Guns, germs, and stealing: exploring the link between infectious disease and crime.

Can variation in crime rates be traced to the threat of infectious disease? Pathogens pose an ongoing challenge to survival, leading humans to adapt defenses to manage this threat. In addition to the biological immune system, humans have psychological and behavioral responses designed to protect against disease. Under persistent disease threat, xenophobia increases and people constrict social interactions to known in-group members. Though these responses reduce disease transmission, they can generate favorable crime conditions in two ways. First, xenophobia reduces inhibitions against harming and exploiting out-group members. Second, segregation into in-group factions erodes people's concern for the welfare of their community and weakens the collective ability to prevent crime. The present study examined the effects of infection incidence on crime rates across the United States. Infection rates predicted violent and property crime more strongly than other crime covariates. Infections also predicted homicides against strangers but not family or acquaintances, supporting the hypothesis that in-group-out-group discrimination was responsible for the infections-crime link. Overall, the results add to evidence that disease threat shapes interpersonal behavior and structural characteristics of groups

Cyber-crime Science = Crime Science + Information Security

Cyber-crime Science is an emerging area of study aiming to prevent cyber-crime by combining security protection techniques from Information Security with empirical research methods used in Crime Science. Information security research has developed techniques for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets but is less strong on the empirical study of the effectiveness of these techniques. Crime Science studies the effect of crime prevention techniques empirically in the real world, and proposes improvements to these techniques based on this. Combining both approaches, Cyber-crime Science transfers and further develops Information Security techniques to prevent cyber-crime, and empirically studies the effectiveness of these techniques in the real world. In this paper we review the main contributions of Crime Science as of today, illustrate its application to a typical Information Security problem, namely phishing, explore the interdisciplinary structure of Cyber-crime Science, and present an agenda for research in Cyber-crime Science in the form of a set of suggested research questions

CPC: Crime, Policing and Citizenship - Intelligent Policing and Big Data

Crime, Policing and Citizenship (CPC) – Space-Time Interactions of Dynamic Networks has been a major UK EPSRC-funded research project. It has been a multidisciplinary collaboration of geoinformatics, crime science, computer science and geography within University College London (UCL), in partnership with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). The aim of the project has been to develop new methods and applications in space-time analytics and emergent network complexity, in order to uncover patterning and interactions in crime, policing and citizen perceptions. The work carried out throughout the project will help inform policing at a range of scales, from the local to the city-wide, with the goal of reducing both crime and the fear of crime. The CPC project is timely given the tremendous challenging facing policing in big cities nationally and globally, as consequences of changes in society, population structure and economic well-being. It addresses these issues through an intelligent approach to data-driven policing, using daily reported crime statistics, GPS traces of foot and vehicular patrols, surveys of public attitudes and geo-temporal demographic data of changing community structure. The analytic focus takes a spatio-temporal perspective, reflecting the strong spatial and temporal integration of criminal, policing and citizen activities. Street networks are used throughout as a basis for analysis, reflecting their role as a key determinant of urban structure and the substrate on which crime and policing take place. The project has presented a manifesto for ‘intelligent policing’ which embodies the key issues arising in the transition from Big Data into actionable insights. Police intelligence should go beyond current practice, incorporating not only the prediction of events, but also how to respond to them, and how to evaluate the actions taken. Cutting-edge network-based crime prediction methods have been developed to accurately predict crime risks at street segment level, helping police forces to focus resources in the right places at the right times. Methods and tools have been implemented to support senior offices in strategic planning, and to provide guidance to frontline officers in daily patrolling. To evaluate police performance, models and tools have been developed to aid identification of areas requiring greater attention, and to analyse the patrolling behaviours of officers. Methods to understand and model confidence in policing have also been explored, suggesting strategies by which confidence in the police can be improved in different population segments and neighbourhood areas. A number of tools have been developed during the course of the project include data-driven methods for crime prediction and for performance evaluation. We anticipate that these will ultimately be adopted in daily policing practice and will play an important role in the modernisation of policing. Furthermore, we believe that the approaches to the building of public trust and confidence that we suggest will contribute to the transformation and improvement of the relationship between the public and police

International sentencing in the context of collective violence

This article evaluates some of the theoretical and practical arguments which suggest that the potential for international trial justice to make a significant contribution towards reconciliation and peace following mass atrocity is limited. Conversely, it argues that it is possible to move beyond the current narrow conceptualisation of penality in international trials by re-thinking the ideological framework for punishment and sentencing and giving trial outcomes a greater sense of moral purpose and legitimacy in the eyes of victims and those communities seeking justice. The article argues why this is necessary and achievable through the adoption of more constructive strategies and interventions in international trial process

EU counterterrorism strategy: value added or chimera?

Europe did not wake up to terrorism on 9/11; terrorism is solidly entrenched in Europe's past. The historical characteristics of Europe's counterterrorism approach have been first, to treat terrorism as a crime to be tackled through criminal law, and second, to emphasize the need for understanding the 'root causes' of terrorism in order to be able to prevent terrorist acts. The 9/11 attacks undoubtedly brought the EU into uncharted territory, boosting existing cooperation and furthering political integration-in particular in the field of justice and home affairs, where most of Europe's counterterrorism endeavours are situated-to a degree few would have imagined some years earlier. This development towards European counterterrorism arrangements was undoubtedly event-driven and periods of inertia and confusion alternated with moments of significant organizational breakthroughs. The 2005 London attacks contributed to a major shift of emphasis in European counterterrorism thinking. Instead of an external threat, terrorism now became a home-grown phenomenon. The London bombings firmly anchored deradicalization at the heart of EU counterterrorism endeavours