Matt Ashby
@LessCrime
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I use data to help police reduce crime. Lecturer at @UCLCrimeScience . Former police officer. More likely to reply at @mattashby .bsky.social
Nottingham and London, UK
Joined April 2009
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Why don’t police arrest many people at protests, even when lots of people are breaking the law?
A 🧵 to explain …
(If you’d like to tell me I’m wrong, please read the whole thread first! 🙏)
Photo:
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The police operation for the Queen’s funeral has been staggeringly complex, involving every police force, events not just in London but across the country, and protecting dozens of heads of state.
As far as I can tell, it’s been done near flawlessly. Well done to all involved.
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@DavidCWillisUSA
@BBCNewsPR
BBC covered it in detail:
Rotterdam police clash with rioters as Covid protest turns violent
Covid-19: Dutch police break up anti-lockdown protest
Netherlands: Police fire warning shots at Covid protesters
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Hard as it is to believe when reading the news, the homicide rate in London has *halved* over the past 20 years.
In the past two decades London has gained 1.7 million extra residents and yet the annual number of homicides has gone down from 212 in 2003 to 110 in 2023.
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The Met don’t get everything right by any means, but in a city of nearly 10 million people the fact that Met officers fire their weapons only twice a year on average (while responding to almost 5,000 firearms incidents a year) is pretty impressive.
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Why do police forces deploy officers to work with ticket inspectors who are checking tickets on buses/trains/trams? There are at least 4 reasons.
A 🧵 for information …
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Over the past 10 years, police in London (a city of 8.9 million people) have fatally shot 11 people, six of whom were in the middle of committing terrorist attacks when they were shot. That’s really important to remember when comparing policing in London to other global cities.
Today we launch our report on annual deaths during or following
#police
contact in 2021/22.
Slide through our carousel for a summary on what these annual death statistics show.
Read the report:
▶️
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A dozen or more police officers (with little/no training) spending hours in hospitals watching over people in mental health crisis because the NHS is not set up or funded properly to care for people.
This happens every day, across the country and it should be a national scandal.
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As someone who waited months for HIV test results after a person spat blood in my mouth during an arrest, this is insulting and upsetting
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@WarnerWrestles
@CassieChristop
Asynchronous learning is really important for students who have caring or other responsibilities that might stop them studying at a particular time. Border restrictions might also mean some students are studying from different time zones.
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This looks like the British Journal of Criminology has been taken in by one of those spoof journal articles that people submit to demonstrate the limits of peer review 👀
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Today I gave a talk on 10 Tips for Effective Problem Solving at the London Police Problem Solving Conference, jointly organised by the three London police forces.
Ten ways to more effectively solve crime problems: 🧵
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I got a medal! Sure, it was mainly for showing up unpaid*, but still!
* This is a Special Constabulary Long Service and Good** Conduct Medal, given for 9 years’ service as a volunteer police officer.
** It should probably say “acceptable”.
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1) Criminology and criminal justice researchers want to influence policy and practice, but we as a discipline are systematically hiding our research from those who need it. If our research is to be worthwhile, this must change.
A thread …
#openaccessweek
#openaccess
#crimcomm
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Yet another case of emergency services struggling to find an incident because of problems with a
#What3Words
location. It’s really long past time police stopped both promoting it and/or building reliance on it into their systems.
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@maxtempers
Looks like that’s data from the 2011 census, which is now 15 years out of date. Looking at the 2021 census, of the 2.6m Muslims aged 16+:
50% are in employment
16% are looking after family
14% are full-time students
5% are retired
5% are unemployed
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@DavidCWillisUSA
@BBCNewsPR
Isn’t covering events what news organisations are supposed to do?
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Some police analysis I'm reading this afternoon: "February had significantly fewer incidents than other months".
I suspect this might be because [grips desk tightly] February is 11% shorter than the other months.
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New resource: 17 *free*, open-licensed, real-world crime datasets from 10 different countries for teaching crime analysis and crime mapping, each with documentation and supporting data for teaching different skills.
Details:
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With 14 years of Conservative-led government coming to an end last Friday, now seems like a good time to look at what has happened to policing over the past 14 years.
TL;DR: policing is not in a good place.
A thread of charts to help explain some of that story …
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A cautionary tale for anyone doing research with police data.
