Crime in Prisons

The point about the displacement of crime into prisons has made been made before, but I've rarely seen the case made as powerfully as in this article.

The really depressing thing is that the most analyses I've seen suggest only a relatively small proportion of the 'crime drop' in the US can be attributed to the increase in imprisonment - other factors, such as change in drug consumption patterns, demographics, and cultural shifts seem to have been as or more important. As the author notes, it's entirely possible that crime hasn't fallen in the US at all, but has merely been shifted inside the prison walls.

This is probably overstating the case a bit. I think there has been, if nothing else, a shift in cultural attitudes toward crime that have made it less acceptable. And its hard to ignore the demographics (i.e. less young men as a proportion of the overall population). But its certainly an argument worth having.

Fire-brigade policing

I really like Rob Reiner's ideas on how we should conceptualise policing. Seems to me this is both an accurate reflection of what the police actually do (i.e. almost anything, when called on) and a useful way of calibrating our expectations about what is possible in terms of real achievements.

That is, while police can and do solve local problems, and may, in certain situations and in certain ways, influence crime rates and even 'put a lid' on crime, there must almost by definition be little they can do about the underlying causes of crime. These are likely to be so deeply embedded in diverse social, economic and cultural structures that it seems almost naive to expect that one single state agency could, on its own, have much effect on them in the long run.

Most people would, presumably, agree that police should work toward this larger goal in conjunction with other state agencies, non-state actors, and the public at large. So why, then, should the success of the police be measured only by it's success in  'fighting crime' (which is what the current government seems to be suggesting). Indeed, if what Reiner says is true, and given the well-known difficulties involved in tracking and explaining changes in the rate of crime, what what be a suitable metric for assessing police performance purely against a crime-change criteria?

Response to Home Office 'curfew' consultation

Some colleagues and I have written a response to the Home Office's consultation on police powers. This covered Section 5 of the existing Public Order Act (on 'insulting language'); and two new proposals to introduce (a) a new police power to enforce removal of face-coverings - e.g. masks, scarfs - and (b) a new police power to instigate curfews.

The last issue took up most of our attention, and suffice to say that we thought it was a very bad idea. You can find the response document here.

Brilliant climate change graphic

I stumbled on this superb graphic (via the comments here) and, although its way off topic for this blog, couldn't resist linking to it.

The first thing you see is the overall trend in global temperature change over the last 40(ish) years. The second is how climate change 'sceptics' might prefer to present the picture: by breaking the period into smaller chunks you can show that over any given 5-10 year period temperatures were either flat or actually fell.

The real action comes at the end of the chart, since it is a standard climate-change denier line that temperatures haven't risen since 1998, the warmest year on record. The overall trend is clearly upwards - selecting 1998 as a start year in order to demonstrate a decline is a classic an example of 'cherry-picking' data to suit one's argument (see here for a discussion).

Were the rioters 'career criminals'?

Excellent post over at fullfact.org. I particularly like the comparison of mean and median.....

Compare and contrast

Interesting to compare the police and government responses the the Grauniad's 'reading the riots' study/conference. Not for the first time, I'm struck by the reasonable tone struck by the MET who, apparently, recognise they must do things differently in the future, and acknowledge that there is a significant problem around stop and search. Whether this translate into real change remains to be seen, of course.

Theresa May, however, seemingly can't climb out of her ideological hole, insisting that any attempt to uncover reasons for the riots amounts to 'excuses'. This know-nothing attitude totally bemuses me. Should we never seek to try and understand things that we can condemn (or, alternatively, only seek to understand things of which we approve)? Gangs get another airing, too, despite all the evidence to suggest that this really wasn't about gangs at all. At least she, too, seems to reluctantly agree we might have a problem with stop and search, and has launched a review.

Ed Milliband, by contrast, said much to agree with (including criticising the government's "simplistic" response to the riots). Let's hope his approach signifies a genuine shift in Labour thinking and a move away from crime policies that have all too often amounted to attempts at outflanking the Tories from the right.

Public trust and police legitimacy across Europe

Article on Comment is Free here. This is (loosely) based on the first findings from the 5th European Social Survey (ESS), which contained questions on trust in the police, legitimacy, compliance and consent.

There was also a linked news story here - which plays rather fast and loose with the issue of country rankings. I would say the UK police come at the top of mid-table across the 20 countries included in the first release of the ESS, rather than being in any way seen as 'untrustworthy'. Although I suppose most of the countries we would want to be compared with - Germany, the Scandinavians - do rank higher. Public trust in the police is certainly higher in the UK than in Bulgaria, Hungry and Russia, but I guess that's not a particularly strong recommendation.

