Access to academic journals

I couldn't agree with George Monbiot more on this.

A particular concern of mine is that virtually all the research I have published has, in effect, been funded twice by the taxpayer. First in terms of paying my PhD grant and then salary while working at university; second in terms of paying for the surveys (such as the British Crime Survey) whose data I and various co-authors have used. It seems to me that in these circumstances everything should be freely available to the people - i.e. all of us - who have funded the research. And it certainly isn't at the moment, because it's sitting behind pay walls charging at least £30 a throw.

Of course there are various ways to get research out there (e.g. www.academia.edu, www.ssrn.com), but the pressure to get papers in the peer-reviewed journals that Monbiot criticises is overwhelming. It's almost the only way to build an academic career. So, obviously, you always make sure the best stuff is that which the smallest number of people can read it!

There are some ways round this problem. Working papers can be posted on the sites above, or on personal websites. Research reports can be - and are - written for the bodies who funded the surveys used. But in a classic catch-22 these will mostly be unread, indeed uncommisioned unless the author has a reputation built by publishing in peer-reviewed journals.....

And this is before we start to consider that the entire system is built on the free (to the journals) labour of academics as authors and as reviewers. I would hope that in the future we can move toward the system proposed by Monbiot. But I won't hold my breath, for reasons for inertia, if nothing else.

I also think, to be fair to the publishers, they are only really responding to a demand from within academia and from the funding bodies. The current system is almost wholly built on peer-reviewd publication, and the pressure to get published is so strong that almost everyone is working on several to many papers at any one time. These all have to go somewhere, hence the multiplication of journal titles in recent years. Which, of course, don't come for free: at the utter barest minimum, someone has to ensure that the review process functions properly and host a website.

I'm not sure the political will exists to change this situation. Indeed the current UK government presumably prefers that private companies make significant profits from the system, and would be ideologically opposed to switching to something entirely publicly funded.

Three deaths in a week following police use of 'non-leathal' weapons

This is very worrying. Of course, the use of non-lethal weapons precludes the idea that the officers involved intended the deaths. I don't think it's granting too much benefit of the doubt, even at this early stage, to assume that they believed use of the weapons was an effective way to control the situation that would not kill or seriously harm the people on the receiving end. The problem, if there is one, must therefore lie in training, the protocols involved and, possibly, the research behind the weapons themselves.

Take the pepper spray cases, for example. This report suggests pepper spray is relatively innocuous, but this, from the ACLU, paints a more complicated picture. A quick read through the ACLU report suggests what you'd probably suspect from first principles. Deaths after the use of pepper spray were concentrated among people with mental disorders, drug users, and so on - all things themselves risk factors in relation to injury during encounters with police officers (or indeed anyone else).

This suggests to me - and I'd like to see more research on this issue - that the use of non-lethal weapons may be particularly prevalent in cases where the person involved is more likely to be injured for other reasons. This obviously confounds the spray as the cause of death, but if true it would mean that deaths after the use of sprays are likely to continue even if the spray itself is not at fault.

In the current climate of increased attention - and arguably suspicion - directed at the police one wonders whether the use of any technique that is associated with deaths in custody might be curtailed or at least reconsidered. Disclaimer: the usual provisos about statistical blips apply. Three deaths don't necessarily mean anything in terms of trends or underlying factors. My point is simply that the police, particularly at this point in time, should avoid using aggressive and arguably dangerous techniques that risk undermining public trust in their ability to manage situations without rapid escalation to violence.

Now with added tweets!

Following some advice here (Paul Gilroy on the riots, worth reading) I've finally signed up to twitter. And in a rush of techno-savvy I've added a feed to the blog. I may get fed up with it - especially as you seem to get messages from people tweeting at what you're interested in, in which case some of the comments might get a bit tedious - but let's see how it goes......

A little something to cheer us up

Lot's of really bad news recently, and bad in lots of ways.

So it's good to see something that makes you smile for a second.

Tottenham riots

Of course it's not only Tottenham, now. Amid the usual welter of worry, concern, condemnation I think three points are worth reiterting.

First, the proximate cause of this was the shooting of Mark Duggan and the (alleged) way the police refused to talk to those protesting on Saturday afternoon. Whatever the intentions of those involved in the rioting on Saturday and Sunday, I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that another Black Londoner has been killed by police, and his family deserve the fullest possible account of what happened as soon as possible.

Second, while you can understand the anger - in this part of London, of all places - nothing justifies people smashing up their own streets and torching their own neighbour's houses (I'd be very surprised if, as David Lammy claimed on TV yesterday, many if not most of the rioters on Saturday came from well outside Tottenham). At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, this is not going to help. As pointed out here it takes a very peculiar mindset indeed to think that burning down the post office on Tottenham High Road is the first step toward righting some of the historic wrongs suffered by this and many other parts of Britain. And there can be little doubt that many of the people involved were in it for the loot, plain and simple.

But, third, even if most of the rioters were just in it for the loot, and even if Mark Duggan was guilty as hell (which would still not justify his death unless he really was shooting back), this still does not absolve the police, the criminal justice system and society more widely of all responsibility for what's going on here. People are not born rioters or looters, they are pushed into these roles by a whole range of external forces as well as internal motivations. Each individual makes a decision to break a window - but how they end up in that street, on that night, in those circumstances and with that state of mind involves economic and social factors far bigger than themselves.

Take two quick examples. On the one hand, the police have genuinely tried to improve their relationships with communities in places such as Tottenham. Things are certainly better, by an large, than they were in the 1970s and 1980s. But some police practices and policies continue to undermine such efforts. I'm thinking in particular of the disproportionaliy in stop and search activity experienced by young ethnic minority and working class men and their communities, and all the negative consequences this disproportionality has for trust and legitimacy. Stop and search is frequently experienced as unfair by those on the receiving end, and this undermines their trust in the police, their willingness to cooperate with officers, and their sense that police can and should work for and with them, rather than against them. This wouldn't matter so much if stop and search was more evenly spread across the population. But it's not, so what happens is a concentration of these experiences in very specific social groups. People increasingly see the police as an occupying power rather than a community resource, they cease to trust what police and other agencies tell them, and they increasingly turn toward ways of solving problems - including those that implicate the police - that put them on a collision course with the law. Naturally, stop and search is just one example: there are others, and all parts of the CJS are implicated.

On the other hand, police and the CJS should not take all or even most of the heat here. There are systemic problems in places like Tottenham that go far beyond the activities of police officers. Long term unemployment and attendent poverty undermines people's sense that they have a stake in society. Add to this a society that celebrates wealth and consumption above all else and you have, I think, a pretty explosive mixture. In particular, in areas that do not grant much legitimacy to the law and where people don't think that the 'system' represents and works for them, is it really surprising that some individuals start to think that the only way they have of obtaining what they want is taking it by force. This holds in the political arena as well - when people feel their legitimate complaints are ignored, they will move increasingly toward more expressive and ultimately violent ways of getting their point across.

These riots demonstrate (again) that we need to move beyond simple condemnation of the people involved from one side, and of the police from the other, to think a bit more deeply about how that boy on that street came to be there and throw a rock or steal a pair of trainers.

HMIC report on police preparedness for cuts

Link. Complete with 'rapid evidence review' on police numbers and crime rates by yours truly.....

Update: I've just notices the above link is dead: there's a PDF version of the note here, however.