[grabs megaphone, clears throat]
📢 To properly analyse administrative data you need someone who understands how the data was produced 📢
🧵In 2021 economists published a study that concluded each new strip club that opened in NYC reduced sex crimes in its police precinct by 13% within a week. If you are incredulous, you are correct. This was nonsense. Our formal reply is now in print here:
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@johnthe92611772
@BBCPolitics
Unless you need to renew your passport or your driving licence, apply for benefits, get a government grant for a business, get support for exporting products, take a driving test, pass through the UK border, or do any of the thousands of other things that civil servants make work
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@debsuffolk
@ChrisPage90
Except – as we know from previous periods of extreme heat – thousands of vulnerable people won't.
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Slight change to my bio today: after 11 years of volunteering, I’m leaving
@BTPSpecials
to have a break (and because I’m so busy at work I often no longer have the time).
If you do research on policing, I highly recommend being a special constable to get a frontline perspective!
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The total severity of crime police have to deal with per officer in England and Wales has almost doubled in the past decade and the increase in new officers hasn't yet reduced that 'crime pressure', which is three-times higher in some forces than others.
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There are criminologists out there seriously arguing that academics should shouldn’t work with the police.
I genuinely don’t get it. Do they really think policing would be less harmful if it were totally divorced from evidence on what does/doesn’t work?
"Criminologists should avoid working in partnership with government criminal justice agencies", the editors write in chapter one
Chapter three, on the value of working within the cracks of political and criminal justice institutions, is a useful corrective to this view
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Just had a paper desk rejected (by the publisher's staff, not the academic editors) because it didn't include a statement of which authors did which bits of the work.
It's a single-author paper. 🤦♂️
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How car makers installing electronic immobilisers in some new cars in the 1980s helped reduce theft of vehicles by 80%.
Lots of explanations of why crime happens are based on ‘root causes’ such as poverty, which don’t explain why theft only dropped for cars with immobilisers.
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One aspect of policing that’s often not understood by outside commentators is that police are the public service of last resort, dealing with “something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-somebody-had-better-do-something-[right]-now” as Egon Bittner put it.
…
Our officers are not easily rattled when responding to unusual calls.
Just after 1.30am this morning we received a call from the public that a 12 foot python was slithering on a street in
#WestBromwich
.
Read more here:
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The lesson here is this:
When a politician says they’re going to create a “specific offence” to cover behaviour that’s already criminal, you can assume they’re doing it so they can say they’ve ‘done something’, usually because actually fixing the problem is too hard/expensive.
Assault of shop workers to be made specific criminal offence
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Why you can't identify changes in crime by comparing this month to last month – a new post by me on the
@TheSRAOrg
blog:
And a thread …
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It’s obviously morally unsatisfactory when people get away with breaking the law. Sadly police work is very often about choosing the option that will cause the least harm, rather than the option that everyone would prefer in a perfect world.
ENDS
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After today's public-sector pay announcement, my initial estimate is that a newly qualified police officer will earn ~£300 less in real basic salary in 2021 than in 2020 – but that officer is earning about *£6,800* less than in 2010, due to a decade of cuts and freezes
#policepay
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Again, you might think this is rare. If I was wanted for murder, or was carrying enough ketamine to anaesthetise King Kong, I’d do everything possible to avoid police attention. But (to put it politely) many serious offenders don’t have great critical thinking skills.
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Some news: next month I’ll be moving on from
@NTUSocSciences
to join the amazing team at
@UCLCrimeScience
! I’ve learned a lot and made great friends in four years teaching at NTU, and I’m really excited to get to research crime and policing with world-leading experts at UCL!
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3. Serious offenders are *much* more likely than the average person to also commit minor crimes, so stopping people for minor offences can be an effective way to identify serious offenders in a busy environment (in academic jargon this is called “offender self selection”).
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The government has announced police will get no pay rise this year, meaning pay for a newly-trained officer has been cut by about £7,200 (22%) in real terms since 2010, while an experienced officers' pay has been cut by about 8%
cc
@AFOcop
@fed_rep
@PFEW_Chair
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@tinchissy
@labourlewis
He served in Afghanistan in 2009 and that book was first published in 2012, so I'm not sure it would have helped him much
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@Passion4law
@questionableway
The US is also an outlier among developed countries in allowing cops to lie to suspects during interrogations, in having politically elected/appointed judges and prosecutors, in trying children in adult courts, and in having the death penalty.
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@CharlesFLehman
If you think that’s silly, wait until you hear about the time he announced that cities could bid for funding for a chess set.
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Deploying large numbers of officers to break up a masked, outdoor vigil (having scared away the organisers who would have provided stewards) does not seem like smart policing. I suspect every one of those officers could have been better deployed elsewhere on a Saturday evening.
