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The present study aims to examine the scope and contribution of behavioural investigative advice (BIA) reports from the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The 77 BIA reports reviewed were written between 2016 and 2021. They were evaluated using Toulmin’s (1958) strategy for structuring pertinent arguments, current compliance with professional standards, the grounds and backing provided for the claims made and the potential utility of the recommendations provided.

Consistent with previous research, most of the reports involved murder and sexual offences. The BIA reports met professional standards with extremely high frequency. The 77 reports contained a total of 1,308 claims of which 99% were based on stated grounds. A warrant and/or backing was provided for 73% of the claims. Most of the claims in the BIA reports involved a behavioural evaluation of the crime scene and offender characteristics. The potential utility of the reports was judged to be 95% for informative behavioural crime scene analysis and 40% for potential new lines of enquiry.

The reports should serve as a model for the work of behavioural investigative advisers internationally.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically evaluate BIA reports commissioned by the NCA; it adds to previous similar studies by evaluating the largest number of BIA reports ever reviewed, and uniquely provides judgement of overall utility.

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.

The study focusses on an area of London (UK) which used a predictive algorithm to designate micro-place patrol zones for each police shift over a two-month period. Police officer movements are measured using GPS data from officer-worn radios. Descriptive statistics regarding the crime data commonly used to evaluate this type of implementation are presented, and simple analyses are presented to examine the effects of officer patrol duration (dosage) on crime in micro-place hot-spots.

The results suggest that patrols of 10-20 minutes in a given police shift have a significant impact on reducing crime; however, patrols of less than about 10 minutes and more than about 20 minutes are ineffective at deterring crime.

Due to the sparseness of officer GPS data, their paths have to be interpolated which could introduce error to the estimated patrol dosages. Similarly, errors and uncertainty in recorded crime data could have substantial impact on the designation of micro-place interventions and evaluations of their effectiveness.

This study is one of the first to use officer GPS data to estimate patrol dosage and places particular emphasis on the issue of data quality when evaluating micro-place interventions.

This study aims to examine the scope and contribution of Forensic Clinical Psychology (FCP) advice from the National Crime Agency (NCA) to criminal investigations in the UK to address the gap in current knowledge and research.

The 36 FCP reports reviewed were written between 2017 and 2021. They were analysed using Toulmin’s (1958) application of pertinent arguments to the evaluation process. The potential utility of the reports was analysed in terms of the advice provided.

Most of the reports involved murder and equivocal death. The reports focused primarily on understanding the offender’s psychopathology, actions, motivation and risk to self and others using a practitioner model of case study methodology. Out of the 539 claims, grounds were provided for 99% of the claims, 91% had designated modality, 62% of the claims were potentially verifiable and 57% of the claims were supported by a warrant and/or backing. Most of the reports provided either moderate or high insight into the offence/offender (92%) and potential for new leads (64%).

The advice provided relied heavily on extensive forensic clinical and investigative experience of offenders, guided by theory and research and was often performed under considerable time pressure. Flexibility, impartiality, rigour and resilience are essential prerequisites for this type of work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to systematically evaluate forensic clinical psychology reports from the NCA. It shows the pragmatic, dynamic and varied nature of FCP contributions to investigations and its potential utility.

This paper investigates the deterrence effect of development on crime against women in India. Specifically, the authors examine the deterrence effect of the composite development index, i.e. Human Development Index (HDI), along with other variables acting as development indicators such as women’s employment, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization, etc., on crimes against women.

This study adopts a fixed effect within-group (WG) panel regression model and pooled regression model on the data of 28 states over 20 years from 2000 to 2019. For checking the robustness of the results, the authors use the estimation from the system generalized method of moments.

The results confirm the deterrence effect of development as measured by the HDI and female labor force participation on various crimes against women. In addition, female feticide representing the socio-cultural attitude toward women turned out to be another significant determinant of almost all types of crime against women. Further, the study also finds the deterrence effect of variables such as police expenditure, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization and arrest rate on various crimes against women.

