Latest News, Analysis and Opinion  (Page 7)

FEATURE: The latest National Strategic Assessment of Serious and Organised crime, published by the UK’s National Crime Agency, highlights the potential for conflicts and wider “geopolitical instability” to provide “fertile ground” for exploitation by organised crime groups (OCGs), while the growth in online crime and the impact of overseas OCGs on UK communities and security represent significant threats, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: A study into the policing of organised crime in London by Open University Criminologist Dr Sarah Hutton suggests that while “disruption” has become a central metric in UK law enforcements efforts to tackle organised crime, it is a concept that is rarely measured or validated, resulting in a claim rather than proving a demonstrable reduction in criminality, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: A decade after forced marriage was first criminalised and more than 30 years after state-level hate crime legislation was introduced, rates of prosecution in Australia remain low compared to the UK; strategy and reform consultant Kavitha Vipulananda explores the differences in approach between the two jurisdictions, and suggests four steps Australia could take to improve outcomes for victim-survivors of both offences.

ANALYSIS: As global policing enters a new data-driven era, questions continue over how the new technology is perceived by the public; a new study by Dr Javad Pool, Professor Marta Indulska, Associate Professor Ida Asadi, and Professor Shazia Sadiq of The University of Queensland, and Queensland Police Service Data Services Manager Nick Moss, suggests that while most of the community accept the use of data-driven and AI-assisted tools in policing, far fewer trust the technology.

FEATURE: The latest Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment from INTERPOL highlights the “industrialisation” of transnational financial fraud and the likelihood that offending will offending “escalate significantly” over the next five years as artificial intelligence leads to easier entry for criminal networks, prompting the agency to set out a range of initiatives to tackle the threat, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Five women are murdered in the US every day by a current, former or estranged intimate partner, with intimate partner violence also a leading cause of death of American children; Pennsylvania State University Assistant Professor Dr Kathryn Spearman argues that, with clear warning signs of the predictable and therefore preventable behavior that leads to domestic homicides, the recognition and response of courts, communities and law enforcement to such red flags needs to be better.

FEATURE: Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth highlights the opportunities presented by a new Young Leaders in National Security Fellowship offered by the Counter Extremism Group, which aims to identify, nurture, and guide young people – including students, graduates, and young police officers and police staff – interested in counter-terrorism and counter-extremism issues.

INTERVIEW: A new Police Public Safety Officer (PPSO) role has been created by Northern Territory Police Force to patrol public transport, government housing projects and anti-social behaviour hotspots, in a bid to improve visibility, target low-level crime and free up general duties officers to focus on more serious offending, as Acting Assistant Commissioner Brendan Muldoon explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

FEATURE: In the latest in The Police Student series focusing on Community and Neighbourhood Policing, Policing Insight Academic Editor Dr Carina O’Reilly focuses on problem-solving – including the evolution of problem-oriented policing and its relationship with neighbourhood policing, the importance of community engagement, and the impact of under-resourcing

LATEST RESEARCH: This summary curates the key policing-related research that's been published online in the last week, with links to the original journal articles, and selected abstracts.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of this week’s first UK National Response Policing Conference, ACC Matt Boyle, the National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Response Policing, spoke to Policing Insight’s Christine Townsend about changing perception of the response role as a specialism in its own right, the importance of response officers in the investigation process, and the need to recognise the role as the interaction where the public experience policing most directly.

OPINION: In the second in his series on UK policing’s software and IT archipelago, organisational psychologist Michael Stephenson explores what modernising actually looks like when the islands of the archipelago cannot simply be rebuilt from scratch, including the constraints to modernisation, how they can be navigated, the police reform process as leverage, and what an effective and realistic modernisation sequence should look like.

INTERVIEW: An Edinburgh Napier University evaluation of Police Scotland’s roll-out of Naloxone found the approach had helped to save lives and build trust with communities; Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons spoke to two of those involved in the evaluation, Visiting Professor and former Police Scotland Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie, and Dr Inga Heyman, Associate Professor of Policing and Public Health, who argue that the more people should be training and equipped with the anti-overdose drug.

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE: AI-powered voice analytics are transforming lawful intelligence operations by replacing rules-based, batch processing with real-time, adaptive AI models. Using advanced speech-to-text and natural language processing, SS8’s Intellego XT platform makes voice data searchable, multilingual, and context-aware, enabling investigators to rapidly triage conversations, detect meaningful threats, and uncover insights at scale.

INNOVATION: While most police agencies accurately monitor and measure performance data such as calls answered, response times and arrests made, metrics on how a community feels about that performance is often absent; Michael Simon, Chief Strategy Officer at civic technology specialists Zencity, explains how Edmonton Police Service embedded community perception into strategic planning and performance management.

FEATURE: UK policing’s current national training approach to child criminal exploitation (CCE) and criminal exploitation (CE) is “largely deficient”, according to a new report from the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, which also calls for a shift from an enforcement lens to one of vulnerability to tackle CCE/CE and criminal exploitation in drug markets, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE: The American Society of Evidence-Based Policing (ASEBP) invites researchers, practitioners, and leaders from across the policing community to join in celebrating a decade of innovation, collaboration, and progress at the 10th Annual ASEBP Conference. Hosted by the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, from May 20-22, 2026, this milestone event brings together those advancing evidence-based policing. Be part of the conversation shaping its future.

LONG READ: With UK police forces facing a range of challenges including complex demand, declining trust and confidence, and widescale reform, the importance of leadership in policing has never been greater; in his second long-read article for Policing Insight, Dr Aksar Bashir of the West Midlands Police Force Contact Training Academy explores the SHIELD (support, health, inspiration, ethics, listening, development) leadership concept and how it could be a step towards “a more engaged workforce, an ethical service, and renewed public confidence”.

FEATURE: A new report by Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland into how the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the wider criminal justice system recognises, assesses and responds to child criminal exploitation highlights the “inconsistent and, in many respects, inadequate” responses, and urges the PSNI to improve its delivery model as well as recoding and monitoring systems to better protect children targeted by paramilitary groups and criminals, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Police forces and other agencies in Australia are increasing their efforts to tackle ‘crimefluencers’, members of decentralised online crime networks who build their own status through ‘posting and boasting’ about criminal activities, and encourage and coerce others to do the same; Dr Xanthe Weston and Dr Raquel Peel of Central Queensland University, and Dr Joel Robert McGregor of Swinburne University, explore the issue of crimefluencers, and suggest steps that can be taken to tackle the problem.

FEATURE: While the ‘Run, Hide, Tell’ guidance remains necessary life-saving advice for the public in the event of a terrorist attack, it was never designed to be adopted by businesses, who have a direct duty of care to staff and customers; Policing insight’s Andrew Staniforth looks at the ‘Guide Shelter Report’ model, launched recently by ProtectUK, aimed at ensuring businesses and organisations have a good security culture in place in response to such scenarios.

INTERVIEW: Deanna Cantrell, a former chief of police and now Director of Law Enforcement Partnerships for Axon, believes leaders need to adopt a “policing inside out” approach by applying the lessons learned from community engagement to leading their own teams – especially those young-in-service officers whose input is often overlooked when it comes to decision-making – as she explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

LATEST RESEARCH: This summary curates the key policing-related research that's been published online in the last week, with links to the original journal articles, and selected abstracts.

INNOVATION: A “revolutionary” suite of tech tools developed as part of the Tackling Organised Exploitation (TOEX) programme’s Capabilities Environment is now being made available to all police forces in England and Wales, to assist with complex investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse as well as other serious crime, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.