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The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime has been highly variable. One possible source of variation runs indirectly through the impact that the pandemic had on groups tasked with preventing and responding to crime. Here, this paper aims to examine the impact of the pandemic on the activities undertaken by front-line workers in the City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD).

The authors use both autoregressive integrated moving average modeling and a regression-based event study design to identify changes in GRYD Community Intervention Worker proactive peacemaking and violence interruption activities induced by the onset of the City of Los Angeles “safter-at-home” lockdown.

Analyses show that the proactive peacemaking and violence interruption activities either remained stable or increased with the onset of the lockdown.

While the City of Los Angeles exempted GRYD’s Community Intervention Workers from lockdown restrictions, there was no guarantee that proactive peacemaking and violence interruption activities would continue unchanged. The authors conclude that these vital functions were indeed resilient in the face of major disruptions to daily life presented by the pandemic. However, the causal connection between stability in Community Intervention Worker activities and gang-related crime remains to be evaluated.

Inquiries, commissions, reviews and the promise of broader data collection about racial and gender disparities are now the reflex defensive responses from state institutions charged with grievous social harm, particularly in the UK. Recommendations from these exercises are rarely implemented. As criminologists, our ability to produce and analyse data that evidences or better illuminates social harm has long been a key offer of the discipline to activism.

How are we to respond to the very institutions activist criminologists seek to challenge immediately offering this very activity, invariably protracted and ineffectual, as a reflex response to activist challenge? This chapter explores this tension. Grounded in the work of groups struggling to end police stop and search, it considers the strategy impasse around research and data production that faces grassroots activists and their accomplice researchers. The chapter proposes new routes for collaboration and action across activist and criminologist communities that may help move past the ‘data trap’. In short, it seeks to answer: do activists need more evidence?

In the last 10 years, India has amended its laws dealing with sexual offences against women with the changes ranging from increasing terms of imprisonment for the offence of rape to state-funded compensation schemes for women and child victims. In this regard, challenges persist for the agencies of the criminal justice system in India especially the courts to realise the vision of restorative justice as these forums have to navigate the relevant statutory provisions and binding precedents. This chapter seeks to analyse the challenges faced by courts in proper reintegration of victims and offenders of sexual offences, the institutional responses of the courts and suggests reforms to the criminal justice system in India in consonance with the principles of restorative justice acknowledged in the restorative justice movement in the international discourse.

Domestic violence in Hong Kong is understudied in various ways: (a) there is no study about the relationships between restorative justice and domestic violence, (b) women’s resilience in the context of domestic violence is seldom mentioned and (c) practitioners’ perspective is often not voiced. This chapter is an explorative study aiming at finding out the following: (a) the relationships between restorative justice and domestic violence in the context of Hong Kong, (b) the understanding and practical implications of women’s resilience from a cultural perspective and (c) the challenges of social work deliverance to victims of domestic violence in Hong Kong. The research of this chapter has been conducted by in-depth interviews with five social work practitioners who deal with victims of domestic violence daily. Three specific cases of domestic violence have been selected and systematically analysed, and the temporal results are: (a) it is challenging to exercise ‘restorative justice’ in cases of domestic violence; (b) Chinese women have a very different understanding of the ‘western’ concept of ‘women’s resilience’; (c) any social work relating to ‘women’s resilience’ is challenging to apply to Hong Kong and arguably any Asian contexts, and (d) restorative justice is not a widespread practice when it comes to domestic violence in Hong Kong.