This research paper is unique because it tries to examine the deterrence hypothesis of development by taking a composite index of development, i.e. HDI and other variables at the state level in the Indian union.

South Africa attained democracy over 24 years ago. The changes in South Africa's Constitution allowed for protection for all citizens. Despite these freedoms and the promise of change, the country is plagued by violence, corruption and crime. These crimes affect the LGBTQ+ people of the South African population. These citizens have been protected by the Constitution; however, they continue to live their lives in a paradox, between protection and prejudice. LGBTQ+ people experience high levels of hate crimes which extend to violence, assault, bullying and cyberbullying. This chapter focuses on the legal protection and challenges experienced by South African LGBTQ+ people.

A large increase in robberies of convenience stores in New Zealand (NZ) in 2016 and 2017 was anecdotally attributed to persistent and substantial increases in excise tax on tobacco products. This study aims to explore the validity of that claim by examining the characteristics of the robberies through the lens of online news coverage.

Google, Bing and main online NZ news outlets were searched for news reports between 2009 and 2018 of tobacco-related store robberies. Content analysis was used to extract characteristics such as date of robbery, type of store, items targeted or stolen and demographic profile of offenders. The prevalence of reported robberies by socioeconomic level of the surrounding community was assessed using nearest primary school decile rating. Descriptive statistics and statistical analysis were used to discuss trends and key findings in the data.

Reports on 572 robberies were unevenly distributed across the years with a large increase in 2016 and 2017, followed by a substantial decrease in 2018. Local community convenience stores were primarily hit – more so in lower socioeconomic communities. Robberies occurred nationwide and disproportionately so during colder months in lower socioeconomic communities. Many robberies were aggravated resulting in serious injury to shopkeepers. Tobacco and cash were predominantly targeted.

The large increase in robberies that occurred in 2016–2017 likely resulted from tax-driven tobacco price hikes combined with reduced duty-free tobacco coming into NZ with travellers. Installation of security in stores, news fatigue and other explanations are potential reasons for the 2018 decrease in reported robberies despite tobacco prices increasing. Frequent robberies of local stores, many including violence, should be a public health concern as destruction of community well-being can be a determinant of other health problems. The negative consequences for communities, particularly lower socioeconomic communities, need to be factored into the cost benefit analysis of raising the tax on tobacco.

This study provides much needed detail on the negative health and social consequences of tobacco-related store robberies.

Large/stochastic spatiotemporal demand data sets can prove intractable for location optimization problems, motivating the need for aggregation. However, demand aggregation induces errors. Significant theoretical research has been performed related to the modifiable areal unit problem and the zone definition problem. Minimal research has been accomplished related to the specific issues inherent to spatiotemporal demand data, such as search and rescue (SAR) data. This study provides a quantitative comparison of various aggregation methodologies and their relation to distance and volume based aggregation errors.

This paper introduces and applies a framework for comparing both deterministic and stochastic aggregation methods using distance- and volume-based aggregation error metrics. This paper additionally applies weighted versions of these metrics to account for the reality that demand events are nonhomogeneous. These metrics are applied to a large, highly variable, spatiotemporal demand data set of SAR events in the Pacific Ocean. Comparisons using these metrics are conducted between six quadrat aggregations of varying scales and two zonal distribution models using hierarchical clustering.

As quadrat fidelity increases the distance-based aggregation error decreases, while the two deliberate zonal approaches further reduce this error while using fewer zones. However, the higher fidelity aggregations detrimentally affect volume error. Additionally, by splitting the SAR data set into training and test sets this paper shows the stochastic zonal distribution aggregation method is effective at simulating actual future demands.

This study indicates no singular best aggregation method exists, by quantifying trade-offs in aggregation-induced errors practitioners can utilize the method that minimizes errors most relevant to their study. Study also quantifies the ability of a stochastic zonal distribution method to effectively simulate future demand data.