Articles

Learning to rank spatio-temporal event hotspots

Crime, traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, and other space-time random events are unevenly distributed in space and time. In the case of crime, hotspot and other proactive policing programs aim to focus limi...

Authors: George Mohler, Michael Porter, Jeremy Carter and Gary LaFree

Constellations of youth criminogenic factors associated with young adult violent criminal behavior

This study identified constellations of childhood risk factors associated with violent criminal behavior in early adulthood. Police data were used to sample violent and nonviolent offenders from a population o...

Authors: Menno Segeren, Thijs Fassaert, Matty de Wit and Arne Popma

What is security worth to consumers? Investigating willingness to pay for secure Internet of Things devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered the next technological revolution. IoT devices include once everyday objects that are now internet connected, such as smart locks and smart fridges, but also new type...

Authors: John M. Blythe, Shane D. Johnson and Matthew Manning

Identification of subgroups of terror attacks with shared characteristics for the purpose of preventing mass-casualty attacks: a data-mining approach

Security and intelligence agencies around the world invest considerable resources in preventing terrorist attacks, as these may cause strategic damage, national demoralization, infringement of sovereignty, and...

Authors: Gonen Singer and Maya Golan

Beyond crime rates and community surveys: a new approach to police accountability and performance measurement

In this conceptual piece, we argue that the current approach to police performance measurement typically based on the use of traditional police metrics has failed to achieve the desired results and that a diff...

Authors: Tarah Hodgkinson, Tullio Caputo and Michael L. McIntyre

What about cyberspace (and cybercrime alongside it)? A reply to Farrell and Birks “Did cybercrime cause the crime drop?”

In this paper we question Farrell and Birks’ assertion of the emergence of cybercrime as an invalid explanation for the crime drop. Alternatively to the “cybercrime hypothesis”, we propose two non-exclusive hy...

Authors: Fernando Miró-Llinares and Asier Moneva

Toward a test of the “Law of Crime Concentration” in Japanese cities: a geographical crime analysis in Tokyo and Osaka

This brief report aims to reveal crime concentration at the district level in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, two cities characterized by low crime rates. Eight types of property crimes that occurred between 2008 and ...

Authors: Mamoru Amemiya and Tomoya Ohyama

Testimony at court: a randomised controlled trial investigating the art and science of persuading witnesses and victims to attend trial

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 ineffe...

Authors: Evie Monnington-Taylor, Kate Bowers, Pippa Streeter Hurle, Liz Ward, Simon Ruda, Martin Sweeney, Alex Murray and Jo Whitehouse

Experimental assessment of the viability of using ground penetrating radar for metal wire-snare detection

Wildlife crime is an international issue with the illicit trade of flora and fauna estimated to be worth several billion dollars. In national parks, the problem can often be summarised as an arms race, with po...

Authors: Hervé Borrion, Amin Amiri, Dorothea Delpech and A. M. Lemieux

Opportunity and rationality as an explanation for suspicious vehicle fires: demonstrating the relevance of time, place, and economic factors

Opportunity theories of crime emphasize the non-random spatial and temporal patterning of criminal events. Such theoretical development has proven useful when extended beyond traditional applications to crime ...

Authors: Hannah Kelly, Joseph Clare, Kathryn Wuschke and Len Garis

Competitive dominance, gang size and the directionality of gang violence

Intergroup violence is assumed to play a key role in establishing and maintaining gang competitive dominance. However, it is not clear how competitive ability, gang size and reciprocal violence interact. Does ...

Authors: P. Jeffrey Brantingham, Matthew Valasik and George E. Tita

The production of jaguar paste in Suriname: a product-based crime script

As apex predators, jaguars have significant cultural importance in the Americas and are a key species for monitoring the health of ecosystems. Threats to jaguar populations include human-wildlife conflict, hab...

Authors: A. M. Lemieux and Nicholas Bruschi

Crime concentration at micro-places in Latin America

Research on crime concentration at micro-places has had a very western-industrialised focus. In this paper we provide results on crime concentration for 42 cities in Latin America. The results suggest that cri...

