The when and where of an emerging crime type: the example of metal theft from the railway network of Great Britain

Metal theft has become an increasingly common crime in recent years, but lack of data has limited research into it. The present study used police-recorded crime data to study the spatial and temporal concentration of metal theft from the railway network of Great Britain. Metal theft was found to exhibit only weak seasonality, to be concentrated at night and to cluster in a few locations close to – but not in – major cities. Repeat-victimisation risk continued for longer than has been found for other crime types. These and other features appear to point to metal theft being a planned, rather than opportunistic, offence and to the role of scrap-metal dealers as facilitators

Safe, secure or punctual? A simulator study of train driver response to reports of explosives on a metro train

Many transport organizations now regard regular employees as important contributors to their security strategies. For this reason, it is essential to understand the interaction between service and security tasks. There is empirical evidence, for example, that workers under pressure to be punctual make more errors in the performance of safety procedures. It is therefore useful to determine whether punctuality goals have a similar effect on the performance of security procedures. This article reports a study conducted on a metropolitan rail system driving simulator to test whether train drivers also ‘take shortcuts’ in the perfomance of security procedures when placed under pressure of punctuality. Four hypotheses were tested using performance measures of two groups of 10 participants. The results show that there is a conflict not only between service and security goals, but also between safety and security goals

Toward a More Structured Crime Scripting Method

Scripts have been used in different disciplines to characterize how individuals conceptualize the conduct of goal-oriented tasks. Cornish introduced this modelling approach to the field of environmental criminology as a more systematic way to identify offenders' decisions during the commission of crime. Despite the growing number of articles about crime scripts, there is limited information about the scripting process itself. In particular, there is no publication describing all of the activities involved in the scripting of crime in a comprehensive manner. As a result, the procedural aspects of physical and cyber crimes are predominantly modelled using intuitive rather than structured methods. To fill in this gap, the current study introduces the concept of crime script lifecycle and examines the stages involved in crime scripting process. Following a bottom-up approach, the research involved searching for information relevant to the production of crime scripts and synthesizing the results to improve crime scripting practice and create a roadmap for future work in this field

Technological innovation in policing and crime prevention: Practitioner perspectives from London

Digital technology now plays a critical role in policing and security management, with policing apps, drones and body-worn cameras potentially being game-changers. Adoption of such technologies is, however, not straightforward and depends upon the buy-in of senior management teams and users. This study examines what obstacles practitioners face in the procurement, deployment and use of crime prevention and detection technologies. The issue is explored through a number of expert interviews conducted with practitioners in London between August 2019 and March 2020. This work expands previous, more theoretical, literature on the topic by adding a practical perspective and advances the understanding of issues faced in innovation processes and their management. We identified a variety of issues and obstacles to technological innovation for policing. These include the deployment of new systems at the cost of old ones, lack of financial and political support, issues in public–private partnerships, and public acceptability. Although individual practitioners may have the expertise and willingness to unleash the full potential of surveillance and crime-reduction technologies, they are usually restrained by institutional rules or, in some cases, inefficiencies. In terms of the latter, this study especially highlights the negative impact of a lack of technical interoperability of different systems, missing inter- and intra-agency communication, and unclear guidelines and procedures

Potential Explosive Device on a Commuter Train: What drives train drivers to deviate from the security procedure?

Explosives pose a major threat to urban metro rail systems. Train drivers are therefore expected to regularly perform security procedures in response to reports of suspicious items on the train. This study was conducted to develop a multi-factorial account of deviation from one such security procedure by train drivers. By analysing data from focus group interviews with 30 train drivers, observation in a rail simulator, actual cab rides, and training material four major themes emerged to explain why drivers may deliberately deviate from following normative procedures designed by their managers. This included perceived pressure from safety and service goals, stress and fatigue during peak hours of operation, and workload created by security tasks. The results are organised in a succinct model that draws a link between drivers’ perceived pressure from multiple goals, and the changing driving conditions in which they perform. The study proposes ways for managers of urban commuter rail networks to understand the pressures that their drivers face in performing security tasks that are not part of their conventional job profile. The findings can inform changes in training methods, encourage drivers to discuss their reasons for deliberate rule violation, and support the design of security procedures more likely to be implemented

Security and the smart city: A systematic review

The implementation of smart technology in cities is often hailed as the solution to many urban challenges such as transportation, waste management, and environmental protection. Issues of security and crime prevention, however, are in many cases neglected. Moreover, when researchers do introduce new smart security technologies, they rarely discuss their implementation or question how new smart city security might affect traditional policing and urban planning processes. This systematic review explores the recent literature concerned with new ‘smart city’ security technologies and aims to investigate to what extent these new interventions correspond with traditional functions of security interventions. Through an extensive literature search we compiled a list of security interventions for smart cities and suggest several changes to the conceptual status quo in the field. Ultimately, we propose three clear categories to categorise security interventions in smart cities: Those interventions that use new sensors but traditional actuators, those that seek to make old systems smart, and those that introduce entirely new functions. These themes are then discussed in detail and the importance of each group of interventions for the overall field of urban security and governance is assessed

