimes abroad is... ...section 007 of the Intelligence Services Act 1994. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/1...

Very good 😂. This describes a lot of what is going on accurately. Credit: @integralanswers.bsky.social

I imagine quite a few chief constables will be wondering about the answer to this question, too. Especially given it’s their officers who are having to deal with the fallout from the government position in both cases.

🚨 Help, please! Next week I’m running a session for Year 1 students on using AI at uni. What specific points would you make if you were running it? (For anyone about to reply “I’d tell them not to use AI”,  please know I don’t think that’s a useful message for them.)

🚨 Help, please! Next week I’m running a session for Year 1 students on using AI at uni. What specific points would you make if you were running it? (For anyone about to reply “I’d tell them not to use AI”,  please know I don’t think that’s a useful message for them.)

Replacing older street lights (🇺🇸) with LED lights (giving more even lighting with fewer dark spots) led to a decrease in outdoor night-time crimes while indoor crimes stayed the same.

Research Associate – Women’s Road Safety in Greater Manchester 0.6 FTE for 12 months To work with my colleagues Caroline Miles and Rose Broad www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Police de-escalation training improved officers’ communication skills during incidents, but didn’t lead to any drop in use of force. (It takes two to tango: some suspects aren’t willing to de-escalate, however professional an officer’s behaviour.)

This seems notable - on current data, the 90 homicides recorded by the Metropolitan Police in the year to August 2025 is the lowest 12-month total since the monthly data started in 2003. #crimestats

Reviews of studies on the drop in youth offending finds consistent decreases across many countries ended around 2015, and the drop is best explained by changes in how young people spend free time and decreases in alcohol consumption. doi.org/10.1086/737409

“Results trended towards significance”

Great afternoon talking with Durham Constabulary leaders about how to make police problem solving really work. If you’d like me to come and talk about making problem-oriented policing effective and sustainable, I don’t charge for talks to police forces. So please get in touch!

Fake shops set up by police in London to catch thieves selling stolen goods didn’t lead to any sustained reductions in theft offences, despite many arrests. ⚠️ This sort of sting also carries a substantial risk of backfiring by incentivising theft.

Today I’m speaking at an event for police leaders in Durham, held at a conference venue. I knew I was in the right place when I pulled into the car park and every single car had been backed into its space.

My job would be so much easier if correlation was causation😔

I've been wondering recently how many racist police officers were racist when they joined, and whether part of the issue is logical fallacies arising from having a lot of contact with very narrow sections of society in places with which they may not otherwise be familiar.

Great podcast discussion between @jeffasher.bsky.social and Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball, The Big Short, etc.) about the difficulty of communicating crime patterns to the public. (never heard of Michael Lewis? Read his Wikipedia entry before listening)

Crime scripts are widely used to work out where best to intervene to stop crime, but this article uses several case studies to illustrate how scripts can also be used in investigations of serious crimes when there are competing theories of the crime.

A brief (and not necessarily well thought out) argument from me on why trying to ban students from using AI when writing essays is like abstinence-only sex education, and will fail for the same reasons. I’d be interested in others’ thoughts on this, especially constructive (🙏) disagreements.

If you teach media and crime, this looks like it would be a very useful introductory reading:

Interesting blog post arguing that as well as researching the reasons police sometimes use excessive force, it’s also important to understand the harms caused by police *not* using force when it is necessary to do so.

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

So had to contact my local police Safer Neighbourhood Team this week, and had *A Bad Time*, so built a thing: Your Police Events, a service that automatically updates your calendar with events from your local policing team. Would welcome some testers! yourpolice.events

Do you trust the police? Great deal / fair amount: 55% Not very much / not at all: 42% yougov.co.uk/topics/polit...

Hello! ENOC is on BlueSky now. We are a working group of the @esc-eurocrim.bsky.social dedicated to the promotion, training, application and rewarding of open research in criminology. Check out our website for more: esc-enoc.github.io

@opencriminology.bsky.social 👋

Foreign nationals are underrepresented as a proportion of prisoners jailed in England and Wales when compared with rates of incarceration among British citizens of similar age, an analysis of government data has found

Nice blog post on how private-sector security can benefit from working with academic researchers. Includes recommendations on bridging the gap between 🎓 and 💼. TL;DR: the benefits of evidence-based policing apply to private-sector security companies, too.

Yes! If we want people to listen to science, then don’t put it all behind a bloody paywall.

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

One of the benefits of good intelligence/crime analysis is that it can stop police wasting scarce resources on wild goose chases. This analysis of a supposed serial killer (🇺🇸) is a good example (the victims almost certainly drowned accidentally):

Yep I’ve changed my mind too. Was very against ID “cards” but now see many advantages. It may help with illegal immigration but there are many reasons why you need to prove ID it will be a great facilitator. We must consider the digitally disadvantaged though!

Police officers (🇺🇸) generally accepted their agency using an AI tool to give them automated feedback on their behaviour during interactions with the public, and became less concerned (but not positive) after they’d used the system for a few months.

statistic of the day

Very useful systematic review by my UCL colleagues of all the crimes that can be facilitated by internet-of-things devices. Just in case you were in need of some nightmare food.

One way X is skewing politics is that most people's concern about crime is about falling detection rates, online fraud, antisocial behaviour, the actual crime problems we really have. Yet a lot of coverage talks as if the average person's concerns about crime are some mad special pleading.

Global review of research from 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇦🇺🇬🇧🇪🇺 finds almost all studies show no difference between the rates at which immigrants and local people commit crime, with only a few studies from 🇩🇪/🇮🇹 finding higher immigrant offending.

Two weeks after seeing last year’s graduates collect their degrees, tomorrow we start it all again with Welcome Week for our new undergraduates. Going to uni is a daunting experience for many students, so we’ll be doing lots of work this week to help them get up to speed before teaching starts!

This seems like a nightmare for police and prosecutors: It’s not conspiracy to murder because there’s no agreement with another person. It’s not attempted murder because the offender hasn’t moved beyond planning/preparation. It’s not terrorism because there’s no ideological motive. 😟