Crime

FEATURE: A New South Wales (NSW) Police state-wide domestic violence (DV) operation, combining raids targeting high-risk DV offenders with education for youngsters and training for officers, has led to more than 10,000 charges against over 5,000 offenders; the operation looks set to maintain a continuing increase in charges and clear-up rates for DV in NSW – a success story that has also been repeated across a whole range of offences according to latest figures, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Australia is losing the fight to disrupt illicit drug supply chains – not for lack of effort, but because it needs additional weapons and new approaches – warns Dr John Coyne, Director of National Security Programs at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who calls for a shift towards measuring law enforcement successes against disruption, deterrence and network degradation, rather than arrests, seizures and prosecutions.

FEATURE: A recent report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) following a series of hearings into the UK Government’s efforts tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) has highlighted how government officials lack understanding of the scale of VAWG and have “starkly different” views on available support to those expressed by local agencies and victim-survivors, with one MP on the PAC warning that the Government “appears oblivious” to some levels of harm, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: To address key areas of crime and vulnerability, UK constabularies can use visual analysis software to pull together data from myriad sources for the prevention of harm, the detection of crime, and the identification of risk; Seth Cooke, a former Avon and Somerset Police intelligence analyst and now i2 Group technical and tradecraft specialist, explains how this technology powerfully supports approaches to knife crime, antisocial behaviour, and violence against women and girls.

FEATURE: The latest Europol Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) highlights the growing threat of cyber criminals – many of them inexperienced – using ‘cybercrime-as-a-service’ platforms to steal and trade data and digital information, and attempt to hold large commercial organisations as well as individuals to ransom, as Policing Insight’s Chris Allen reports.

INTERVIEW: Essex Police’s Commercial Vehicle Unit (CVU) is staffed by officers who have completed specialist training to qualify as transport managers and HGV drivers, enabling the team to engage more effectively with the industry – which has helped to significantly reduce the number of killed and seriously injured collisions involving lorries, as CVU Sergeant Dearsley told Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of next month’s 4th World LGBTQI+ Criminal Justice Conference in Austin, Texas, Policing Insight’s Christine Townsend spoke to Austin Police Department’s Sergeant Mike Wilmore-Crumrine, Conference Executive Director, about his own experiences as an officer who is gay, the work being done to improve internal workplace cultures for queer-identifying officers as well as the communities policing serves, and why the conference theme of ‘Bridging the Gap’ is also crucial part of moving forwards.

OPINION: With the UK spotlight on tackling violence against women and girls and a strong focus on domestic violence and abuse, Noor Da Silva, Sexual and Domestic Abuse Service Manager at the University of Northampton and one of the country’s 15 specialist Harmful Cultural Practice IDVAs argues that it’s also time to address the gaps in current domestic abuse risk assessment tools which disproportionately endanger minoritised women.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of this month’s Global Societies of Evidence-Based Policing Conference, Policing Insight’s Keith Potter talked to conference speaker Prof Ben Bradford, Director of UCL’s Centre for Global City Policing, about the findings from recent research into the UK public’s trust and confidence in policing, why the decline shouldn’t be seen as catastrophic – yet – and what forces and policing more widely can do to reverse some of that decline.

INNOVATION: An updated National Policing Digital Strategy for forces across the UK has called for greater government investment in new policing technology, a commitment from forces to modernise “local ways of working” and follow the blueprints set out nationally, and a push for “capturing, cleaning, managing, using, and sharing data at all levels” if the service is to grasp the “once-in-a generation opportunity to deliver significant, tangible change” offered by technology advances, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: The work of the European PACTESUR2 project to improve the protection of public spaces has led to the creation of a new EU-POLNET, a European network of more than 20 local police forces that aims to develop local forces’ expertise and promising practices through peer-to-peer exchanges, as Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth reports.

