A lovely Christmas Day walk in some amazing light.

Happy Christmas! (This picture is actually from January this year, but we can still dream of a white Christmas.)

Useful review of evidence on what works, what doesn’t and what’s promising in using AI in policing. Although the speed of AI development means many emerging technologies haven’t been properly evaluated yet.

Companies sell AI-based software to automatically review police body-worn video and flag potential misconduct. This study (🇺🇸) found officers are more likely to accept automated flagging if the system also emails supervisors when it finds good conduct.

Christmas movie? Yes. Terrorism movie? No. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

‘Nudge’-based signs encouraging people to lock their bikes at a railway station (🇯🇵) increased how likely people were to do so. This might seem obvious, but some previous research has found signs often aren’t good at changing victim behaviour.

Citizens (🇬🇧) greatly overestimate the frequency of bribery in UK businesses: 43% of people think bribery in UK business happens ‘very/fairly often’ but only 3% of businesses were asked for or gave a bribe in the past year. www.gov.uk/government/p...

People (in 30 countries) are more likely to co-operate with police if they think police make fair decisions and treat people with respect. In most countries that's more-important in explaining co-operation than police effectiveness or legal duties to obey. doi.org/10.1111/1745...

Some students cheat on essays using AI or by paying someone to write for them. But the answer isn’t “severe penalties”, it’s to redesign assessments so it’s harder to cheat. Too many lecturers set essays that are easy to cheat on and then moan that students cheat. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Training police (🇺🇸) on procedural-justice techniques (e.g. explaining the rationale for police actions) led to improvements in just treatment of people stopped, with the effect not varying by ethnicity of the person. (Note, though, small sample size)

Police (🇬🇧) retrospective facial recognition system (e.g. comparing CCTV to mugshots) almost always identifies right suspect but is more often wrong with non-White suspects. Home Office is buying new software that’s equally effective across ethnicities.

Half of people arrested by police in London who did not have an ADHD diagnosis tested positive on an ADHD screening test after arrest, driven by 60% positive tests among those arrested for drugs offences (for other offence types it was <20% positive).

“The narrative is ‘rape gangs’ roaming the streets, targeting girls,” he added. “That does happen, but the majority of the crimes that are committed against children are done by people that they know.” The report also found that child sexual abuse is increasingly happening wholly or partly online

6–15 min police patrols (🇧🇪) every 24h were associated with longest crime-free period after patrols, relative to longer patrols. It’s an observational study, not an experiment, but suggests patrols can have an effect even below 15-min Koper-curve limit.

This paper introduces an interesting way of comparing violence between countries: the average number of days of life lost to homicide. In the UK it's ~3.4 million total days of life lost to homicide per year, or ~70 minutes off the average British life. doi.org/10.1177/1088...

Interesting review of research into issues faced by rural police. Some obvious eg isolation from backup. Some less so eg community expectation they can bring problems, including non-police problems, to officers 24/7 because they know officer personally. doi.org/10.1177/0032...

Deploying police to optimal points between calls (what ambulance services calls ‘standby’) could reduce emergency response times, relative to random patrol. Note this is based on computer simulations rather than a real-world test, so treat with caution. doi.org/10.21428/cb6...

Not, perhaps, London Underground’s most useful train arrivals board.

Review of research into the effects on children of witnessing a parent's arrest recommends planning arrests to avoid children being present if possible (which it won't always be) and searching/handcuffing away from children. Hopefully things agencies are already doing. doi.org/10.1177/1524...

This study of where officers (🇺🇸) chose to patrol between calls found no relationship at all with where crime was most concentrated. The lesson for police leaders: don’t assume your cops know where to patrol if you haven’t given them clear guidance.

January tickets to our #CM150 exhibition are being snapped up quickly, but everyone seems to be too busy with Christmas shopping for the December ones. There's still good availability on 9-11 & 17 at www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/metropolit... if the #truecrime fan in your life needs an early present ...

I've banged this drum before, but … Academics, I beg you: please write article titles/abstracts in plain English so people beyond your sub-discipline understand them. Especially if the article is about harm caused by exclusionary language! (📷 original vs ChatGPT re-write)

Police-led lessons on drugs law (e.g. the wide definition of drugs 'supply' in English law) that used procedural-justice principles (fairness, dialog, respect) led to a sustained increase in perceptions of police fairness relative to a control group. doi.org/10.21428/cb6...

Excellent Home Office analysis of what police (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿) spend their time doing. An essential benchmark if you’re interested in police reform, have ever complained about what police (don’t) do, or if you teach policing to undergrads.

Compared to the working-age population, police officers (🇺🇸) are more likely to die due to heart disease, cancer, suicide or COVID, but less likely to die in accidents or homicides. Worth thinking about if you’re responsible for officer safety/welfare.

Assaults on police officers (🇧🇪) most often occur in specific scenarios: immediate escalation when officers arrive, drunken verbal escalation to an assault, or escalation to escape arrest/search. Useful if you design police training scenarios.

Interested in women and girls safety/co_creation/planning and housing. New fully funded PhD opportunity below. www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-n...

Police patrols onboard London buses along ‘hot routes’ reduced crime (and crime harm) onboard relative to control routes. Each patrol lasted 15 minutes. Some limitations, though: eg we don’t know what activities the officers did during the patrols.

Police officers (🇺🇸) did substantially fewer traffic stops as the end of their shifts approached. But the likelihood of them finding an offence went up at the same time, suggesting they became more picky about which cars to stop.

I think London Underground might be trying to tell us something about the state of the world:

One in ten girls *aged 12* in a sample of schools (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿) had experienced sexual harassment at school in the past year, along with 20% of those who identified as gay or lesbian and 22% of those who identified as non-binary.

This paper identifies different types of residential burglar (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿), eg specialists who target high-value items, cautious offenders who favour weekend nights and opportunists who burgle on weekday afternoons. Maybe useful for identifying series.

Only 16% of people (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿) said they could name their police and crime commissioner (vs. 68% saying they could name their mayor). This and other findings from a 2020 (!) Home Office report released now to support abolishing PCCs.

A curfew that required businesses selling tobacco in an area with high on-street drug use to close by midnight led to a substantial drop in drug-related crime with no displacement to nearby areas (🇺🇸).

I’m being especially nerdy this evening at Mapping London, an event organised by the great @stanfordstravel.bsky.social travel and map bookshop. 🗺️ 🤓

A review of experimental evaluations of victim counselling as a way to prevent domestic violence repeat victimisation found that it either didn’t reduce subsequent victimisation or any effect only lasted for a short while.

When asked what are the biggest issues facing them in their daily lives, only 5% of Britons mention crime or public safety. Partly this is because crime is highly concentrated so disproportionately affects a few people. But it probably also illustrates why big police funding increases are unlikely.

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

Useful example if you work on crime harms: the costs of the recent Jaguar Land Rover cyber attack were big enough to impact national GDP figures.

The government seemingly still hopes to publish the delayed police reform white paper at some point in the next five weeks (Parliament goes into recess for Christmas on 18 December).

The government has announced that Police and Crime Commissioners will be scrapped in 2028 - which would have been the next elections - saying it will "cut the cost of unnecessary bureaucracy" Many senior police officers have long wanted them gone, as seen here www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

If you want to engage with policing policy and practice, you need to understand that policing is all about managing the trade offs between different risks, and doing so with finite resources where opportunity cost considerations abound.

Record low murder rate in England and Wales

Do you think about time in criminology? ⏰ Do you think about how we can better specify temporal processes and effects in theory and research? Consider contributing to a new special collection! 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 Feel free to send a message if you have any questions!

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.