Kate Bowers

University of London · University College London (UCL)

If and how policing affects crime has long been studied. On the relationship between police force size and crime, different authors come to different conclusions. This study examines the relationship between police resourcing, including workforce size, structure and stability over time using data for 42 police forces in the UK over a 13-year period...

Human trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ cover a wide, varied and poorly delineated range of exploitative practices. Yet, conflating different issues risks obscuring important variation. The geographies of trafficking are surprisingly under-researched, particularly quantitatively. Informed by opportunity theories, we examined geospatial and demograph...

Introduction In response to COVID-19, governments imposed various restrictions on movement and activities. According to the routine activity perspective, these should alter where crime occurs. For burglary, greater household occupancy should increase guardianship against residential burglaries, particularly during the day considering factors such a...

There is relatively little empirical research into the geographies of human trafficking, despite its inherent spatiality and the clear benefits of geographical perspectives. An emerging but vibrant body of qualitative work explores different aspects of trafficking's spatiality and spatio-temporality in depth and nuance, but equivalent quantitative...

A ‘local lockdown’ was introduced in Leicester city on 29 June: the city had < 1% of the UK population but 10% of all positive COVID-19 cases the week before. We examine recorded crime in July, the first month. Fig 1 shows the most populous 10 cities in England and Wales. In July, total recorded crime increased more in cities other than Leicester....

Objective This paper reports the findings of a systematic review on the effectiveness of Electronic Monitoring (EM) on reducing recidivism. It identifies mechanisms through which EM is expected to produce reductions in recidivism rates, under what conditions, and at what cost. Methods Eligible studies were identified through a search strategy and...

The presence of civilian witnesses and victims in court is central to the effective operation of the criminal justice system. However, there is evidence of significant non-attendance which can result in ineffective and cracked trials. To address this, West Midlands Police Witness Care Unit and the Behavioural Insights Team designed an intervention...

Combatting trafficking in human beings is a well-established social policy and crime prevention priority for the twenty-first Century. Human trafficking, as defined in international law, can occur for diverse exploitative purposes. Yet, different forms of trafficking are routinely conflated in research, policy and interventions. Most of the attenti...

Policing plays a critical role in crime prevention, incorporating both deterrent and responsive activities. Since many policing activities require the physical presence of officers, a crucial issue for police effectiveness concerns the extent to which officers are located where they are needed. Operationally, this can be framed as a ‘supply and dem...

Law enforcement data are a promising and largely untapped resource for academic research into human trafficking, it is argued in this chapter. Better use of such data can help inform and expand an evidence-based approach to counter-trafficking policy and practice. Written by authors from both sides of the academia-law enforcement divide, this chapt...

The What Works Centre for Crime Reduction was established in September 2013 with the aim of increasing the use of research evidence by decision-makers in policing and crime reduction. The EMMIE framework was developed to meet this aim. It encapsulates five broad categories of research evidence that are considered relevant to crime reduction, namely...

Uses the Security Function Framework to describe an attempt to design, develop, install and evaluate Grippa Clips to secure customers' bags beneath tables in bars.

Objectives Our objectives were (1) to systematically map the contours of the European evidence base on labour trafficking, identifying its key characteristics, coverage, gaps, strengths and weaknesses and (2) to synthesise key scientific research. Methods We took a two-phase approach: a systematic map followed by a detailed synthesis of key scient...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use an evaluation of a micro-place-based hot-spot policing implementation to highlight the potential issues raised by data quality standards in the recording and measurement of crime data and police officer movements. Design/methodology/approach The study focusses on an area of London (UK) which used a pre...

Objectives Our objectives were (1) to systematically map the contours of the European evidence base on labour trafficking, identifying its key characteristics, coverage, gaps, strengths and weaknesses and (2) to synthesise key scientific research. Methods We took a two-phase approach: a systematic map followed by a detailed synthesis of key scienti...

This research sought to investigate patterns and correlates of the under-researched crime of crude oil theft (COT) in the context of the Niger Delta. The aim was to examine the feasibility of opportunity-, deprivation- and market-value-based explanations for COT patterns. A total of 1039 incidents of COT recorded by the Nigerian Oil Producers’ Trad...

