New crimes – new tactics: the emergence and effectiveness of disruption in tackling serious organised crime

Whilst the encouragement to use disruption techniques in tackling organised crime has emerged in government and law enforcment rhetoric, little is known about its importance. This study examines how two UK police forces use a disruption approach to target 100 organised crime suspects. The findings show that a disruption approach offers a more dynamic and flexible approach, when compared with traditional prosecution and is popular with practitioners. However further research is needed to understand the most effective method of delivery and the level of impact the approach can bring

Hosting Byzantine Fault Tolerant Services on a Chord Ring

In this paper we demonstrate how stateful Byzantine Fault Tolerant services may be hosted on a Chord ring. The strategy presented is fourfold: firstly a replication scheme that dissociates the maintenance of replicated service state from ring recovery is developed. Secondly, clients of the ring based services are made replication aware. Thirdly, a consensus protocol is introduced that supports the serialization of updates. Finally Byzantine fault tolerant replication protocols are developed that ensure the integrity of service data hosted on the ring.Comment: Submitted to DSN 2007 Workshop on Architecting Dependable System

Community and the Problem of Crime

A book review of Community and the Problem of Crime (author Karen Evans

A Peer-to-Peer Middleware Framework for Resilient Persistent Programming

The persistent programming systems of the 1980s offered a programming model that integrated computation and long-term storage. In these systems, reliable applications could be engineered without requiring the programmer to write translation code to manage the transfer of data to and from non-volatile storage. More importantly, it simplified the programmer's conceptual model of an application, and avoided the many coherency problems that result from multiple cached copies of the same information. Although technically innovative, persistent languages were not widely adopted, perhaps due in part to their closed-world model. Each persistent store was located on a single host, and there were no flexible mechanisms for communication or transfer of data between separate stores. Here we re-open the work on persistence and combine it with modern peer-to-peer techniques in order to provide support for orthogonal persistence in resilient and potentially long-running distributed applications. Our vision is of an infrastructure within which an application can be developed and distributed with minimal modification, whereupon the application becomes resilient to certain failure modes. If a node, or the connection to it, fails during execution of the application, the objects are re-instantiated from distributed replicas, without their reference holders being aware of the failure. Furthermore, we believe that this can be achieved within a spectrum of application programmer intervention, ranging from minimal to totally prescriptive, as desired. The same mechanisms encompass an orthogonally persistent programming model. We outline our approach to implementing this vision, and describe current progress.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200

Promoting Component Reuse by Separating Transmission Policy from Implementation

In this paper we present a methodology and set of tools which assist the construction of applications from components, by separating the issues of transmission policy from component definition and implementation. This promotes a greater degree of software reuse than is possible using traditional middleware environments. Whilst component technologies are usually presented as a mechanism for promoting reuse, reuse is often limited due to design choices that permeate component implementation. The programmer has no direct control over inter-address-space parameter passing semantics: it is fixed by the distributed application's structure, based on the remote accessibility of the components. Using traditional middleware tools and environments, the application designer may be forced to use an unnatural encoding of application level semantics since application parameter passing semantics are tightly coupled with the component deployment topology. This paper describes how inter-address-space parameter passing semantics may be decided independently of component implementation. Transmission policy may be dynamically defined on a per-class, per-method or per-parameter basis.Comment: Submitted to ICDCS 200

Can higher education reduce the negative consequences of police occupational culture amongst new recruits?

Purpose There is considerable evidence to illustrate police occupational culture can negatively influence service delivery and organizational reform. To counteract this, and to improve professionalism, the Police services of England & Wales will become a graduate profession from 2020, although little empirical evidence exists as to what impact this will have. This study examines the implications of a police degree course on its students. Design/Methodology Initially a survey was conducted with 383 University students studying for Criminal Justice related undergraduate degrees in a UK University. This indicated Police Foundation degree students (N=84), identified themselves as being different, and behaving differently, to other University students. To explore the reasons for this, four focus groups were conducted with this cohort, during their two-year degree programme. Findings The study found that the Police Foundation Degree students quickly assimilated a police identity, which affected their attitudes and behavior. The process led to a strengthening of ties within their own student group, at the expense of wider student socialization. Originality/ Value The study provides new findings in relation to undergraduate students who undertake a University based degree programme, tailored to a future police career. The results have implications for both police policy makers and those in Higher Education as it highlights the strength of police occupational culture and the implications for the design of future police related degree programmes