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This paper estimates the relationship between sports participation and two broad categories of crime – property crimes and violent crimes- in 323 local authorities in England between 2012 and 2015. The objective is to assess whether participation in sporting activities influences regional crime rates. Furthermore, the impact of socioeconomic conditions on crime rates are estimated. The findings suggest sport participation is associated with reduction in both property and violent crime rates across English local authorities between 2012 and 2015. However, sports participation has a stronger effect on violent crimes compared with property crimes. The results show a 10% increase in sports participation is associated with a fall in violent crimes of 0.97 and 1.56% while a 10% increase in sports participation is associated with a fall in property crimes of approximately 0.65%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between public houses or pubs, and crime rates in England and Wales. The impact of pubs on local communities is generally studied and investigated within the context of third places, thus physical places that facilitate the accumulation of social capital within communities. We estimate Poisson Fixed-Effects (PFE) and a frontier Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) model on a unique panel dataset for 375 local authorities in England and Wales between 2003 and 2018. Results from the analysis indicate that the presence of pubs progressively relates to a higher incidence of major crimes when transitioning from rural to urban areas, mainly due to weaker level of community cohesion and a lack of resources to support formal policing in more urbanized centres. These findings highlight the importance of place-based strategies in tackling rising incidences of crimes, indicating that recent pub closures may have contributed to severing community ties that act as a deterrent to crime in certain areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a surge in stop and search operations following a high‐profile murder to look at their effect on recorded crime. Difference‐in‐difference estimates using detailed geocoded data at the street‐level suggest a doubling to trebling of the number of searches in streets close to the place of the murder. IV estimates on the effects of stops and searches on crime suggest little effect on property crime, weapons offences and violent crime or drug offences. Some specifications find reductions in anti‐social behaviour, suggesting that any effects on crime are due to an increased police presence on the streets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, human trafficking has become the battleground for competing discourses on human rights and penality. While rights solutions are generally presented as in opposition to crime-control measures, in the context of anti-trafficking interventions, rights-based initiatives and criminal governance are often linked together both discursively and in practice. Drawing on the findings of Discourse Analysis of 120 texts about trafficking, this paper explores how dominant discourses and alternative voices construct the relationship between human rights and penality. It is contended that penality is framed as a crucial tenet of human rights. Dominant discourses (the 'law enforcement' and the 'victims first' discourses) link human rights to state coercive action, seen as a necessary component of their effectiveness. Alternative voices (the 'incompatibility' and the 'transformative justice' discourses) reject the appropriateness of penal intervention, but they end up preserving what they denounce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expected crime rates that enable police forces to contrast recorded and anticipated spatial patterns of crime victimisation offer a valuable tool in evaluating the under-reporting of crime and inform/guide crime reduction initiatives. Prior to this study, police forces had no access to expected burglary maps at the neighbourhood level covering all parts of England and Wales. Drawing on analysis of the Crime Survey for England and Wales and employing a population terrain modelling approach, this paper utilises household and area characteristics to predict the mean residential burglary incidences per 1000 population across all neighbourhoods in England and Wales. The analysis identifies distinct differences in recorded and expected neighbourhood burglary incidences at the Output Area level, providing a catalyst for stimulating further reflection by police officers and crime analysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kernel smoothing methods can be used to visualise complex point event data that are distributed geographically. The visualisations generated by these methods allow users to observe trends in the data which may not be apparent from numerical summaries or by visualising the point data themselves. Crime data in the UK has recently been made available to the public for the smallest postal delivery areas in the country (postcodes). Visualisations of the number of recorded events at each postcode for a given area are provided online. In this paper we apply some widely used kernel smoothing methods to this data, to assess the use of kernel smoothing methods as applied to open access data. Kernel smoothing methods are applied to crime data from the Greater London metropolitan area using freely available packages for the open source R program. We also investigate the utility of using simple methods to smooth the data over time. The kernel smoothers used are demonstrated to provide effective and useful visualisations of the data, and it is proposed that these methods should be more widely applied in exploratory data visualisation in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, criminologists have been aware of the severe consequences of the dark figure of police records for crime prevention strategies. Crime surveys are developed to address the limitations of police statistics as crime data sources, and estimates produced from surveys can mitigate biases in police data. This paper produces small area estimates of crimes