The Met policed a peaceful vigil that required the utmost sensitivity in possibly the least sensitive way they could tonight. Just when a huge effort to persuade women they are safe on the streets was needed.
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@DannyShawNews
@policeconduct
@CPSUK
I continue to be amazed by how long IOPC investigations take. It’s very unlikely it would take police 6–9 months to investigate a fatal shooting in which the shooter’s identity was known and the entire incident was captured on video. Is it a resource issue or a cultural one?
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B. The time for the police to explain why they do things that might not make sense to the public is **before** individual incidents end up causing public alarm, not afterwards. Police need to get *much* better at this.
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I’ve spent this morning running a focus group of UK police intelligence analysts about
#KnifeCrime
– it’s always great to see how knowledgeable analysts are and how hard they work, often with too little time and not enough resources.
Police officers 🙏 value your analysts!
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@lizziedearden
Breach of the peace is contrary to common law, rather than an act of Parliament. It will be interesting to see the rationale for arrests using these powers when the protesters sue the Met (as I assume they are quite likely to).
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This is a really silly way of measuring how good police are at solving burglary.
If police solve 98 of 99 crimes in a high-crime area, and 0 of 1 crimes in a low-crime area, they've solved 99% of burglaries but "failed to solve a single burglary in half of neighbourhoods". 🤷♂️
🚨👮 Our latest analysis on burglaries looks at 30,100 neighbourhoods* across E&W.
Some 48.2% had recorded at least one or more burglary of which NONE had been solved over three years.
- with
@charleshymas
(*LSOAs for data peeps)
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Police officers will hear "haven't you got anything better to do?" pretty often (mostly from people who have just been caught committing a crime), but I've never heard it applied to a murder investigation before … 🤷♂️
Just handed this by a police officer at the tube .
@metpoliceuk
must have a plenty of capacity to be sparing resources for this rather than concentrating on existing work load .
There was always something futuristic about 1984 but maybe now we are in Ashes to ashes territory
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Earlier this week I spoke at the
@WMerciaPolice
problem-solving conference on how to use crime analysis to prevent knife crime.
So, how to analyse knife crime, a 🧵…
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1. Ticket inspectors are at high risk of being assaulted. If they’re assaulted, police will have to attend anyway (and maybe spend many hours investigating), so if sending a couple of officers along ahead of time can prevent those assaults, that can be a good use of time.
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2. Ticket inspections can reveal more-serious offences, such as Freedom Passes stolen in burglaries of vulnerable people’s houses or larger-scale frauds of many thousands of pounds. Typically only police officers have the skills/powers to deal with those offences.
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Has crime gone up or down in the past 20 years?
Fortunately, England and Wales has some of the best-quality data on crime trends anywhere in the world, thanks to the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
So who's right,
@rickmuir1
or
@NickFerrariLBC
?
A 🧵 …
'Crime is lower now than it was 20 years ago.'
'Oh, give me a break!'
@NickFerrariLBC
debates with Policing Foundation's
@rickmuir1
over 'police inaction' in the UK.
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@barteh
Knocking over a fleeing suspect, rugby tackling them, etc, are all well within the definition of reasonable force to stop a fleeing suspect. It’s not the level of any injury that determines if the force is reasonable, but what the person using the force could reasonably foresee.
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Is it possible to reliably compare crime rates across the developed world’s largest cities? Actually, it’s harder than you might think, but for interesting reasons.
A thread for nerds 🤓…
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Criminologists, I'm begging you: 🙏 write your paper titles in plain English!
Think how many more people would be able to find this article in an online search if it was called something like 'Harms experienced by exonerated prisoners after release'.
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What traps must politicians avoid when coming up with policies to reduce crime?
This week, UK political parties are announcing their policies on crime ahead of the
#GeneralElection
. So here are 10 traps they’ll need to avoid if they want to reduce crime effectively …
🧵
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Is London a dangerous city? One way to answer that is to compare London to other major global cities.
TL;DR: crime in London isn’t particularly high compared to other global cities in Europe and North America, but is higher than in Asia.
A thread 🧵 …
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If you think all police officers in Britain should be armed (or even if you don’t), I have some questions for you.
There has been a lot of debate since the Hainault stabbings about whether police should be armed routinely, but it’s a complex decision.
