Public order policing (again)

I think public order policing is one area which you can identify in which the many police forces are getting things badly badly wrong. Another example, via the Guardian - essentially banning festivals that have been going on for years because, well, why, exactly? Even the local council seems surprised at what's transpired.

At the very least this is bad PR on the behalf of the police. No-one likes a killjoy. But I'm inclined to agree with George Monbiot and others and say that actions like this are fundamentally undemocratic. People should have a right to freely gather, even if the end is simply (gasp!) to enjoy themselves. It's the job of the police to facilitate this, not stop it happening. The fact that 73 people out of c.20,000 were arrested last year is neither here nor there. In any large gathering you're going to get people misbehaving - look at football matches, for example - but that doesn't mean the gathering should be prevented from occurring.

A peculiarly British obsession

When discussing the relationship between police and public in Great Britain one thing above all others always comes up - 'bobbies on the beat'. In the main, the view will be that there aren't enough, and if only we had more then this would somehow magically solve the 'crime problem'.

This is so strong a theme that it appears that press and politicians follow public opinion on this issue, in contrast to their more usual stance of assuming people think a certain way in the face of evidence to the contrary. Think for example about the divergence between how punitive people are thought to be and how punitive they actually are (see here for an interesting discussion of some of the issues). The public obsession with this type of policing is so strong that police officer's have been heard to complain that some people would like a constable standing permanently on their doorstep - keeping the world at bay, presumably.

In this context it's hardly surprising that the Home Office have apparently tried to inflate the proportion of time neighbourhood teams spend 'on the beat'. One issue is the usual one of government setting itself targets (here, the policing pledge) and then having to wangle the figures, to a greater or lesser extent, to meet them. Wangle more, here, I think, because I suspect 'attending neighbourhood meetings' is not what most people would mean by 'on the beat' - and that's before the ASA's concerns about the 80 per cent claim appearing to apply to all 140,000 thousand officers kicks in.

But perhaps another issue is more fundamental. Is it really an efficient use of resources to have sworn officers wandering around the streets waiting for something to happen, or could their time be put to better use? While some beat patrolling will always be a good idea, especially that done by PCSOs, should the police be the first and only institution involved in providing visible agents of social control in local areas? That they pretty much are says a lot about the gradual removal from public space of others who used to do something similar - park wardens, bus conductors and so on - and is probably an example of the gradual colonisation of that space by the criminal law, at the expense of other ways of maintaining order.

One argument is of course that patrolling police make people feel better. And they probably do, to some extent. But is this enough in itself to warrant such expensive activity? Are there other benefits to beat patrols - do they have any deterrent effect, for example?Actually, they might, if limited to crime hotspots, although you kind of get the impression that such targeting would go against the spirit of the policing pledge. What about deterrence more widely? Has anyone done some kind of cost benefit analysis, or is beat patrol considered to be a good in and of itself? If it is, for example in terms of public confidence, how long do the effects last - are they effervescent, only lasting for a few minutes, or longer lived? Do they apply to all people, or are some scared or annoyed by a very visible police presence?

These are all really interesting questions, and I certainly don't think we have answers to them all yet. Which makes it all the more bizarre that the Home Office should make itself a hostage to targets which may not actually be that useful and which in any case it has to fudge in order to achieve. And then undermine public confidence in crime statistics again by playing a bit fast and loose with the figures.

Watching them watching you watching them

Here's another example of the way in which the use of new media techniques look set to alter the balance of power between police and protesters in public order situations.

Only a few years ago this case, if it had gone to court at all, would have been decided on contradictory personal accounts and, perhaps, police video footage (and further back in time, personal accounts only). In either case a conviction would probably be the most likely outcome; that's a guess, but it doesn't seem unreasonable.

The fact that in addition to all the film the police hold there are now thousands of hours of footage of demonstrations and other situations routinely uploaded to Youtube - and definitively into the public domain - seems to mark a sea-change in what police and protesters can expect to get away with. This looks like a situation that police are going to have to learn to live with, just as people involved in demonstrations have over the last 10-15 years.

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes ...

... and it seems my time has come!

"Ugly criminals"?

"Being very attractive reduces a young adult’s propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it. Being very attractive is also positively associated with wages and with adult vocabulary test scores, which implies that beauty may have an impact on human capital formation. The results suggest that a labour market penalty provides a direct incentive for unattractive individuals toward criminal activity. The level of beauty in high school is associated with criminal propensity seven to eight years later, which seems to be due to the impact of beauty in high school on human capital formation, although this avenue seems to be effective for females only" (Mocan and Tekin 2010).

I want to use this post to discuss a recent paper that appeared in The Review of Economics and Statistics (full version here if you can access it, otherwise the abstract above will have to do). Initially because I though the idea was so mad it was worth a few comments, but having re-read the paper more now because I think it throws up some very interesting points beyond its specific empirical content.