Ethnic variation in sentencing

Depressing article in the Guardian yesterday. Note the academic's caution in assigning a causal link with prejudice within the courts system, though. For example, Coretta Phillips from the LSE:

"[But] on the basis of the data published yesterday, it would be hard to conclude anything about prejudice and discrimination from the magistracy or judiciary or that there is greater criminality among minority groups."


I think this shows admirable restraint! She is of course correct that the statistics on their own cannot prove discrimination or prejudice. They are only the raw numbers, and don't therefore take into account things like offending histories, potential mitigating factors and so on. The figures certainly do not prove discrimination. But the data from certain areas, in particular, certainly indicate it. For some prejudice not to be present, at least in some of the local areas mentioned, we would have to believe that the black offenders had very different records and applicable mitigating factors to the white offenders. I wonder how plausible this idea really is......?

What is it about US cops and pepper spray?

Rhetorical question, obviously.

As I think the article notes, this looks like someone spraying bugs. Watch it to the end though - fascinating and rather wonderful to see the crowd turn on the police, in a non-violent way, and apparently shame them into retreat. The looks on the faces of some of the officers speak volumes.

More on the August riots

Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott have a new e-book on the riots, out today I think. If this summary is anything to go by it looks like an essential read for anyone wanting to understand (as opposed to simply condemn) what transpired.

After a long hiatus .....

..... A new post.

Not much more than a link, though, but at least it's a link to something I've written. That's probably going to be the new plan around here - work orientated posts, less waffle, less often, and links to stuff I think is interesting. We'll see how it goes.

So this is a piece on the London riots for La Vie Des Idees. I think I may have posted some vaguely similar thoughts around the time of the riots. See what you think!

NYPD attack wall street demonstration

The pictures are pretty shocking (although probably hardly surprising if you live in parts of many US cities). But on a lighter note you have to love the ultra-serious delivery and downright anger of the anchorman.

Police forces to cease recording ethnicity during stop and accounts

Really not good news.

The ethnic disproportionality in the application of police stop powers is one of the most invidious aspects of current police practice in the UK - and probably in many other countries as well. There is nothing better suited to driving a wedge between the police and the people they serve (i.e. us) than the sense that we are being unfairly stopped by officers in order that (a) we should account to them for our movements, or (b) that we should be body searched (with no reason necessary under several pieces of legislation). Disproportionality in this type of police behaviour seems to me to be the antithesis of procedural justice (and distributive justice and probably any other type of justice as well).

The argument made by Craig Mackey, who's ACPO lead on stop and search - that police have no real powers to stop and account (so presumably the change is therefore of little consequence) is I think slightly disingenuous. I wonder how many ordinary people distinguish between a stop for an account and a stop for a search, or how often a stop intended to lead to a search does not, and therefore becomes in essence a stop and account.

We should not forget that stopping people in public places merely on the suspicion that they may have committed a crime is one of the most significant powers the police have. On one hand, in the final analysis police officers should be able to approach members of the public to ask them questions and, yes, 'account' for what they are doing. Policing as it is currently construed in the UK would be impossible without this type of contact between police and citizen (for one thing policing would have to become almost entirely reactive). But on the other hand they do this not as ordinary citizens but as wielders of the power of legitimate violence. The coercion in this type of police behaviour lies not in the legal status of the act but in the power of the people doing it. Until they have proved that they can use this power fairly monitoring all stop activity is vital.

Tony Blair's magical reasoning

Tony Blair was interviewed at length on Radio 4 today (listen here - it was in the post 8am section). Among the many pearls of wisdom was his explanation as to why the motivations of Jihadists have nothing whatsoever to do with 'western' actions in the middle east and elsewhere. Rather:

"They believe in what they believe in because they believe that their religion compels then to believe in it"

That's right, they believe in something because they, y'know, believe in it.

Mind you, similar 'reasoning' is used in political discourse all the time. David Cameron recently appeared to blame the crimes committed during the August riots on 'criminality'; although to be fair, unlike Blair he went on to suggest some causes that at least nodded to a move beyond tautology (whether you agree with them or not). Lack of ability to tell right from wrong, lack of self control and so on.

Of course in both cases the magical reasoning is entirely self-serving. Blair is ideologically committed to the idea that Islamist terrorism is sui generis and definitively unrelated to actions taken by western governments; Cameron is a right wing Tory for whom the idea that crime has social as well as personal causes is extremely challenging. It's just a shame that politicians making these types of comments don't get pulled up more often by those interviewing them. If they were, we might at least start to get at their motivations for such laughable arguments.

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.