FEATURE: A new report from the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse into the latest trends in child sexual abuse (CSA) offences in England and Wales has highlighted record levels of charges for CSA and long delays in court cases, but also significant geographical variations in data recording and trends that suggest the response to sexually abused children “depends on where they live”, prompting calls for a Government-led national prevalence survey to establish the true scale of the problem, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: A new Winston Churchill Trust report exploring the international policing responses to cybercrime, written by Queensland Police Service Detective Chief Inspector Michael Newman, has highlighted a range of learning opportunities and practical takeaways around prevention, detection, investigation, and capability to improve Australia’s law enforcement efforts to target cybercriminals, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: New research from the Youth Endowment Fund exploring how violence affects children and young people in England and Wales highlights “shocking disproportionality” across sectors such as youth justice and policing, and sets out five steps the Government should take – including around stop and search and diversion away from the criminal justice system – to address the problem, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: An evaluation of the UK Government-funded Project ADDER initiative has found that while the approach has led to more arrests of high-harm individuals, significant seizures of drugs and cash, and an increase in the number of users being referred to diversionary services through out-of-court disposals, a stronger focus on a ‘whole systems approach’ will be needed if the Project is to cut offending and reduce drug use, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: The continuing development of multi-channel public contact is a key issue for policing across England and Wales; in the last in the recent series of Policing Tech Forum webinars produced by PolicingTV, Content Guru Business Development Director Shub Naha, Humberside Police Chief Digital and Innovation Officer Scot Dunn, and David Jackson from the NPCC’s Digital Public Contact Programme, explored the opportunities for AI to improve service delivery as well as staff and officer wellbeing, but not to replace humans in the process.

INNOVATION: A Thames Valley Police trial of a mobile phone app-based tasking mechanism for hotspot policing has led to increased patrols, reduced costs and cuts in violent crime – and a scalable solution which researchers believe could be used for other policing activities, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: A recent UK conference on the management of sexual or violent offenders (MOSOVO) saw speakers call for a shift in focus to encouraging desistance from offending, rather than reacting to events, with the need for greater sharing of good practice and closer collaboration with partner agencies also high on the agenda, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) has launched new guidance on how forces and violence reduction units can adopt and implement the multi-agency focused deterrence (FD) approach to tackle serious violence, which international research shows has cut crime by an average 33%; the YEF’s Dr Stevie-Jade Hardy spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about how FD works, the guidance and ‘on the ground’ support offered by the YEF, and ongoing evaluations of the scheme in the UK.

INTERVIEW: With the continuing advances and availability of 3D printing technology, New Zealand Police National Intelligence Director Dan Wildy spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about the importance of the multi-disciplinary approaches being taken by the service in tackling a growing firearms threat favoured by organised crime groups, and the value of international collaboration.

INNOVATION: The roll out by two forces in Wales of operator-initiated facial recognition, which uses a mobile phone app to help identify individuals who are unable to confirm their ID, refuse to give details or give false information, is already resulting in benefits for the police and the public despite concerns voiced by campaign groups, as South Wales Police facial recognition lead Inspector Ben Gwyer told Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

INNOVATION: An initiative launched by City of London Police is helping those who end up in custody because of alcohol-related crime or excessive drinking to take steps to address their problems through a collaboration with Alcoholics Anonymous; as well as encouraging other forces to adopt the approach, Sergeant Richard Scullion – who oversees the initiative – believes there could also be wider benefits for officers, as he explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

INTERVIEW: A review of the connections between sexual exposure and contact sexual offending is calling for non-contact sexual offences to be handled by police with the same focus and response as rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO), as the impact on victims is still significant, and many of those offenders who go on to commit RASSO have previously carried out non-contact sexual offences, as London Metropolitan University Professor Dr Fiona Vera-Grey (one of the report’s authors) told Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

INNOVATION: As forces increase contact channels to include digital and online routes, the likelihood of comms staff being exposed to harmful images has increased, says Rebecca Malpass, Digital Communications Development Senior for Derbyshire Constabulary; now a new AI-based image filter together with additional guidance for staff can help to protect individuals from being exposed to indecent images, as she explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

INNOVATION: With the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate online child sex abuse material (CSAM), a new report from the Australian Institute of Criminology has highlighted the potential of the new technology to be deployed in the fight against CSAM and to relieve some of the burden on human investigators – but also warns that many would-be AI solutions are still not fit for purpose, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: A new Europol and Eurojust report on the challenges of tackling cybercrime has highlighted the huge volumes and difficult access to data, increasingly sophisticated anonymising measures deployed by criminals, and the legal and logistical difficulties of cross-border investigations as some of the key barriers for law enforcement, despite the “progressive strides” made by agencies and governments to address the issues, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: A ‘solution-focused approach’ to interactions both with the public and within the force is currently being explored by New Zealand Police, as a way to improve outcomes for the community as well as officer wellbeing; Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons spoke to psychologist Emma Burns of the Royal NZ Police College about the thinking behind the new approach, and how transforming conversations could eventually become the NZ Police go-to strategy.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of International Women’s Day, International Association of Women Police (IAWP) President Julia Jaeger spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about the continuing problems of misogyny and discrimination in the workplace, the need to revisit the gender agenda, and the work that will be going on at the IAWP annual conference later this year to advance gender equality.

FEATURE: The latest findings of the PwC Global Economic Crime Survey reveal that UK companies are in many instances ahead of their international counterparts in using data analytics to tackle crimes such as procurement fraud, supply chain fraud and corruption – but the consultants warn that there is still significant room for improvement, particularly at a time when perception of public sector corruption in the UK is at an all-time high, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: When it comes to research and services for victims of adolescent domestic abuse (ADA), those aged under 16 are often overlooked by policies that focus on the adult domestic abuse (DA) agenda; Gloucestershire Deputy Chief Constable Katy Barrow-Grint and City St George’s, University of London Senior Researcher Dr Ruth Weir spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about new efforts to identify the scale and nature of the problem, and encouraging police forces to use technology to extract ADA data.

FEATURE: A new report by Children’s Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza into the involvement of children in the riots across the UK last summer has found that “significant work” is still to be done to create a child-first approach to justice, while a strong distrust of police underlines “an urgent need for child-centred policing”, and conversations with children didn’t support the narrative that online misinformation or right-wing influences were responsible young people being “enticed to join in the aggression”, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: Since taking up her post as Iceland’s National Police Commissioner five years ago, Sigríður Björk Guðjónsdóttir has made significant strides in addressing gender inequality within the force, and in the service it provides; she spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about the need to keep pushing for greater gender equality, the new approaches to responding to domestic violence, and why appointing senior leaders from outside of policing helps to change potentially damaging cultures.

FEATURE: The ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ programme to tackle serious and organised crime (SOC) – implemented across almost all territorial police forces in England and Wales – is successfully driving down acquisitive crime and promoting partnership approaches that are ending silo working, according to a new evaluation report, although challenges still remain in some areas around community perceptions and long-term resilience, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: A tri-agency response to those in mental health crisis involving members of the police, ambulance and clinical services has been further expanded across Tasmania after implementation of the approach in other parts of the state successfully reduced the need for individuals to be restrained or involuntarily detained in hospital, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: The continuing development of digital and multi-channel public contact is a key issue for policing across England and Wales; in the third in the Policing Tech Forum series of webinars produced by PolicingTV, Ch Supt Tony Josephs, NPCC Digital Public Contact Programme Director, Tony Jackson, Head of Digital Futures at Merseyside Police, and Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO of Content Guru, explored opportunities to enhance the public experience through the My Police Portal and other technology, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.