This whole "Crime as a Service" trend is really under-covered – it's widespread across Europe. Enemy intelligence agencies don't need secret agents or embedded saboteurs any more, they just need to find some idiot 16 year olds on a Discord who'll firebomb an ambulance station for pocket money

come work with us! A fantastic project (Cargo Crime) with a specific focus on the shadow fleet at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law. You will be working closely with @kjerstilohne.bsky.social and me for this PhD: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Very interesting post about how generative AI is likely to change how we do academic research. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it certainly poses questions academics can’t meaningfully just wave away by saying “AI is bad” or similar.

🤦‍♂️

"Perhaps it’d be a good thing if AI finally pushes us to move on from a system where universities spend taxpayer money to pay commercial publishers to very slowly produce paywalled PDFs with outdated results of publicly funded research." alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/academics-...

Some good news: annual theft person offences in Westminster, the national epicentre for those crimes, have fallen by 1/3.

The MoJ has today published the costs per prison place and per prisoner The cost per prison place was £39,454 in 2024/25 up 6.3% on the year before or just 2.2% if you factor in inflation. Costs per prisoner £37,845 up 8% or 3.8% allowing for inflation

On the way to Oxford for the first event on decarceration as part of our Oxford Martin School project. Looking at alternatives to custody and ways to improve service delivery - please send ideas / papers etc. (Have a bunch of systematic reviews but interested in specific ideas too)

Police (🇺🇸) changed tactics so that they pursued many more vehicles that failed to stop for police. This led to a substantial increase in pursuits that ended in crashes – and to several deaths – but had no effect on violent crime. www.crimrxiv.com/pub/xm2wyat5

There are often stories of UK universities treating their staff badly (in some cases apparently vindictively so), so it's good to see @ucl.ac.uk introducing better paid parental leave across different circumstances.

All societal groups (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) are victims less often due to the global crime drop. But the drop wasn't equal across groups, so people who are not White, are disabled or who are in poverty are now more likely to be victims, **relative to the rest of society**. doi.org/10.1177/1477...

Use CrimRxiv. Join CrimConsortium http://dlvr.it/TRZFSl

Working hypothesis: If you're doing research and don't occasionally have a small existential crisis, either you've been blessed to work in an exceptional field (do tell which one it is!), or maybe you're being a bit naive.

📍 Great Longstone

Reminder! We are seeking discussants for a roundtable on repeatability of criminological research at #eurocrim2026 @esc-eurocrim.bsky.social Inform us before 20 March if you are interested @asiermoneva.com @alextrinidad.eurosky.social @isabellevdv.bsky.social

I thought this was interesting. While stop and search 'criminality detected' rates vary between forces, at force level those rates vary little by subject ethnicity, especially in the large metropolitan forces. In other words, the bar for reasonable suspicion is applied quite consistently.

This Wednesday 2-3.30pm GMT @crimsochull.bsky.social: Jimmy Paul (Head of Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit) discussing 20 yrs of violence reduction in Scotland and the challenges of sustained violence reduction. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-scotti...

If the title of this book is to be believed, forensics must be easier to learn than I’d thought.

Yet another criminology article with hallucinated references published in an @elsevierconnect.bsky.social journal. I reported it over a month ago to the journal, but the paper is still online and not retracted www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Your regular reminder that the UK is in fact a high trust society and anyone who implies it isn’t is either selling you a pup or has bought one.

Please join us for an exciting event tomorrow on LSE's campus on Police & People in London!

Well this looks like a pretty big editorial failure: a book review in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education retracted because it “contains such extensive inaccuracies that it neither describes nor evaluates the book it claims to review”. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

There are still places left for the upcoming LSE/UCL event 'Police and People in London - What's changed in 40 years'. Afternoon of the 6th March at LSE. Come along - it'll be fun! www.lse.ac.uk/social-polic...

Use CrimRxiv. Join CrimConsortium http://dlvr.it/TR2QFp

❗ Early career researcher safety & wellbeing workshop: next week❗ Come along on 25th Feb to hear from our expert speakers (Allysa Czerwinsky, @ashkingdon.bsky.social, and Antonia Vaughan) and to share your own experiences and advice for other ECRs. events.teams.microsoft.com/event/0fdd8f...