Authors: Spencer P. Chainey, Gastón Pezzuchi, Néstor Octavio Guerrero Rojas, José Luis Hernandez Ramirez, Joana Monteiro and Erwin Rosas Valdez

Responding to victimisation in a digital world: a case study of fraud and computer misuse reported in Wales

This paper presents the early results of a study exploring computer misuse and fraud victimisation in Wales, United Kingdom (UK). The results presented here describe the quality of the data available to local ...

Authors: Sara Giro Correia

Empirical analysis of weapons of influence, life domains, and demographic-targeting in modern spam: an age-comparative perspective

Spam has been increasingly used for malware distribution. This paper analyzed modern spam from an age-comparative perspective to (i) discover the extent to which psychological weapons of influence and life dom...

Authors: Daniela Seabra Oliveira, Tian Lin, Harold Rocha, Donovan Ellis, Sandeep Dommaraju, Huizi Yang, Devon Weir, Sebastian Marin and Natalie C. Ebner

Ransomware deployment methods and analysis: views from a predictive model and human responses

Ransomware incidents have increased dramatically in the past few years. The number of ransomware variants is also increasing, which means signature and heuristic-based detection techniques are becoming harder ...

Authors: Gavin Hull, Henna John and Budi Arief

An evaluation of bylaw and policy changes on pharmacy robberies in British Columbia

On 15 September 2015, the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia (BC) implemented a set of by-law and security policy changes in an effort to reduce robberies and burglaries in BC pharmacies. Prior to thes...

Authors: Martin A. Andresen, Elliott Mann, Tarah Hodgkinson, Stephen Thacker and Bob Nakagawa

Searching for safety: crime prevention in the era of Google

This research investigated the association between Internet searches and property crime levels in the United States. States with the highest levels of property crime tended to have the highest levels of Google...

Authors: Megan S. Stubbs-Richardson, Austin K. Cosby, Karissa D. Bergene and Arthur G. Cosby

Correction to: Towards a ‘smart’ cost–benefit tool: using machine learning to predict the costs of criminal justice policy interventions

The original version of the article contained an error in the funding section and name of an author. The correction funding note should be: This project was funded by the Economic & Social Research Council gra...

Authors: Matthew Manning, Gabriel T. W. Wong, Timothy Graham, Thilina Ranbaduge, Peter Christen, Kerry Taylor, Richard Wortley, Toni Makkai and Pierre Skorich

Automatically identifying the function and intent of posts in underground forums

The automatic classification of posts from hacking-related online forums is of potential value for the understanding of user behaviour in social networks relating to cybercrime. We designed annotation schema t...

Authors: Andrew Caines, Sergio Pastrana, Alice Hutchings and Paula J. Buttery

To the moon: defining and detecting cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps

Pump-and-dump schemes are fraudulent price manipulations through the spread of misinformation and have been around in economic settings since at least the 1700s. With new technologies around cryptocurrency tra...

Authors: Josh Kamps and Bennett Kleinberg

Under and over the surface: a comparison of the use of leaked account credentials in the Dark and Surface Web

The world has seen a dramatic increase in cybercrime, in both the Surface Web, which is the portion of content on the World Wide Web that may be indexed by popular engines, and lately in the Dark Web, a portio...

Authors: Dario Adriano Bermudez Villalva, Jeremiah Onaolapo, Gianluca Stringhini and Mirco Musolesi

Don’t shoot the messenger! A criminological and computer science perspective on coordinated vulnerability disclosure

In the computer science field coordinated vulnerability disclosure is a well-known practice for finding flaws in IT-systems and patching them. In this practice, a white-hat hacker who finds a vulnerability in ...