The article is based on analysis of the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n=15,338, which is relevant). It uses respondent’s ‘beauty’ (controlling for a very wide range of other variables) to predict self-reported criminal behaviour. It’s worth noting that the mechanisms the paper suggests for attractiveness affecting criminal activity are all social – it essentially claims that the less attractive are more likely to commit crime (and the more attractive less likely) because they are treated differently by those around them, in terms of access to the jobs market, treatment at school, and so forth (hence for example the lower vocabulary scores mentioned above - it's not that 'ugly' people are thick, its that they get treated differently at school and this inhibits their learning process).

Methods and stats

First, let’s get the methods/statistics out of the way. With two provisos they are actually quite convincing. It really does seem that the physical attractiveness of females (although to a lesser extent males – see below) is associated with self-reported criminal activity, in the ways suggested in the abstract above.

The two provisos are quite important, though. Firstly, how is physical attractiveness measured? It turns out by the interviewers in the survey. There is something immediately almost repellent about this, but the authors present some evidence that such ratings are fairly robust, and I don’t want to get bogged down in this point, so let’s just take it as read for now that they do have a somewhat accurate measure of the survey respondent’s physical attractiveness.

The second proviso is even more important. Namely, that the effect sizes they identify are very small. For example, “Being a very attractive female reduces the propensity to damage property by 1.1 percentage points” (controlling for personal and family characteristics). This effect is statistically significant, because of the very large sample size. But is it substantively meaningful? Does it make any sense to concentrate on such a small effect? The authors clearly think so, and up to a point I agree with them – the social world is a complicated place, and the unique association between any one factor (e.g. physical attractiveness) and another (e.g. propensity to vandalise things) is almost bound to be small. If there is a statistically significant association, robust to all the control variables that seem relevant, it probably does mean something.

But on the other hand, there must come a point where an association, although significant, is so small that it really can’t have much meaning – certainly if we want to change the world in some way. A one percentage point difference is interesting in the context of this paper, but would be so if, for example, some sort of policy intervention was being planned? I think we as social scientists do not pay enough attention to the pay off between statistical significance and effect size, and this paper butts right up against that point.

One other point on the specific empirical content – as noted the effect of ‘attractiveness’ on crime appear much more consistent for women than for men. I’m not too sure what to make of this, and neither I think are the authors. While it might be consistent with their theoretical framework (since it appears physical attractiveness as rated by others varies by more among women than among men, it should therefore have a bigger effect), it’s unclear how this fits with ‘explaining crime’, given the well known gender disproportionality in criminal activity.

Three more substantive points

There are (at least) three more substantive points I’d like to make about the paper, again because these seem to me to be relevant far beyond its specific content (there are more but these particularly strike me).

First is the rational choice theory model of criminal behaviour used in the paper. It essentially takes as a given the idea that people commit crimes when there is motive (reward) to do so, there is an opportunity, and the rewards outweigh the potential costs. Yet much recent work on why people commit crime would stress the importance of morals and normative values – to the extent that most people do not commit crime because they do not even see it as an option, even in situations where they would gain from doing so.

Now, this may not make much difference in terms of this specific paper, because we would expect normative orientations toward the law to be evenly distributed across ‘attractive’ and ‘unattractive’ people and thus not affect the results. But taking such a narrowly instrumentalist approach toward decisions to commit crime does I think in the wider context run the risk of over-simplifying what seems certain to be a very complex process.

More serious for the specific claims of the paper is its very one-sided view of what crime is. The types of crimes covered by the analysis are ‘damage’ (vandalism), burglary, robbery, theft, assault and selling drugs; essentially, ‘crimes of the poor’. What about white collar crime? Tax evasion? Fraud? Corporate crime? At the very least the omission of a wider range of criminal behaviour limits the claims that can be made by the paper. But worse, it may be that being physical attractive, and thus preferred in the job market to others, opens up greater opportunity to engage in white collar crime (by increasing both opportunity and level of potential gain). So it could be in these cases physical attractiveness is linked to higher rates of self-reported offending. Of course, such a impoverished of crime is not unique to this paper – it seems to bedevil many economic and similar approaches to criminological matters.

But to finish on a more positive note I think this is a very interesting paper not because of the specific claims it makes but because of the way it tries to integrate ‘innate’ characteristic (physical attractiveness), personal proclivities and propensities (to commit crime), and the social world which influences and interacts with them. That is, it takes seriously the idea that people are individuals (and individual), and make personal choices about how and when to act – but their individuality and their choices (and possibility of choices) are structured and limited by the actions of others around them and the social and economic structures in which all are embedded. It seems to me that this kind of empirically robust ‘cross-level’ analysis is exactly the kind of thing we should be trying do more of in British criminology.

