I help people use data to reduce crime. Associate Professor at @UCLCrimeScience. Former police officer.
Nottingham and London, UK
Joined April 2009
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Sure, and it would have been good if the paper had reported the proportion of drivers who were speeding before and after, as well as the change in average speed. But it’s notable that the average before the alerts was over the speed limit and the average afterwards was under.
So, as I said before, it looks like the main cause of vetting failures was rushing to recruit people to meet the Home Office target and avoid the loss of funding missing the target would lead to. Although as it turned out the Met missed the target in any case.
Sorry for the slow reply– I don’t check Twitter mentions often.
It looks like the vetting review unit you mention overturned 114 cases (not all non-white) out of 5,073 applicants who weren’t properly vetted during the push to meet uplift targets.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9z…
The decision not to install immobilisers on Kia/Hyundai cars (🇺🇸) led to over 1.1 million extra vehicle thefts over 5 years.
Note: unlike other developed countries, the US doesn't require manufacturers to fit cars with immobilisers.
crimrxiv.com/pub/4u5hwcwg/re…
Since apparently you only believe AI, try this:
ALT is the population of the administrative city of Paris a good basis on which to compare the overall population of Paris with the population of other global cities? No, using only the administrative city of Paris (Ville de Paris) is a poor basis for comparing its population with other global cities. Why Administrative Limits Fail • Fixed Borders: The official city limits of Paris (intra muros) have not changed for over 160 years (stretching across just 105 square kilometres), unlike cities like London or New York that absorbed surrounding suburbs. • Artificial Smallness: The administrative city houses only about 2.1 million people, making Paris look deceptively small. • Exclusion of Suburbs: It completely cuts off the continuous, built-up urban area that spills past the Périphérique (ring road).
There is no meaningful measure of population that makes London 15 times the size of Paris. The area covered by the Paris police has a population of about 5 million, compared to about 9 million for the Met in London.
The Met has a slightly more restrictive policy on this for its own officers. But the bikes in the pictures aren’t from the Met so that policy wouldn’t apply.
All that said, it’s generally more considerate to park on yellow lines rather than in taxi/resident/disabled bays.
The London Local Authorities and Transport for London Act 2003 (try saying that three times fast) exempts vehicles being used for police, fire and ambulance purposes (whether or not in an emergency) from parking restrictions in London.
When a temporary speed trap (🇦🇺) appears on phone navigation apps (Waze, Google Maps, etc.), average vehicle speed on that road drops by about 4km/h.
One for academics still teaching students that offenders don't make rational choices, I guess. 😉
doi.org/10.1007/s11292-026-0…
Matt Ashby retweeted
I’ve heard Journal of Quantitative Criminology will soon require opens data/code…which will make it the only journal in the entire field to do so. In late 2026.
We should be embarrassed! Complete abrogation of basic scientific responsibility for decades. And seemingly no urgency from the editors of Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Criminology & Public Policy, or Journal of Experimental Criminology.
There was an effort to get there from the last two editors of criminology, but the new editors haven’t followed through.
Meanwhile, what year do you think the first preregistered RCT was published in the fields flagship journal Criminology? If you guessed 2026 then you win (proud to have authored that one 😁).
Chatting with a friend about ongoing efforts in Economics to use AI to replicate every econ paper ever published. This is scary for individual researchers, of course (everyone lives in fear of a coding error), but clearly good for science.
I'd love to see this applied to Criminology, but those journals still don't require authors to post their data or code. 🙄
Embedding mental-health clinicians in police control rooms (🇺🇸) was associated with a small drop (about 7%) in police deployments to mental-health calls. Seems like this would have been a good opportunity for a randomised controlled trial, though.
doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.202…
Repeat victimisation happens to police officers, too, especially when it comes to violent crime. A useful reminder in @PolicingInsight of the importance of leveraging concentrations of victimisation risk when trying to prevent officers being assaulted.
policinginsight.com/feature/…
What’s the link between reductions in vetting standards and increased diversity? My understanding is that the Met skimped on vetting both to save money and because they couldn’t get enough applicants of any ethnicity, not because they were attempting to increase diversity.
I did answer his question, 7 hours ago. I’m sure if he wants more detail he’ll ask.
But relative to other big US cities, New York has quite low crime rates, so I’m not sure why you might think the NYPD performs badly (and even if it did, that could be for lots of reasons).
Academic publishing is fundamentally broken, and is only going to get more so. But since most academics seem content for most journals to be run by exploitative publishers, I fully sympathise with a choice just to put your work out elsewhere.
There’s a recent review of research at ideas.repec.org/a/bjf/ijriss…