A short 🧵 …
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@adzo72
@PickardJE
None of the types of honours announced in the New Years honours list can be awarded posthumously. The only awards that can be awarded after someone has died are gallantry awards, which are announced in a separate list in May. I’d be quite surprised if he’s not on that list.
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Why has the Met (so-far) chosen not to investigate
#PartyGate
?
I have no insider knowledge of their decision making, but it’s likely a combination of several reasons. I'm not saying these are good reasons, but it's probably useful to understand them nonetheless …
[thread]
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Arrests are particularly draining on police resources because the (legally mandated) custody process means it often takes an officer a whole shift to deal with a single detainee. That’s especially true if many protesters are arrested, creating long queues at custody suites.
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I really wish more people in public policy debates understood the fundamental attribution error.
If we want police to solve more crime, we need to understand that the cause of the problem is more complicated than it being because police can’t “be bothered to”.
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4. Transport operators (especially TfL) pay the entire cost of employing police officers specifically to patrol public transport. So most police working with ticket inspectors haven’t been diverted from other duties – if they weren’t on the bus/train/tram they wouldn’t exist.
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Some criminologists give the impression they don’t care about victims of crime, but this article really is from another planet. Ted Kaczynski is not remembered for his writing, he’s remembered for murdering three people and leaving many others with life-changing injuries. 😠
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That simple maths often makes arresting someone during a protest a bad tactical option, unless arrest is essential (e.g. if the person is committing serious violence).
If police try to arrest lots of people at a protest, they’ll quickly run out of officers.
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@Maf67Neale
@theJeremyVine
If the Met sacked him and he then pleaded not-guilty to the murder (he only pleaded guilty to it last week), his defence team could have claimed his sacking had prejudiced a jury. Much better to wait until they were sure there’d be no jury trial then sack him, which they’ve done.
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You might think identifying more-serious offences during ticket inspections is pretty rare, but if so then you’d be surprised. For a particularly egregious example, see:
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Across many common crime types, fewer people (less than half, for some crime types) are victims now than 30 years’ ago, even taking into account recent increases in some crime types
#cjcharts
#crimtwitter
#rstats
Details:
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So if officers can effectively deal with an offence without arresting, they must do that instead. For example if police tell someone to get off a memorial and they do, it’s very unlikely arrest would be proportionate, even if an offence was committed.
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Coding errors are inevitable in research – everyone tries to avoid them, but some will slip through.
The important take-away is that this mistake was only caught because the authors went out of their way to put all their data and code online. This is why open science matters!
Criminology – the flagship journal in the discipline – recently published an article with completely erroneous results about the impact of reduced policing on crime. This has major implications for public budgets and public policy.
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At almost all protests, the protesters will vastly outnumber the police. It takes 2 police to arrest someone who’s compliant and 5–6 to arrest someone who’s resisting. If the crowd tries to block the arrest, you will need many more officers to stop them.
Saturday 28th October | Cease Fire Palestine Protest
One arrest at Whitehall where an officer was injured by laceration to the head.
Violence broke out with individuals demanding the assailants to be freed from police custody.
#palestineprotest
#londonprotest
#londonpalestine
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Two notes:
A. I wasn’t going to do this thread, since I assumed public concern about the incident on the bus would blow over because it was very minor (a person was briefly arrested, likely lawfully, without injury and with minimal force, then de-arrested at the scene).
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Amazing map showing how small Victorian police beats were and how dense the coverage provided by foot patrols was.
Officers doing hotspot patrols today sometimes complain of a lack of autonomy, but being directed which side of the street to walk on is something else!
Just 4 days until we open, why don’t you have a go walking the Beat?
Police Constables stationed at Bow Street spent the majority of their working life walking around
#CoventGarden
, getting to know the local area and it’s residents.
Beat Map 4 (c) Metropolitan Police Service
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@Chapincabras
@ChrChristensen
California does not have “strict gun legislation”. In the UK, hand guns and automatic weapons are banned outright. To get a rifle or shotgun, you have to convince the police you need one then pass a background check, home inspection and medical. That’s strict gun legislation.
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There are ~22,000 fewer police officers in England & Wales than in 2010, but numbers haven’t dropped equally across forces: some escaped cuts and others are recovering, but numbers are still falling in half of forces
#cjcharts
#crimtwitter
#rstats
Details:
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On their own, no one of these reasons might be enough to justify deploying scarce police resources. But in combination, they can be good reason for police to use this tactic (especially when the officers are funded by TfL).