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to use an evaluation of a micro-place-based hot-spot policing implementation to highlight the potential issues raised by data quality standards in the recording and measurement of crime data and police officer movements. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The study focusses on an area of London (UK) which used a pred...

Objectives This paper reports an evaluation of a police-led target-hardening crime prevention strategy inspired by research concerned with space–time patterns of burglary. Methods A total of 46 neighbourhoods in the West Midlands (UK) were randomly allocated to treatment and control conditions. Within treatment areas, resources were delivered to r...

New forms of data are now widely used in social sciences, and much debate surrounds their ideal application to the study of crime problems. Limitations associated with this data, including the subjective bias in reporting are often a point of this debate. In this article, we argue that by re-conceptualizing such data and focusing on their mode of p...

Objectives Decades of empirical research demonstrate that crime is concentrated at a range of spatial scales, including street segments. Further, the degree of clustering at particular geographic units remains noticeably stable and consistent; a finding that Weisburd (Criminology 53:133–157, 2015) has recently termed the ‘law of crime concentration...

Throughout the course of a forensic investigation following an explosive attack, the identification and recovery of tissue fragments is of extreme importance. There are few universally accepted methods to achieve this end. This project aims to explore this issue through the examination of the spatial distribution of the tissue fragments resulting f...

Background Retailers routinely use security tags to reduce theft. Presently, however, there has been no attempt to systematically review the literature on security tags. Guided by the acronym EMMIE, this paper set out to (1) examine the evidence that tags are effective at reducing theft, (2) identify the key mechanisms through which tags are expect...

Research Summary Just four decades ago, the predominant narrative in crime prevention and rehabilitation was that nothing works. Since that time, criminologists have accumulated a wide body of evidence about programs and practices in systematic reviews. In this article, we summarize what is known in seven broad criminal justice areas by drawing on...

Evidence-based policing is the use of the best available research on the outcomes of police work to implement guidelines and evaluate agencies, units, and officers. This chapter considers the main sources of research evidence available to support decision-making in the crime prevention field. It discusses four main sources of research evidence: pra...

Alley gates are designed to limit access to alleys and the crime opportunities they afford. Informed by the acronym EMMIE we sought to: (1) systematically review the evidence on whether alley gates are Effective at reducing crime, (2) identify the causal Mechanisms through which alley gates are expected to work and the conditions that Moderate effe...

Metal theft has become an increasingly common crime in recent years, but lack of data has limited research into it. The present study used police-recorded crime data to study the spatial and temporal concentration of metal theft from the railway network of Great Britain. Metal theft was found to exhibit only weak seasonality, to be concentrated at...

Crime, Policing and Citizenship (CPC) – Space-Time Interactions of Dynamic Networks has been a major UK EPSRC-funded research project. It has been a multidisciplinary collaboration of geoinformatics, crime science, computer science and geography within University College London (UCL), in partnership with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). The a...

Situational crime prevention (SCP) measures are those that aim to prevent crime by reducing opportunities for offending and by increasing the effort and risk to offenders (Clarke, Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention, 1995). There have been a number of systematic reviews, using the explicitly stated, transparent method...

Over the last two decades, there has been increased interest in the distribution of crime and other antisocial behavior at lower levels of geography. The focus on micro geography and its contribution to the understanding and prevention of crime has been called the ‘criminology of place’. It pushes scholars to examine small geographic areas within c...

Metal theft has become a substantial crime problem in many areas. In response, several countries have introduced legislation to regulate scrap-metal recycling yards. However, at present there is little evidence to support this use of the market reduction approach (MRA) in preventing metal theft. The present study sought to test the underlying assum...

Objectives This paper describes the need for, and the development of, a coding system to distil the quality and coverage of systematic reviews of the evidence relating to crime prevention interventions. The starting point for the coding system concerns the evidence needs of policymakers and practitioners. Methods The proposed coding scheme (EMMIE)...

