Crime

FEATURE: An independent review of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), commissioned by Chief Constable Jon Boutcher and carried out by leading barrister Rachel Langdale KC, has acknowledged the efforts of officers across the force in tackling violence against women and girls, but warns that much more needs to be done to tackle the “clear evidence of sexism and misogyny within the PSNI”, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: Following the launch of the UK’s National Knife Crime Centre (NKCC), Commander Stephen Clayman, the officer leading the centre, spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about the role of the NKCC, efforts to “join up the dots” to tackle the sale and importation of knives, and the need to improve both data collection and understanding around knife crime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

OPINION: Victoria Police is making more arrests than at any point in its recorded history; but strategy and reform consultant Kavitha Vipulananda argues that, as the force is also experiencing record rates of officer burnout, a documented accountability deficit at command level, and a systematic misidentification problem in family violence proceedings, all the evidence points toward the need for a comprehensive reform agenda spanning all three of these interconnected issues.

FEATURE: The UK is winning the tactical battles but “losing the strategic war” in the fight against serious organised crime (SOC), according to a new report from the Coalition for Global Prosperity, which calls for the introduction of a more coherent strategy that approaches SOC as a national security risk, recognises threats from other states including China, Russia and Iran, and focuses on using existing frameworks to move the fight “upstream”, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Child criminal exploitation has long been recognised in the UK – particularly the county lines model – and is a focus for a number of European countries, but understanding of the issue is limited in Australia; Dr Susan Baidawi, an Associate Professor at Monash University, warns that far from being an emerging problem, such exploitation is already a defining contemporary youth justice issue, and one which urgently requires data collection, multi-agency collaboration, and a response embedded in child protection.

FEATURE: A new evaluation of the UK Government’s Turnaround Programme, designed to help support more than 20,000 children “on the cusp of the youth justice system”, has hailed the schemes success and recognised the positive impact of closer collaboration between youth offending teams, police and other agencies, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: The Early Awareness of Stalking Intervention (EASI) team now in place in West Midlands Police is leading to an increasing number of stalking protection orders issued, a longer-term approach to supporting victims, and better monitoring and interventions with perpetrators, as Detective Superintendent Adam Jobson, the force’s lead for domestic abuse and stalking, explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

FEATURE: This month sees the launch of a £30m Online Crime Centre combining police, intelligence services, banking, mobile networks and major tech firms in the fight against fraud – a key element in the UK Government’s recently launched Fraud Strategy 2026-2029, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Former British Transport Police officer Rob Glassborow was a member of the County Lines Task Force launched in 2019, which adopted an approach of focusing on juveniles exploited by drug gangs as offenders rather than victims; now a lecturer in policing at Leeds Trinity University, he admits to being “in awe” of how county lines policing has become a specialist area with a clear safeguarding mission, and points to the increased knowledge and expertise as an example of the success of professionalising policing.

ANALYSIS: Research from Operation Soteria has found numerous institutional issues in the policing of rape and serious sexual offences that require urgent attention: in this article, Dr Anna Gekoski, Dr Kari Davies, and Professor Miranda Horvath explore these issues, which include problems relating to staffing, training, and technology.

ANALYSIS: A recent report based on interviews with officers in England and Wales in 2021-22 highlights a number of ‘institutional challenges’ around investigating rape and serious sexual offences; however, Prof Betsy Stanko, Senior Strategic Academic Advisor for Operation Soteria, Chief Constable Sarah Crew, National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Adult Sexual Offences, and Detective Chief Superintendent Melissa Laremore, Operation Soteria Delivery Lead, set out the significant progress in addressing these and many other issues over the past five years.