unknown to the police at local and neighbourhood levels from the Crime Survey for England and Wales to explore the geographical inequality of the dark figure of crime. The dark figure of crime is larger not only in small cities that are deprived but also in wealthy municipalities. The dark figure is also larger in suburban, low-housing neighbourhoods with large concentrations of unqualified citizens, immigrants and non-Asian minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that community deprivation can increase the risk of right-wing radicalization and violent attacks and that measures of local deprivation can help improve forecasting local hate crime rates. A large body of research stresses how experiences of deprivation can erode the perceived legitimacy of political leaders and institutions, increase alienation, and encourage right-wing radicalization and hate crime. Existing analyses have found limited support for a close relationship between deprivation and radicalization among individuals. We provide an alternative approach using highly disaggregated data for England and show that information on local deprivation can improve predictions of the location of right-wing hate crime attacks. Beyond the ability to predict where right-wing hate crime is likely, our results suggest that efforts to decrease deprivation can have important consequences for political violence, and that targeting structural facilitators to prevent far-right violence ex ante can be an alternative or complement to ex post measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Dogs are considered property under U.K. law, while owners generally regard their canine companions as family. Reports that the number of stolen dogs in England and Wales rose from 1788 in 2016 to 1909 in 2017 led to public calls to change the law. Recognising that a more robust analysis of dog theft crime statistics is required, we gathered dog theft data for 2015, 2016, and 2017 from 41 of 44 police forces. This paper examines how dog theft crime statistics are constructed, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of these data, and categorises, maps, and measures dog theft changes temporally per police force in England and Wales. Our findings reveal there has been an increase in dog theft crimes, with 1559 thefts in 2015, 1653 in 2016 (+6.03%), and 1842 in 2017 (+11.43%), and a decrease in court charges related to dog theft crimes, with 64 (3.97%) in 2015, 51 (3.08%) in 2016, and 39 (2.11%) in 2017. The actual number of dog theft crimes will be higher as three forces could not supply useable data. There is a need for a qualitative study to understand dog theft crime in different parts of the country, and a standardised approach to recording dog theft by all police forces in England and Wales. We recommend classifying dog theft (or pet theft more generally) as a crime in itself under the Sentencing Guidelines associated with the Theft Act 1968. Dogs are considered property under U.K. law, while current discourses of pet ownership place canine companions as part of an extended family. This means sentences for those who steal dogs are not reflective of a dogs' sentience and agency, rather in line with charges for those who steal a laptop or wallet. This is particularly problematic as dog theft is currently on the rise in England and Wales, leading to public calls to change the law. Recognising that a more robust analysis of dog theft crime statistics is required, we gathered dog theft data for 2015, 2016, and 2017 from 41 of 44 police forces through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. This paper uses these data to examine how dog theft crime statistics are constructed, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of these data, and categorises, maps, and measures dog theft changes temporally per police force in England and Wales. Our findings reveal there has been an increase in dog theft crimes, with 1559 in 2015, 1653 in 2016 (+6.03%), and 1842 in 2017 (+11.43%), and a decrease in court charges related to dog theft crimes, with 64 (3.97%) in 2015, 51 (3.08%) in 2016, and 39 (2.11%) in 2017. There were police force inconsistencies in recording dog theft crime, which meant some data were unusable or could not be accessed or analysed. We recommend a qualitative study to understand stakeholder perspectives of dog theft crime in different areas, and a standardised and transparent approach to recording the theft of a dog by all forces across England and Wales. This could be achieved by classifying dog theft (or pet theft more generally) as a crime in itself under the Sentencing Guidelines associated with the Theft Act 1968. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street-level crime maps are publicly available online in England and Wales. However, there was initial resistance to the publication of such fine-grained crime statistics, which can lower house prices and increase insurance premiums in high crime neighbourhoods. Identifying the causal effect of public crime statistics is difficult since crime statistics generally mirror actual crime. To address this question empirically, we would ideally experiment and introduce a source of random variation in the crime statistics. For instance, we could randomly increase or decrease the number of offences displayed in crime statistics and measure their effects on local house prices. For obvious reasons, we cannot pursue this research design. However, street-level crime maps contain intentional errors, which are the product of a geomasking algorithm designed to mask the location of crimes and protect the identity of victims. This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with practitioners, the article reconstructs how and why vulnerability has become an organizing principle in community safety work in England and Wales. Decreasing crime rates, growing awareness of risk and harm, loss of political salience of volume crime and modifications to the structure of incentives all contributed to making the move away from crime and disorder possible. The article shows how vulnerability is now used to facilitate partnership working to maintain existing levels of service provision, but also to