OPEN ACCESS VERSION: http://www.crimesciencejournal.com/content/4/1/8 Although the relationship between weather and crime has been extensively investigated over the past century, little consensus has emerged on the directions of the relationships observed and the mechanisms through which weather might exert its influence. This paper advances an ar...

PurposeThere is a current need for innovation in research on the fear of crime to move on from general and static representations and instead approach it as a dynamic phenomenon experienced in everyday life, to inform or evaluate situational interventions.Methods This study presents a novel approach to fear of crime research using the framework of...

This is the EMMIE coding tool. It is used to appraise evidence contained in systematic reviews in the field of crime prevention. Following coding narratives are written and, once quality assured, are included on the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction (WWCCR) toolkit.

Marcus Felson is not only an exceptional scholar, a great colleague, and a good friend, but he is also a man who is very free with his ideas. This chapter focuses on just one of the many ideas that Marcus has given us over the years that we have known him. We picked this idea in particular because it fuses together two of the subjects that we know...

This study examines the existing metrics used in evaluating the effectiveness of area-based crime hotspots for operational policing. We identified some of the limitations of the metric (i.e. Area-to-Perimeter (AP) ratio) used for measuring compactness of hotspots and then proposed a new improved metric called " Clumpiness Index (CI) ". The case stu...

OPEN ACCESS link: http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/12/30/police.pau058.short?rss=1 In many disciplines there is a wealth of primary evaluation research on what works, and systematic reviews that synthesize that evidence. This is, of course, extremely positive. However, the sheer scale of the information and the way in which it...

Objectives If offending were simply displaced following (often spatially) focused crime reduction initiatives, the continued expenditure of resources on this approach to crime reduction would be pointless. The aims of this article were to: critically appraise the current body of displacement research; identify gaps in understanding; articulate an a...

This research will contribute to the work of the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction, hosted by the UK College of Policing. The aim of this particular review is to identify existing systematic reviews within the crime reduction area. Subsequent research will involve coding the identified reviews along a number of dimensions, to include their appr...

This document gives some summary statistics for the sample of systematic reviews that met the WP1 inclusion criteria. These criteria are documented in the systematic review protocol for this work package. In summary, the final list of studies constituted 337 separate systematic reviews.

The Web 2.0 technology introduced dynamic web mapping, which in turn has dramatically changed the distribution and use of geographical information in our society. Some of the many advantages of online mapping include the fast information dissemination to the public, the interactivity between the users and the map interface, as well as the frequent...

There is no doubt that crime mapping is now a mainstream practice in police organizations and the security industry more generally (Wartell and McEwen, 2001). For example, a Home Office survey (Weir and Bangs, 2007) conducted in 2005, with responses from 35 of the 43 UK police forces and many of the UK Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDR...

Objectives: Test the influence of darkness in the street robbery crime event alongside temperature. Methods: Negative binomial regression models tested darkness and temperature as predictors of street robbery. Units of analysis were four 6-hr time intervals in two U.K. study areas that have different levels of darkness and variations of temperature...

In their paper on routine activity theory, Cohen and Felson (1978) stated that for a direct predatory crime to occur, a motivated offender and a suitable victim must converge in space and time in the absence of a capable guardian. Moreover, that changes in the degree to which this convergence occurs could lead to changes in the volume of crime, eve...

To undertake the first exploration of the nature of the relationship between internal crime (those that happen within facilities) and external crime (those occurring outside but in the nearby locale of facilities). The following questions are addressed. Do those localities that suffer high volumes of crime internally within their facilities also su...

Objectives To test the accuracy of various methods previously proposed (and one new method) to estimate offence times where the actual time of the event is not known. Methods For 303 thefts of pedal cycles from railway stations, the actual offence time was determined from closed-circuit television and the resulting temporal distribution compared a...

Objectives: Test the influence of darkness in the street robbery crime event alongside temperature. Methods: Negative binomial regression models tested darkness and temperature as predictors of street robbery. Units of analysis were four 6-hr time intervals in two U.K. study areas that have different levels of darkness and variations of temperat...