Authors: Marleen Weulen Kranenbarg, Thomas J. Holt and Jeroen van der Ham

Hate is in the air! But where? Introducing an algorithm to detect hate speech in digital microenvironments

With the objective of facilitating and reducing analysis tasks undergone by law enforcement agencies and service providers, and using a sample of digital messages (i.e., tweets) sent via Twitter following the ...

Authors: Fernando Miró-Llinares, Asier Moneva and Miriam Esteve

Problem-oriented policing: matching the science to the art

This paper is an edited version of the Jerry Lee Lecture delivered at the Stockholm Criminology Symposium in 2018, the year in which Professor Herman Goldstein was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in...

Authors: Malcolm K. Sparrow

On problem-oriented policing: the Stockholm lecture

This paper is an edited version of the speech given upon being awarded the 2018 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. After a brief introduction, the paper describes the concept of problem-oriented policing (POP), f...

Authors: Herman Goldstein

Towards a ‘smart’ cost–benefit tool: using machine learning to predict the costs of criminal justice policy interventions

The Manning Cost–Benefit Tool (MCBT) was developed to assist criminal justice policymakers, policing organisations and crime prevention practitioners to assess the benefits of different interventions for reduc...

Authors: Matthew Manning, Gabriel T. W. Wong, Timothy Graham, Thilina Ranbaduge, Peter Christen, Kerry Taylor, Richard Wortley, Toni Makkai and Pierre Skorich

A simple weighted displacement difference test to evaluate place based crime interventions

This work proposes a new statistic, the weighted displacement difference (WDD), as a simple test to evaluate crime reductions subsequent to place based interventions taking into account trends in comparison areas...

Authors: Andrew P. Wheeler and Jerry H. Ratcliffe

Is travel actually risky? A study of situational causes of victimization

We present a first test using a smartphone time use survey app for whether the risk of criminal victimization is higher while traveling than during other activities, and assess risk heterogeneity between publi...

Authors: Stijn Ruiter and Wim Bernasco

A comparative analysis to forecast apartment burglaries in Vienna, Austria, based on repeat and near repeat victimization

In this paper, we introduce two methods to forecast apartment burglaries that are based on repeat and near repeat victimization. While the first approach, the “heuristic method” generates buffer areas around e...

Authors: Philip Glasner, Shane D. Johnson and Michael Leitner

Did cybercrime cause the crime drop?

Recent studies have hypothesised that the international crime drop was the result of the rise in cybercrime. We subject this ‘cybercrime hypothesis’ to critical assessment. We find significant evidence and arg...

Authors: Graham Farrell and Daniel Birks

Understanding site selection of illegal border crossings into a fenced protected area: a rational choice approach

This study investigates illegal border crossings by rhino poachers into a fenced reserve in South Africa, comparing journeys to and after crime using a rational choice approach. Using various regression models...

Authors: Nick van Doormaal, A. M. Lemieux and Stijn Ruiter

The East Asian crime drop?

The ‘crime drop’ refers to the substantial reductions in crime reported in many industrialised countries over at least the past quarter century. Asian countries are underrepresented in the crime drop literatur...

Authors: Aiden Sidebottom, Tienli Kuo, Takemi Mori, Jessica Li and Graham Farrell

Victims of cybercrime in Europe: a review of victim surveys

Review the evidence provided by victim surveys in order to provide a rough estimate of the personal crime prevalence of the main types of cybercrime.

Authors: Carin M. M. Reep-van den Bergh and Marianne Junger

Enhancing SARA: a new approach in an increasingly complex world

The research note describes how an enhancement to the SARA (Scan, Analyse, Respond and Assess) problem-solving methodology has been developed by Transport for London for use in dealing with crime and antisocia...

Authors: Steve Burton and Mandy McGregor

Risk terrain modeling for monitoring illicit drugs markets across Bogota, Colombia

Colombia has gone from being a producer and exporter of illicit drugs to becoming a country where consumption also plays an important role. In Bogota, as result of specific policies adopted by the authorities ...