The hyper-criminalisation of normal human beahviour

By normal human behaviour I'm talking of course about sex and drugs (rock and roll appears to be OK, at least for now). Calls for a 'legal high' (mephedrone) to be banned because it has been linked to the deaths of two lads are complemented by a shadow minister who appears to be saying we should criminalise underage sex to an even greater extent than we do already (or at least punish it more - he's not exactly clear, unsurprisingly).

What is about our current political scene that sees banning, criminalisation and more criminalisation as the only answers to any problem? One answer lies in the very moving interview shown on Channel 4 news with the parents of one of the boys who died. It was awful. But current policy making seems to be largely determined by such emotive moments, rather than a rational debate about the pros and cons of, in this case, making something illegal (class A status has been mentioned, placing mephadrone on a par with heroin and crack). I've yet to see much evidence to suggest that making drugs illegal makes any difference in terms of use or availability (although I stand to be corrected on that).

Don't get me wrong - I think mephadrone is pretty unpleasant drug. I just don't think criminalisation will be some sort of panacea to whatever problems are associated with it - and might even make them worse. This is before taking into account the fact that new 'legal highs' will just spring up to take its place.

Hence the title. It seems to me that taking mind-altering substances are as much a part of the human condition as having sex - and any attempt to over-regulate either is doomed to failure. So let's keep the prison sentences for sexual predators, not teenage fumbles. And let's not automatically ban something because of a few horrible events. At the very least, perhaps there are better ways to deal with the problem.

Update: Another (and interesting) potential reason for over-criminalisation here.

The trouble with charts

Having spent all morning grappling with tables and charts this seemed particularly relevant to me today. I like the offer to correct poor practice, too!

Campaign to reform UK libel laws

I think this campaign deserves everyone's support - and here's a good reason why.

Of course it had to be the DWP investing in such dubious technology - anything to get them darn benefit cheats! Costing us almost as much as the bonuses paid out by one of the nationalised banks.

Police infiltration of anti-racist groups

This video raises so many issues it's hard to know where to start......

Sent down for a year for throwing a bottle

The story surrounding the sentences being handed down to those convicted after the demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy last spring is quite outrageous. But perhaps the worst bit so far comes at the end of this piece. One of the protestors, who admitted throwing one bottle (he says at the Israeli embassy, the police say at them), was given a one year prison sentence. Apparently for that act and that act alone. According to the report, his father says:

"that the judge gave Mosab a flawless character reference. "He said, 'I know you came here peacefully, I know you have an excellent character, I know you were not armed, you said sorry to the police.'" He was sure his son would go free. "I was so pleased. Then the judge says, 'I'm going to give you this sentence to deter other people.'"

The judge in the case has been quite open about using sentences to deter people from behaving in the same way in the future. This seems to reveal an alarming naivety about the deterrent impact of sentence length (i.e. there isn't any). It also goes against one of the key strands in any properly thought through idea of justice: that the sentence should fit the crime. A one year sentence for throwing one bottle in the heat of the moment is grossly disproportionate, both in absolute terms and in relation to other sentences handed down for other crimes.

I can't blame people in the Muslim community for thinking they are being singled out for special treatment here. There really doesn't seem to be any other explanation, especially when you compare the above with what has happened to other protesters in the past (as noted by Bruce Kent in the linked article).

How do they get away with it?

This really should be a complete scandal.

The level of disproportionality in police stop/search activity - and the public's acceptance of it - says, I think, as much about us as it does about the police. Despite all the advances in 'race' relations over the last 20-30 years I suspect there are many who think it's OK that Black and Asian people are 10 times more likely to be stopped than their White counterparts. That this is far far in excess of any differences in offending behaviour that can be identified doesn't seem to matter.

Indeed, the bias in police activity might even be one reason why some people appear so convinced that people from ethnic minorities are more involved in crime (something which, at the aggregate level, there's no evidence for whatsoever, although it may be true that some people from some minority groups are more involved in some types of crime than similar people from other groups - almost certainly because of variation in socio-economic conditions). A variation on the no smoke without fire argument, perhaps.

The police service itself, an organisation (genuinely, I think) interested in trying to develop better ways of dealing with increasing diversity and multi-culturalism, appears positively schizophrenic on this. Quite apart from the ethical and legal considerations, allowing this state of affairs to continue surely presents a massive barrier to police attempts to improve 'community relations', something which sits right in the middle of many current policies and strategies, from neighbourhood policing to Prevent.

Crime: up, down, shake it all around

This piece is quite interesting, and broadly correct, I think, but the really good stuff is in the comments below. Amid the general distrust of government statistics (often, any statistics) are some pretty strong statements about (a) the British Crime Survey (it can't be trusted) and (b) police recorded crime statistics, which are either the only reliable source - presumably because they are 'real' - or completely made up.