This study engages with the public to identify and assess methods for improving the operation of whole body security scanners within UK airports. We examine the reasons why individuals prefer either body scans or pat-downs. We also measure the effects of presenting passengers unbiased information about scanners at the screening checkpoint. Our key...

This article reviews the research concerned with crime displacement. It summarizes previous reviews on crime displacement and describes the search strategy used to identify studies for inclusion. It then considers the analytical approach and methodological challenges for studies concerned with crime displacement. This article also aims to study the...

ObjectivesTo undertake a systematic review of the extent to which geographically focused policing initiatives appear to displace crime (simply relocate it to other places) or diffuse benefits (lead to reductions elsewhere). MethodsEvaluation research which assessed whether such schemes may have led to displacement or diffusion of benefit to nearby...

Recently, against a backdrop of general reductions in acquisitive crime, increases have been observed in the frequency of metal theft offences. This is generally attributed to increases in metal prices in response to global demand exceeding supply. The main objective of this article was to examine the relationship between the price of copper and le...

Overall, teachers' multi‐component classroom management programmes have a significant positive effect in decreasing aggressive or problematic behaviour in the classroom. Students in the treatment classrooms in all 12 studies reviewed showed less disruptive or problematic behaviours when compared to the students in control classrooms without the int...

Crime is often found to concentrate in and around bars. Although numerous studies have looked at the relationship between bars and violent crime, research concerned with acquisitive crime in bars is lacking. This study focuses on bag theft in bars and presents analyses of 1023 recorded bag thefts in 2005–2006 from 26 bars of 1 chain in central Lond...

The Ministry of Justice issued statistics of recalls to custody in July 2009, after media outrage about murders committed by an offender remaining free some 33 days after his recall. A contrast is drawn between the Ministry of Justice recall figures with in many ways analogous cancer survival rates, which provide helpful estimates of probability of...

That crime is concentrated in space is now accepted as commonplace. Explanations for why it clusters at particular locations are various reflecting the range of factors which are held to influence crime placement. In this article, we focus on the role of the permeability of the street network on the location of crime. We first review the research c...

Few criticisms of situational crime-prevention (SCP) efforts are as frequent or prevalent as claims of displacement. Despite emerging evidence to the contrary, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that crime displacement is inevitable. This study examined 102 evaluations of situationally focused crime-prevention projects in an effort to determine t...

Planners of crime prevention evaluations often face a dilemma: how to actively manage numerous interacting variables needing prospective consideration as part of a research design. Failure to consider one design component at the expense of another, or lavishing disproportionate attention on some and not others can increase the likelihood of non-con...

This chapter concerns the forecasting of crime locations using burglary as an example. An overview of research concerned with when and where burglaries occur is provided, with an initial focus on patterns of risk at the individual household level. Of central importance is evidence that as well as being geographically concentrated (at a range of geo...

It has been known for some time that crime risk is unevenly distributed and that some geographic areas experience more crime than others. However, less attention has been given to the ebb and flow of crime hotspots and in particular the stability of crime problems. This is important as the identification of appropriate crime reduction responses sho...

The relative merits of quasi-experimental area-level place-based evaluations and randomized control trials are the subject of contemporary debate in the criminological literature. Pertinent issues in the application of these approaches to crime prevention include the experimental validity of the former and the real-world practicality of the latter....

Using epidemiological techniques for testing disease contagion, it has recently been found that in the wake of a residential burglary, the risk to nearby homes is temporarily elevated. This paper demonstrates the ubiquity of this phenomenon by analyzing space–time patterns of burglary in 10 areas, located in five different countries. While the prec...

This paper seeks to explore police officer percep- tion of the spatial distribution of residential burglary over different time periods. Using a survey of officers across three English police basic command units (BCUs), it examines the accur- acy of their impressions of the locations of crime over the preceding year and the preceding two weeks. It...

This paper offers unique insights into the distribution of damage to bus shelters, in a single case study area, Merseyside (UK). The geography of bus shelter damage is examined in relation to the criminogenic and socio -economic characteristics of its neighbourhood, and the local land use context. The findings suggest that shelter damage is related...