ration the amount of support made available to citizens at a time of austerity. This is potentially problematic and open questions remain on the solidity, orientation and reach of this shift. The article concludes by discussing the research findings in light of their broader implications for European criminology and comparative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments around the world have enforced strict guidelines on social interaction and mobility to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Evidence has begun to emerge which suggests that such dramatic changes in people's routine activities have yielded similarly dramatic changes in criminal behavior. This study represents the first 'look back' on six months of the nationwide lockdown in England and Wales. Using open police-recorded crime trends, we provide a comparison between expected and observed crime rates for fourteen different offence categories between March and August, 2020. We find that most crime types experienced sharp, short-term declines during the first full month of lockdown. This was followed by a gradual resurgence as restrictions were relaxed. Major exceptions include anti-social behavior and drug crimes. Findings shed light on the opportunity structures for crime and the nuances of using police records to study crime during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-90s there has been almost a 50% reduction in the volume of crime in England and Wales - a trend that has been mirrored in many Western countries (Greenberg Justice Quarterly, 31(1), 154–188, 2014). Despite previous assumptions, for example, declining birth cohorts, it is proposed here that the decline in crime for the 1995–2005 period can largely be attributed to a doubling of the probability of a crime being 'proven' (cf Lloyd et al. 1994; MOJ, 2012; Taylor 2016). However, in the last decade these reductions in crime rates have levelled off to a relatively stable degree. Analysis of published data relating to the performance of the criminal justice system in England and Wales suggests that reductions in crime levels since 2005 are largely accounted for by the fall in proportion of the youth population engaging in offending behaviour. It is argued that falls in rates of crime are largely independent of the offending frequency of young people or variations in the probability of offences being proven; rather, reductions in youth crime over this period could largely be attributed to policy changes, including multiagency interventions targeted at young people who were at risk of starting to offend (McAra and McVie 2015; Smith 2015). Further discussion suggests that the binary proven reoffending rate is not an accurate barometer of criminal justice system performance; rather it is argued that reductions in the youth offending population feed forward into later reductions in the number of adult offenders and further impact on overall crime rates in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated gender differences regarding young people charged with murder in England and Wales. A sample of 318 cases was collected from the Home Office's Homicide Index and analysed. Of these cases, 93% of the offenders were male and 7% female. The analyses explored gender differences in terms of the offender's race, offender's age, victim's age, victim's gender, weapon used, offender-victim relationship, and circumstances of the offence. The study found that a female offender was significantly more likely to murder a family member than a male offender, and a male offender was significantly more likely to murder a stranger than a female offender. In addition, a female offender was significantly more likely to murder a victim below the age of 5 than a male offender. Implications for interventions with young people who are charged with murder are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous research into specialisation has been dominated by the debate over the existence of specialisation versus versatility, it is suggested that research needs to move beyond the restrictions of this dispute. The current study explores the criminal careers of 200 offenders based on their criminal records, obtained from a police database in the North West of England, aiming to understand the patterns and nature of specialisation by determining the presence of differentiation within their general offending behaviours and examining whether the framework of Expressive and Instrumental offending styles can account for any specialised tendencies that emerge. Fifty-eight offences were subjected to Smallest Space Analysis. Results revealed that a model of criminal differentiation could be identified and that any specialisation is represented in terms of Expressive and Instrumental offending styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Secure hospitals are a high-cost, low-volume service consuming around a fifth of the overall mental health budget in England and Wales.Aims: A systematic review and meta-analysis of adverse outcomes after discharge along with a comparison with rates in other clinical and forensic groups in order to inform public health and policy.Method: We searched for primary studies that followed patients discharged from a secure hospital, and reported mortality, readmissions or reconvictions. We determined crude rates for all adverse outcomes.Results: In total, 35 studies from 10 countries were included, involving 12 056 patients out of which 53% were violent offenders. The crude death rate for all-cause mortality was 1538 per 100 000 person-years (95% CI 1175-1901). For suicide, the crude death rate was 325 per 100 000 person-years (95% CI 235-415). The readmission rate was 7208 per 100 000 person-years (95% CI 5916-8500). Crude reoffending rates were 4484 per 100 000 person-years (95% CI 3679-5287), with lower rates in more recent studies.Conclusions: There is some evidence that patients discharged from forensic psychiatric services have lower offending outcomes than many comparative groups. Services could consider improving interventions aimed at reducing premature mortality, particularly suicide, in discharged patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]