This chimes with something I was going to write in the wake of the latest Tory fast-and-loose interpretation of violent crime stats, until I was more or less beaten to it. But I think the point is worth repeating in some sense, because I really can't fathom what people's problem with the BCS is. As long as you bear the caveats in mind (over 16s only; personal/household crime only; probably misses the truly excluded) it has to be the most reliable record of crime victimisation we have. One simple reason: the sample size is truly gigantuan, itself a reflection of the relative frequency of some of the crimes it's trying to pick up, whereas so many of the objections seem to made on the basis of anecdote and/or common sense ('what we all know'). There are other reasons, but I think this on its own is a massive point.

How people can say they know crime is going up in the face of the weight of evidence the BCS provides is beyond me. Unless of course they really believe it's all a conspiracy. Which some probably do, but I don't get the sense that it's a particularly common viewpoint. It seems to be more a simple denial that the world could possibly be different to way people believe it to me. Which always, to me, begs the question in such debates - my conclusion that crime is (still) falling is based on a representative sample survey with 40,000 respondents carried out by a reputable survey company. And your assertion that is going up is based on ....... what, exactly?

The BCS is most certainly not perfect, but we can be more sure that we 'know' things about trends in and patterns of crime - as opposed to crime events - based on the data it provides than we can 'know' things based on what a bloke in the pub said, what we read in the press, and yes, what actually happens to us as individuals.

I know I'm being hopelessly naive about the possibility for rational debate on this subject on the interweb.

On the other hand, I think most people recognise using police recorded crime statistics as anything other than a record of police activity is problematic, to say the least. Which is not to say they're useless, by any means. But the idea that anyone should place more store on police data than BCS to look at trends over time, particularly, is frankly ridiculous. Not that this will stop people doing it, especially when it's much harder to fudge BCS data to make it suit their particular narratives.

The Venables affair

It's coming to something when one of the best comments on the whole business comes from a cartoonist.

That said I'm not totally sure what to make of it all. For example, why was the information that Venables was back inside made public in the first place? There's already been so much written about the whole thing this seems to have gone down the memory hole - in fact, the government released the information the day before it was going to be published by the tabloids. Which obviously takes us right back to Steve Bell's cartoon. The tabloid press really does seem to run the government agenda sometimes.

Once the first 'drip' of information is out, of course, the pressure builds and builds until something has to give. But while I was initially thinking the government would have to reveal what he's (allegedly) done, I now think Jack Straw is doing the right thing by holding firm. Surely the clinching argument is that if there is to be a new trial it is imperative, for all concerned, that it should not be compromised by too much information being made public. I've heard several commentators make the point that celebrities (especially Gary Glitter) have had fair trials, even though events surrounding the accusations being so well-known. But this isn't really an argument, since presumably if the trials were fair this was despite the publicity, not because of it.

Until the facts are decided in a court of law, where's the public interest in airing the accusations in such an emotive case? I've yet to be convinced there is any.

Lessons from down under

Lest we forget that the UK is not the only country with a severely distorted view of criminal justice - what it should do, how it should do it, and why. Things can be just as bad in Australia.

Every politician should read this

I really can't understand why the fact that England and Wales has more children in prison than any other country in Western Europe isn't a national scandal. Especially when it's extremely expensive and does very little to reduce crime.

More on this later, if I have time.

'Fear of crime', part 1,243

The political insistence that fear of crime is still a big problem continues. This time Labour are at it.

In reality, of course, less than one in seven people say they are 'very worried' about crime (see Table 5.07 in this PDF), and this has been falling in recent years. While worry about crime can have quite negative implications for some of those who feel it (although for other people fear - more accurately, worry - can be 'functional', enabling them to get on with their lives in a positive way), to prioritize 'fear' as the basis of a policy in this way seems slightly perverse. For one thing, are we sure that more police on the streets automatically means less fear? Is all fear of crime really about crime, or do more diffuse anxieties about modern life, insecurity, and uncertainty play a role - and if they do, what can the police really do about it?

It's almost as if, despite the relatively low levels of worry about crime, and of course actual crime rates which continue to fall despite the recession, we (more correctly, politicians) have lost the ability to talk about the issue in any other way. If it's crime, it has to be fear, dread, worry, crisis. Or at least 'continued public concerns' which must be addressed, in this case by the magic pill of more 'bobbies on the beat'. As Chicken Yoghurt points out, such talk very naturally slips into calls for increased power for the police, the need for new databases - of DNA, of vehicle movements - to address a problem which, by almost every available measure, is getting better, not worse.

In an election year this ratcheting effect will only get worse, and the pressure toward ever more illiberal criminal justice policies seems almost inevitable. It'll be a very brave politician who sticks their head about the parapet to say, "hang on, have we really got such a big problem here?".