FEATURE: Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons spoke to two officers from the South Australian Joint Anti-Child Exploitation Team (SA JACET) – one of a number of JACET units across the country – about their successes in protecting children and arresting offenders involved in online child sexual exploitation, as annual referrals to the national Centre to Counter Child Exploitation soar, increasing more than five-fold over the past seven years.

LONG READ: The riots that affected many English cities last summer following the Southport murders highlighted the increasing difficulty for policing globally in responding to social media disinformation; Policing Insight’s Christine Townsend, a communications specialist, looks at the challenges that have faced police in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US in the response to digital communications, as well as efforts to use online platforms to better engage communities and build trust.

OPINION: Twenty years ago this week, UK policing faced one of its largest planned operational challenges – the G8 summit in Scotland – as well the 7/7 suicide bombings in London; in this second article, Policing Insight contributor Graham Wettone – then an experienced sergeant on the Metropolitan Police Public Order Intelligence Unit – describes the training and deployment of intelligence and evidence gathering teams during the summit, and the devastating impact of the London attacks.

OPINION: Twenty years ago this week, UK policing faced one of its largest planned operational challenges – the G8 summit in Scotland – as well the 7/7 suicide bombings in London, the most devastating terrorist attack since the Lockerbie bombing; two of Policing Insight’s regular contributors, Martin Gallagher and Graham Wettone, were involved in the response to these events, and in this first of two articles, Martin shares his memories and experiences of policing the G8.

FEATURE: Scottish Biometrics Commissioner Dr Brian Plastow has set out a range of steps Police Scotland should take to gain the maximum benefit from new technology that will “transform society and policing” – including backing greater investment in live facial recognition, particularly in the fight to prevent violence against women and girls – as Policing Insight’s Martin Gallagher reports.

INNOVATION: University of Sheffield Senior Law Lecturer Dr Joe Purshouse, and University of Southampton Law Lecturer Dr Joe Atkinson, set out the findings from a series of workshops and events hosted by the UK’s Predictive Policing Network, including the current implantation of predictive policing technology, the regulation governing its use, and the potential opportunities and challenges of future adoption of predictive policing tools – particularly in relation to the use of artificial intelligence.

ANALYSIS: Police forces have been urged to improve their data capture and analysis around non-fatal strangulation and suffocation after a new report from the Institute for Addressing Strangulation highlighted a 65% increase in the number of recorded cases in 2023-24, but 70% of cases failing to progress to court and little clear or consistent data about victims or suspects, as Policing Insight’s Keith Potter reports.

ANALYSIS: The UK Government’s latest Wastewater Analysis Programme report has highlighted an estimated 85% increase in ketamine use, prompting National Police Chiefs’ Council National Drugs Co-ordinator Mark Lay to call for more data sharing and closer collaboration between police and other agencies to make young people more aware of the dangers of the drug, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: New research suggests that Australians living in rural areas are more likely to support tougher penalties for crime than those in the cities; Caitlan Davey, Dr Kyle Mulrooney and Dr Sue Watt explain the reasons behind this divide, the implications for policing and the criminal justice system, and what can be done to address it.

INNOVATION: With the recent Counter-Terrorism Preparedness Network report focusing on the security benefits and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI), Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth looks at some of the key issues raised by the report, as well as the work of the EU’s PRECRISIS initiative in establishing compliance frameworks around the use of AI in security contexts, which ensure that ethical standards, data privacy and personal rights can be maintained.

FEATURE: A new report from animal welfare charity the Naturewatch Foundation is calling for mandatory training for UK police officers to recognise how animals are used in domestic abuse cases involving coercive control, after highlighting a “postcode lottery” in the current approaches of forces across England and Wales, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: After the tragic murder of a 19-year-old woman in 2022, Essex Police set about changing how it assesses known and suspected perpetrators of domestic violence and developed an approach to stop them that had been “stolen with pride” from tackling gangs; Policing Insight’s Ian Weinfass spoke to Detective Superintendent Matt Cornish and Detective Constable Robert Kedar about their work.

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