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@duturdte
@davetroy
@MattDursh
@xtbot
Not really. The ship could have lost power anywhere along its route, but we likely wouldn’t have heard about it because it wouldn’t have caused a disaster. Think of all the bridges in all the ports in the world, and you’ll see that occasionally a ship will strike a bridge.
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What got published in criminology journals in 2018? A brief look at 4,486 articles from 110 journals using
#rstats
and data from
@CrimPapers
at
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Self-selection policing has to be done carefully. It doesn’t mean police should arrest every fare evader! But it does mean (e.g.) police should check every fare evader’s details to see if there are any outstanding warrants for their arrest.
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@nyssa7
@MetMattTaylor
@isowman
Climate change means that extreme temperatures happen more often now than they did in the past. But that doesn’t mean extreme temperatures haven’t happened occasionally before now. The problem is that as they happen more often, the harm caused by extreme temperatures gets worse.
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I've updated the Crime Open Database with 2019 data and added data for Nashville, Seattle and St Louis – it now contains 22.5 million
#opendata
crime records from 16 large US cities going back to 2007 with locations, timestamps and crime types
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Police also have to consider that making an arrest might be the flashpoint that turns an angry but peaceful crowd into a violent one. Is one arrest (especially if it’s for a relatively minor offence) worth potentially causing many injuries to public and police?
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That’s why frontline police react so badly when politicians tell them to ‘just focus on crime’ or similar. The police would love to do that, but that’s not what policing is (and it never has been). If you want policing to be better, you first need to understand what it is.
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Last year the Met had just over a quarter of the intelligence analysts supporting local policing around London that it had 14 years ago.
Intel analysts don’t cost as much as a police officer, but can make a huge difference to how effective police officers are in their jobs.
…
@LessCrime
I was looking for something in the Casey Review and alighted on this detail about analysts, something I know we've discussed before.
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@GarethDennis
Do they also promise to boycott all the regional trains that will use the extra mainline space freed up by
#HS2
?
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The reasons police don’t arrest people fall into two types: legal and practical/tactical.
The most important legal reason? Police don’t have the power to arrest everyone who breaks the law. They can only arrest if one of these criteria applies:
Source:
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So, in summary, police don’t arrest many people at protests because:
* Police can only arrest people in limited circumstances (more limited than most people think).
* Arrests at protests are usually a bad option that risks doing more harm than good.
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New paper!
Problem-oriented policing can reduce crime, but its implementation has been patchy. We identify barriers to effective police problem solving to help chiefs develop the right environment for reducing crime.
@Aiden_S
@ProfRArmitage
@CaitlinClemmow
@g_laycock
@nicktilley
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New by me on how you can stop hiding your
#criminology
research from practitioners and policy makers who need it, because YOU ALMOST CERTAINLY HAVE THE RIGHT TO POST THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF YOUR JOURNAL ARTICLE ONLINE FOR FREE
[cough] Sorry for shouting
#openaccess
#openscience
Fantastic new blog from
@LessCrime
on how to make your research a little more accessible to non-academic audiences. Super happy to have this contribution!
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Happy to say
@r_solymosi
and I have received funding from
@N8PRP
to work with
@cheshirepolice
to understand changing demand for police during the pandemic. We hope this will help equip forces to plan for future pandemics and other emergencies.
Questions? Ideas? Get in touch!
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Hotspots policing patrols were more effective at preventing crime when officers focused on community contact than on enforcement. Really useful-looking paper by
@PizaEric
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The
@UCLForensicSci
Crime Scene Examination module has reached the first practical session, which means the
@UCLCrimeScience
building looks like this:
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This is absolutely true: an intelligence/crime analyst will cost you about the same – or even a bit less than – an extra police officer* but if they've good they'll mean you can use your resources massively more effectively.
* analysts should get paid more – they're worth it
Popular opinion is “more bobbies on the beat”
Today I reviewed a piece of work by an Analyst at
@ukwildlifecrime
written in support of
#OpGalileo
I’ll say again - Quality Analysts are worth their weight in Gold
They prevent crime by helping us “get lucky”
#OneTeam
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First, I should say that what I mean by ‘police don’t arrest many people at protests’ is that police almost always arrest only a small proportion of protesters who are breaking the law. If you break the law at a protest, you’re chances of being arrested are usually quite low.
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This book review of
@ReneeMitchellDr
and
@DrLauraHuey
’s ‘Evidence Based Policing’ criticises the book because it ignores the idea of abolishing the police, but the reviewer doesn’t seem to consider that might be because police abolition isn’t evidence based! 🤨
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