Authors: José A. Escudero and Boris Ramírez

Homicide in Canada and the crime drop

In contrast to the Canadian crime drop of the 1990s, homicide appeared as an anomaly with a peak in the 1970s. Yet previous studies tend to refer only to completed homicides, and here we also include attempts....

Authors: Graham Farrell, Tarah Hodgkinson and Martin A. Andresen

An information theory approach to hypothesis testing in criminological research

This research demonstrates how the Akaike information criterion (AIC) can be an alternative to null hypothesis significance testing in selecting best fitting models. It presents an example to illustrate how AI...

Authors: Gohar A. Petrossian and Mike Maxfield

Crime topic modeling

The classification of crime into discrete categories entails a massive loss of information. Crimes emerge out of a complex mix of behaviors and situations, yet most of these details cannot be captured by singu...

Authors: Da Kuang, P. Jeffrey Brantingham and Andrea L. Bertozzi

Personal security alarms for the prevention of assaults against healthcare staff

Personal security alarms have been used to try to reduce violence against healthcare staff, some of whose members face relatively high risks of assault. This systematic review focused on the effect of alarms i...

Authors: Chloe Perkins, Deirdre Beecher, David Colas Aberg, Phil Edwards and Nick Tilley

Ravenous wolves revisited: a systematic review of offending concentration

Numerous studies have established that crime is highly concentrated among a small group of offenders. These findings have guided the development of various crime prevention strategies. The underlying theme of ...

Authors: Natalie N. Martinez, YongJei Lee, John E. Eck and SooHyun O

How concentrated is crime among victims? A systematic review from 1977 to 2014

Considerable research shows that crime is concentrated among a few victims. However, no one has systematically compared these studies to determine the level of concentration and its variation across studies. T...

Authors: SooHyun O, Natalie N. Martinez, YongJei Lee and John E. Eck

Compared to what? Estimating the relative concentration of crime at places using systematic and other reviews

That crime is concentrated at a few places is well established by over 44 studies. This is true whether one examines addresses or street segments. Additionally, crime is concentrated among offenders and victim...

Authors: John E. Eck, YongJei Lee, SooHyun O and Natalie Martinez

A systematic review of tagging as a method to reduce theft in retail environments

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...

Authors: Aiden Sidebottom, Amy Thornton, Lisa Tompson, Jyoti Belur, Nick Tilley and Kate Bowers

How concentrated is crime at places? A systematic review from 1970 to 2015

Despite the increasing awareness and interests about the importance of crime concentration at places, scholars have not comprehensively synthesized the body of evidence related to this thesis. We conduct a sys...

Authors: YongJei Lee, John E. Eck, SooHyun O and Natalie N. Martinez

Retraction Note to: Investigative advising: a job for Bayes

Authors: Jared C. Allen

Wildlife crime: a conceptual integration, literature review, and methodological critique

Wildlife crime, including poaching and wildlife trafficking, threaten the existence of particular species. To date, research on wildlife crime has been primarily conducted by those with backgrounds in the biol...

Authors: Justin Kurland, Stephen F. Pires, Sara C. McFann and William D. Moreto

Domestic burglary drop and the security hypothesis

This study examines the role of household security devices in producing the domestic burglary falls in England and Wales. It extends the study of the security hypothesis as an explanation for the ‘crime drop’....

Authors: Andromachi Tseloni, Graham Farrell, Rebecca Thompson, Emily Evans and Nick Tilley

Drug supply networks: a systematic review of the organizational structure of illicit drug trade

This study presents a systematic review of research using social network analysis to document the structure of organized crime groups involved in drug trafficking. Our first objective is to determine whether t...

Authors: Gisela Bichler, Aili Malm and Tristen Cooper

Multivariate analysis of energy dispersive X-ray diffraction data for the detection of illicit drugs in border control

A system using energy dispersive X-ray diffraction has been tested to detect the presence of illicit drugs concealed within parcels typical of those which are imported into the UK via postal and courier servic...

Authors: Ireneos Drakos, Peter Kenny, Tom Fearn and Robert Speller