Police (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿) are much more likely to strip search Black and Asian people brought into custody, even after the offence a person is arrested for, whether they use drugs/self harm and how co-operative they were are taken into account.

Lovely example for teaching of how weak statistical designs can produce misleading results, and how stronger designs can fix that.

Gunshot detection technology (🇺🇸) led to a large increase in police workload in responding to calls for shots fired (which tripled, partly due to false-positive alerts from the tech), but led to no change in the likelihood of solving any crimes.

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

❓Gen AI could well annihilate scientific publishing by overwhelming journals with submissions. Many journals are in any case struggling as reviewers get ever harder to find. But I’ve no idea what comes next. How will we publish in future and what should we be doing to prepare?

Banning police officers from lying to juvenile suspects during interviews (🇺🇸) led to no change in the likelihood of crimes being solved. (Lying to any suspects in interviews should be banned anyway, of course!)

Police reports written by officers (🇺🇸) using an AI assistant (Axon Draft One) were rated by experienced supervisors as less accurate in a blind test versus reports written without an AI tool.

Really fascinating and detailed maps on how the population of different bits of Europe has changed over the past 60 years: rural depopulation and the move from east to west being the big stories. correctiv.org/en/europe/20...

I touched on this in this piece: www.ft.com/content/4d00... Violent crime has declined. Demand has shifted to stuff that happens behind closed doors. It’s really hard and time-consuming to investigate.

You also see this just by looking at the British Retail Consortium's 'most shoplifted items' list, where every year it's not 'things people desperately need to live' it is 'things you need to make illegal drugs'!

A really useful framework for police leaders to think through the issues associated with adopting a new technology, written by my colleagues Shane Johnson and Kate Bowers. More detail in this paper: doi.org/10.1111/1467...

Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work. Admin is work.

Example 2️⃣ I use purrr ALL the time to pull in a long list of csvs (or other files), often binding them together in the same step.

Apparently today is the day that a lot of people are learning that the law absolutely allows police officers (and, indeed, members of the public) to kick people in the head when faced with a potentially lethal threat such as a person actively stabbing people.

Good explanation of why events that obviously seem to be terrorism aren't always immediately declared as being terrorist incidents. Whether something is a terrorist incident depends largely on the offender's motivation, which it can take time to gather evidence of.

Allowing bars to open later in a city (in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) increased alcohol-related late-night crime and ambulance calls, while allowing only nightclubs that met quality standards to open later in another city led to no change. ➡️ Venue management matters. bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/4/2/...

@scottkeay.bsky.social 1h 41min!? 😳 This had better be good.

Really nice atmosphere at today’s Champions League semi-final at the Emirates. Going to a women’s top-flight match is just such a nicer experience than going to a men’s game. If you’ve not tried it, it’s a great afternoon out!

A 40-hour training course (🇺🇸) on trauma-informed interviewing of victims of sexual assault improved detectives’ ability to build rapport with victims and gather relevant evidence during interviews.

Today @rusi.bsky.social is hosting a discussion on 30 years of broken windows policing in the UK. Very interesting to hear from David Blunkett on the difficulties he faced in convincing police chiefs they should focus on prevention of everyday crime!

New post! Are you following @sketchplanations.bsky.social ? He is great at explaining complex ideas via text and images, and some of those complex ideas are statistical.

Interesting article on what police leaders/tech companies should be thinking about to integrate AI into UK policing. Particularly important is a focus on robust data, public trust and interoperability via open standards. (Note: it’s written by a vendor)

Gen-Z teens are getting arrested much less often than Millennials were, while Millennials are still getting arrested as they get older (🇺🇸), so the typical person arrested for some crimes is now in their 40s rather than the young-offender stereotype. crimeforecast.substack.com/p/the-age-cr...

Uncaring or insensitive conduct by responding/investigating officers towards crime victims damaged the victims’ subsequent mental health, interfered with their psychological recovery from being a victim, and undermined their trust in police.

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

According to this analysis of drugs in sewage (yes, that's a thing), we're (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿) using more cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy (both tripled in 5 years), but less heroin. This analysts estimates we consume the equivalent of 132 tonnes of pure cocaine each year. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Loads of interesting findings in a new report on how police (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿) spend their time, including that police spend more time investigating violent crime than any other crime type, and they spend almost no time investigating people's social-media posts. Some other highlights …

I’m aware I have mentioned this many times before. But if you want to communicate clearly, just use plain English rather than clogging up your writing with abbreviations that other people might not know:

Serious Violence Reduction Orders (introduced in 2022) didn’t actually reduce serious violence – the people given an order in court were just as likely to commit further violent crimes as those who weren’t.

If police charge someone with a serious crime today, in some parts of England that case might not come to trial until the autumn of 2030! This is obviously a scandal government should fix, but it shows the limitations of relying on deterrence to prevent crime. The CJS just isn’t built to do that.

Interesting paper on how police officer discretion meant that a drug diversion programme often wasn’t used as it was designed to be. An important reminder for anyone designing programmes: you must think about how it will be implemented on the front line.

The Tube gets most of the attention when people think about public transport in London. But London Buses carry far more people: 9.7 million bus journeys a year start or end at Brixton Station, more than the total number of buses journeys in the counties of Dorset, Leicestershire or Shropshire.

Reducing the drink-drive limit had no effect on alcohol-related traffic fatalities (🇺🇸), possibly because the change wasn’t backed up by any extra enforcement. Notable because the limit in England and Wales is the highest in Europe.

Police calls to mental-health incidents (🇺🇸) were heavily concentrated on a small number of streets, with hotspots usually stable over several years. Would be interesting to see if this is true outside the US, given their poor public mental-healthcare system for a developed country.

Small-scale hotspot policing patrols (🇸🇪) reduced violence and vandalism (and increased how many crimes were solved) but had no effect on robbery or theft. The patrols had no effect on district-wide crime totals, though.

One of the things you gain from befriending criminal lawyers is an insight into how stupid most criminals are.

Investigations of rape and seriously sexual offences (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿) are less effective because of (1) lack of police resources, (2) lack of specialist training and (3) unhelpful technology, according to sex-offence investigators.

I’m pretty amazed to read in this study that most police officers in 🇧🇪, 🇩🇪 and 🇪🇸 don’t routinely audio/video record suspect interviews, and that always doing so isn’t legally required there (or in 🇳🇱, 🇳🇴 or 🇸🇪). 😳

Working on something, if folks have examples where people had hallucinated citations (either journal articles or court proceedings is fine), appreciate send me the papers.

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.