Systematic review of situational prevention methods for crime against species

© 2021, The Author(s). Illegal activities concerning terrestrial species (TS) are responsible for a variety of health, environmental, economic and security issues. The majority of academic research associated with species relates to conservation, with few publications specifically investigating the scale of crimes impacting species or how they can be prevented. This article systematically reviews the available evidence about what works to prevent crime against terrestrial species. Of over 29,000 documents that were returned in the first stage of the review, these were filtered to just over 100. The remaining documents were partially or fully read to identify the most relevant documents to include in the final qualitative synthesis. The review results show there is a significant lack of primary research in this area, as only five articles were found that met the study inclusion criteria. The identified articles focus on the effects of two types of situational crime prevention interventions: community outreach and ranger patrol frequency. Community outreach was shown to have a significant impact on local poaching levels, while for patrolling the evidence suggests a positive impact on the discovery of poachers, animal carcasses and poaching paraphernalia, however, the quality of these studies varied greatly. To prevent the further decline of species numbers internationally, more effort should be invested in publicising existing research into the effectiveness of prevention strategies that have not reached the wider scientific audience, as well as the funding and promotion of research into alternate methods of crime prevention

Study of processing techniques for radar non-cooperative target recognition.

Radar is a powerful tool for detecting and tracking airborne targets such as aircraft and missiles by day and night. Nowadays, it is seen as a genuine solution to the problem of target recognition. Recent events showed that cooperative means of identification such as the IFF transponders carried by most aircraft are not entirely reliable and can be switched off by terrorists. For this reason, it is important that target identification be obtained through measurements and reconnaissance based on non-cooperative techniques. In practice, recognition is achieved by comparing the electromagnetic sig nature of a target to a set of others previously collected and stored in a library. Such signatures generally represent the targets reflectivity as a function of space. A common representation is known as one-dimensional high-resolution range-profile (HRRP) and can be described as the projection of the reflectivity along the direction of propagation of the wave. When the measured signature matches a template, the target is identified. The main drawback of this technique is that signatures greatly vary with aspect-angle so that measurements must be made for many angles and in three dimensions. This implies a potentially large cost as large datasets must be created, stored and processed. Besides, any modification of the target structure may yield incorrect classification results. Instead, other processing techniques exist that rely on recent mathematical algorithms. These techniques can be used to extract target features directly from the radar data. Because of the direct relation with target geometry, these feature-based methods seem to be suitable candidates for reducing the need of large databases. However, their performances and their domains of validity are not known. This is especially true when it comes to real targets for at least three reasons. First, the performance of the methods varies with the signal-to-noise ratio. Second, man-made targets arc often more complex than just a set of independent theoretical point-like scatterers. Third, these targets are made up of a large number of scattering elements so that mathematical assumptions are not met. In conclusion, the physical correctness of the computational models are questionable. This thesis investigates the processing techniques that can be used for non-cooperative target recognition. It demonstrates that the scattering-centre extraction is not suitable for the model-based approach. In contrast, it shows that the technique can be used with the feature-based approach. In particular, it investigates the recognition when achieved directly in the z-domain and proposes a novel algorithm that exploits the information al ready in the database for identifying the signal features that corresponds to physical scatterers on the target. Experiments involving real targets show that the technique can enhance the classification performance and therefore could be used for non-cooperative target recognition

Measuring the Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Crime in a Medium-Sized City in China

Objectives: The study examines the variation in the daily incidence of eight acquisitive crimes: automobile theft, electromobile theft, motorcycle theft, bicycle theft, theft from automobiles, pickpocketing, residential burglary, and cyber-fraud before the lockdown and the duration of the lockdown for a medium-sized city in China. Methods: Regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) models are used to test the effect of the lockdown measures on crime by examining the daily variation of raw counts and rate. Results: It is indicated that in contrast to numerous violent crime categories such as domestic violence where findings have repeatedly found increases during the COVID-19 pandemic, acquisitive crimes in this city were reduced during the lockdown period for all categories, while “cyber-fraud” was found more resilient in the sense that its decrease was not as salient as for most other crime types, possibly due to people’s use of the internet during the lockdown period. Conclusions: The findings provide further support to opportunity theories of crime that are contingent upon the need for a motivated offender to identify a suitable target in physical space

Current status of food waste generation and management in China

The current status of FW generation, including its characteristics, management, and current challenges in China, were analyzed, and further suggestions were made with regards to improvement. About 19.50% of the FW generated could be treated under the current designs for treatment capacity in China. FW characteristics show great variability in different economic regions in China, where both treatment efficiency and FW management are poor. Combined pretreatment and three-phase separation is the most used pretreatment method, and of the current FW pilot projects, anaerobic digestion is the most prevalent, accounting for 76.1% of all projects. Significant regional characteristics have been identified regarding FW generation and the treatment capacity for FW processing. Possible factors influencing FW management in China were also discussed. Finally, detailed suggestions are given for further development of FW treatment capacity, particularly regarding potential technical routes and management measures