Greater collaboration between police forces has been talked about for more than a decade as a means of delivering efficiencies, but there are rather few examples of it working in practice.

If it's your proposed alternative to mergers, what will be different now?

Across a large sample of cities (🇺🇸), police agencies introducing degree requirements for new officers didn’t lead to any drop in the gender or ethnic diversity of recruits, as some critics of degree requirements had claimed it would.

doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab…

Nice @Jerry_Ratcliffe editorial on the hypocrisy of academic criminologists who won’t call drug dealers ‘drug dealers’ because of the apparent negative effects of labelling, but are happy to write papers stereotyping all police as racist thugs.

…d-49b2-8259-19d81fea8b3f.usrfiles.com/ugd/f5df24_389…

Always worth remembering: a jury has heard all the admissible evidence in a case, and has been advised on the law by a judge. You probably haven’t heard all the evidence, and don’t know the law as well as a judge.

Better street lighting and related crime prevention through environmental design improvements halved crime on a high street (🇺🇸) and also led to a reduction on surrounding streets (i.e. a diffusion of benefit, rather than displacement of crime).

doi.org/10.1007/s11292…

Call for evidence re police accountability gov.uk/government/cal…

I was strongly opposed to lecture recordings for much the reasons given here until I received a note from a student with extreme dyslexia, for whom being able to replay short segments of a lecture multiple times had revolutionised his learning. He did very well in his degree.

In a lab experiment, increased likelihood/severity of punishment reduced student likelihood of using AI to cheat on an assessment. **But** common university policies tested didn’t influence student perceptions of likelihood/severity, so had no effect.

doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.…

Since 1861 (!) homicide (🇸🇪) has gone up with inflation and down with economic growth. But the relationships is very weak (compared with other factors, eg changes in alcohol use), suggesting the link between the economy and crime isn’t that strong.

doi.org/10.1007/s10940…

Lab experiment found that people preferred reporting a burglary to a human police officer rather than to an AI chatbot, but preferred a chatbot that followed procedural justice principles to a police officer who didn’t.

doi.org/10.1080/156142…

This study tries to make recommendations on helping students feel safer from sexual violence, based on … interviews with a convenience sample of 10 “casual acquaintances” of the authors. Is that really the quality of evidence this problem deserves?

doi.org/10.1080/135526…

Hard-drug use (as estimated from metabolic byproducts in sewage) in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 is largely unchanged in 2026, with cocaine, ketamine, heroin and amphetamine being most common. Unlike the US, fentanyl still hasn’t really made an appearance on the UK drugs scene.

gov.uk/government/pub…

I wasn’t expecting walking down the middle of the newly pedestrianised Oxford Street to feel so lovely (never a word I’ve used for Oxford St before!). It instantly feels like something that should have been done years ago.

Well done, @MayorofLondon, for finally getting it done.

Obviously (because Twitter 🙄) saying I enjoyed walking along a street has led to abusive replies from people who find someone enjoying a moment in life triggering, so I’m muting this post now.

A quasi-experiment (🇺🇸) found two publicity campaigns (geo-targeted messages broadcast to mobile phones and anti-violence messages stencilled on pavements) had no effect on violent crime.

doi.org/10.1111/1745-9…

Changing the standard for judging police deadly force (🇺🇸) from “reasonable” to “necessary in defense of human life” had no effect on how many people were killed by police (as proponents claimed) or on how many officers were injured (as opponents claimed)

doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab…

Liberating criminology from a narrow focus on offender motivation meant criminologists could also understand that crime is partly caused by opportunities, which has been hugely important in developing effective ways to prevent crime.

doi.org/10.1111/1745-9…

"The UK has fallen because two years ago someone who had probably never handled a gun before was photographed holding an empty gun the wrong way"

Is such a lame outrage chasing pile of tepid nonsense, you'd think the world had run out of things to be upset about.

This experiment finds a practitioner or global-south researcher without expensive institutional journal subscriptions can only access about 5% of criminology research.

Long past time more researchers (especially in the US) got serious about open access.

doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab…

Useful short summary by @PizaEric of research evidence on the limited effect of CCTV (including automated numberplate recognition cameras) on crime and police outcomes.

counciloncj.org/wp-content/upl…