Today mark‘s the 200th anniversary of the founding of UCL, London’s first university. Apparently, right from the start UCL was looked down on by some for being too egalitarian, because we admitted (male) students regardless of religion or background!

One absurdity of the 43-force police structure: the investigation of Mandelson is done by the Met because he was probably in London when he emailed Epstein, while the investigation of Andrew is by Thames Valley because he was in probably in Berks when he did the same. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Very interesting blog post on how the lack of a coherent approach to the police workforce is hurting police productivity (with some especially jaw-dropping numbers on the financial cost of police disciplinary investigations very-often being far too slow). leapwiseadvisory.com/current-poli...

One advantage of the wet weather: waterfalls currently look amazing! 📍@nationaltrust.org.uk Aira Force

If you can spare 2 minutes for a survey on street lighting and perceptions of safety, I have a student who would be very grateful! 👍 qualtrics.ucl.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_...

If you can spare 2 minutes for a survey on street lighting and perceptions of safety, I have a student who would be very grateful! 👍 qualtrics.ucl.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_...

Spring!

Homicide is often made more likely by 'enhancers' such as drugs, alcohol, mental health or the involvement of street gangs. This thread summarises what we know about factors that make homicide more likely. 🧵

The most-common victim of homicide a young man killed during a brawl. But what about child homicide, elder abuse and domestic abuse? This thread summarises what we know about homicide vulnerability for those specific groups in society. 🧵

Law is not magic, and prohibitions are not spells. All a prohibition does is to change the legal and other consequences when a prohibited thing happens. Some prohibitions make sense, others make no sense at all.

Just bizarre to me that there is such a large market for "AI will go away on its own" at this stage. And that so few people who serve that market seem to have updated their beliefs at all in the past year, even as key tasks like coding have already started to change beyond recognition.

The weirdest conspiracy theory of all is that 15 minute city thing. Why would anyone not want 15 minute cities? I mean you can still live in the countryside if you want but all villages, towns and cities should have amenities within 15 mins.

Are any forces doing this? It sounds like a useful bit of strategic analysis.

Data sciencey people — if you haven’t tried Positron, I highly, highly recommend giving it a whirl.

A good example of how many public debates about violence don’t match reality: Women in England and Wales are more than 10 times more likely to be killed in a dwelling by a partner/relative/friend than outside the home by a stranger.

Homicide (like all types of crime) is heavily concentrated in a small number of places – half of all homicides in England and Wales happen in six police-force areas. But where are different types of homicide most concentrated? 🧵

England and Wales has a much lower firearms homicide rate than in most large European countries, Australia and Canada. And obviously a vastly lower rate of firearms homicide than in the US. (Also: no, we don’t have more knife homicides than they do, either.)

People living in England and Wales are much less likely to be victims of theft than in the 1990s— Several data sources show that theft in England and Wales has declined in recent decades. One of those is police records — but they only capture reported crimes, and many people don’t report thefts.

An excellent article pointing out some of the issues with the government’s (generally good) police reforms. For me, most important point: the reforms will likely only work for local communities if they manage to combine strong local operational independence with greater back office centralisation.

Every year about 600 people are killed in homicides in England and Wales. But how are people killed, and how does it vary for victims in different groups? This thread summarises what we know about how often different methods are used in homicides. 🧵

Homicide offenders are almost always men. But homicide offending is concentrated in other ways, too: while unemployed White men aged 20–49 make up less than 1% of the population but more than a quarter of all homicide offenders.

Each year about 730 people are charged with a homicide offence in England and Wales. But who are they? This thread summarises what we know about who commits homicides and in what circumstances. 🧵

Black teenage boys are 13 times more likely to be killed in a homicide in England and Wales than White boys of the same age.

Each week, about 12 people are killed in homicides in England and Wales. But who is most likely to be killed? This thread summarises what we know about who is most likely to be a victim of homicide. 🧵

The homicide rate in England and Wales is about one fifth of the global average, and about one third of the average for high-income countries. The US homicide rate is six times higher than ours.