United States

OPINION: The killing of five people in Plymouth by Jake Davison (pictured), a man whose online activity included regular interaction with the incel sub-culture, has raised questions in the UK around the need for such groups to be targeted under counter-terror and extremist legislation; former Detective Chief Superintendent Gareth Bryon explores the growth in the incel movement and related attacks on women both in the UK and the US, and looks at what can be done to tackle the sub-culture.

ANALYSIS: Crime prevention programmes in many countries often adopt a blanket approach to communities, with little regard to race or culture; ahead of next week’s Australia and New Zealand Society of Evidence-Based Policing Conference, researchers Dr Kabir Dasgupta, Dr André Diegmann, Professor Tom Kirchmaier and Dr Alexander Plum discuss their latest study which highlights the role of ethnicity in the criminal behaviour of young fathers, and suggests that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy response to crime reduction is likely to fail.

ANALYSIS: A network of programmes seek to provide pathways out of criminal behaviour for at-risk youth in New York City; Greg Berman, former Director of New York’s Center for Court Innovation, looks at both the challenges and the potential of the Cure Violence approach, and underlines the importance of empirical research in establishing if, why and how the various programmes achieve their aims.

FEATURE: After a turbulent 12 months for policing in the United States, it’s no surprise that President Joe Biden is working on – or has already implemented – a range of measures that will impact on law enforcement; Brady Kirkpatrick, owner and Editor-in-Chief of website Gun Made, highlights the key reforms already introduced by the Biden administration, and those likely to materialise in the coming weeks and months.

ANALYSIS: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this last in a series of essays from the Violence Reduction Project, former Newark Police officer Prof Jon Shane of John Jay College of Criminal Justice outlines the thinking behind situational crime prevention, and how addressing the physical and social environment can help to reduce crime, aggression, and disorder.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, former NYPD Detective Sergeant Joseph Giacalone, now an Adjunct Professor at the City University of New York, explains why solving cold cases could build community bridges, take more offenders off the street, and play a crucial part in reducing levels of violence.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, born and bred city resident Voice of Chicago highlights the devastating impact of the increase in the number of murders, violence and gun crime has had on the city’s Black community, and what can be done to address the problem.

OPINION: The increased use of police body-worn cameras has been welcomed in many quarters as a route to improving transparency and accountability; but Bryce Newell, Assistant Professor of Media Law and Policy at the University of Oregon, fears that public records laws such as those prevalent in the US can lead to people’s most sensitive and traumatic moments being made available for public viewing.

ANALYSIS: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Professor Joel Caplan of Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice explains how using a data-informed approach to crime prevention which engages local communities can offer an effective alternative to focusing solely on law enforcement.

ANALYSIS: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Professors Richard Rosenfeld and David Klinger of the University of Missouri, St. Louis outline how tackling three key issues – subduing the pandemic, redoubling smart policing tactics and implementing police reform – could provide a three-pronged strategy for reducing violent crime.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, police officer Ari Maas argues that the Broken Windows approach employed so successfully on the New York subway in the 1980s by Transit Police Chief Bill Bratton has been wrongly conflated with zero tolerance and stop-and-frisk, leaving a successful crime fighting tool overlooked and dismissed by academics and others.

FEATURE: Organised crime groups have a long history of infiltrating the legitimate transport industry to move illicit goods and ‘commodities’ around the globe; now a new report has highlighted how those criminal networks are increasingly targeting the tow-truck sector as cover for their illegal activities, as Policing Insight's Chris Allen explains.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, former FBI agent Donovan J Leighton explores the problems associated with tackling gun violence, and the challenges and successes of Operation Ceasefire in balancing prevention and enforcement.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Elliott Averett, a former Seattle Police officer and JD candidate at Georgetown University, explains why rioting, lack of support from political leadership, and the threat of defunding and layoffs are driving good police officers to quit.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Dr Laura Huey, Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, argues that programs for ‘supportive reporting’ have the potential to reduce often unrecorded violence through increased reporting, not something easily dismissed.

VIOLENCE REDUCTION PROJECT: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Chris Fisher, Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives at Seattle Police Department, says that any attempt to tackle the problem must focus on stopping the violence first, before wider public health and community approaches can be considered.

OPINION: With Sadiq Khan re-elected as London Mayor, the focus now turns to one of the key issues of the campaign – tackling knife crime; Greg Berman, former Director of New York’s Center for Court Innovation, and Elizabeth Glazer, former Director of the Mayor of New York’s Office of Criminal Justice, believe there are lessons for London in the efforts of New York to tackle its own problem of criminal violence.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Stephen Eide, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, calls for more effective treatment and supervision of those who are mentally ill as an important step towards reducing violence and creating safer communities.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Professor Michael Fortner of City University of New York explores the political limitations of the ‘causal story’ attached to #defund and why a blended reform approach rather than the moral clarity of police abolition will save more lives.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and gun violence remains worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Dr Maria (Maki) Haberfeld of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice argues that improving national standards in law enforcement and taking politics out of policing would be much more effective in reducing violence than defunding the police.

OPINION: At a time when relationships between police and some communities are under growing strain, and in an era when law enforcement is encouraged to engage more positively through social media, there is always a danger that police forces themselves become the ‘fake news’; when that happens it’s important to address the problem quickly and effectively, explains Yael Bar tur, digital communications expert and former NYPD Director of Social Media.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and gun violence remains worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, DeVone Boggan, CEO of Advance Peace, explains why investing in ‘Violence Interrupters’ – reformed gun offenders operating as mediators, de-escalation experts and violence interventionists – has the real potential to drive change in gun-impacted communities.

OPINION: The guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd should be the catalyst for fundamental change in US policing, believes Professor Temitope Oriola, who argues that – with 17 disciplinary complaints against him – the fact that Chauvin was still a serving officer suggests the system is broken.

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Nick Selby, former Director of Cyber Intelligence and Investigations for NYPD, sets out why funding mental health teams staffed by clinicians and cops would be a smarter way to reduce violence and deaths.