̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - crime

A third of people from Chicago carry concealed handguns in public before they reach middle age

fpjl2 — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:56:48 +0000

Around a third (32%) of people who grew up in Chicago have carried a concealed firearm on the city streets at least once by the time they turn 40 years old, according to a major study of gun usage taking in a quarter of a century of data.

Urban sociologists behind the research argue that such carry rates are likely to be similar across many other major US cities.

̽��ֱ��research suggests that almost half of men (48%) have carried a concealed gun by the age of 40, compared to just 16% of women.*

̽��ֱ��study, published in Science Advances, is one of the few to track gun usage in the same US population across decades, and reveals that two-thirds of those who carried a gun in the past year started doing so in adulthood, compared to only a third who began in adolescence.

̽��ֱ��research also found that gun carrying in adolescence and adulthood may occur in response to different concerns. Those who started carrying in their teens often picked up a handgun in response to experiencing gun violence first-hand.** This was not true of those who began carrying over the age of 21.

“Among adolescents, we found a strong association between either witnessing a shooting or being shot, and beginning to carry soon after,” said Dr Charles Lanfear, study lead author from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“ ̽��ֱ��majority of people who ever carry a concealed handgun start doing so in adulthood. For those adults, we found no link between direct exposure to gun violence and gun carrying,” said Lanfear from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“This pattern suggests that gun carrying among adults may be linked to perceived threats of a more general nature, such as the idea that the world is a dangerous place, and police are incapable of ensuring public safety. Whereas gun carrying in adolescence may more often be related to direct experiences of gun violence.

“One simple but crucial fact is clear from our study, that carrying a concealed firearm is now a common event in the life course for Americans,” Lanfear said.

In the US between 1995 and 2021 some 89% of firearm homicides were committed with a handgun. However, despite the US gun stock doubling over the past quarter-century, and homicides spiking in COVID-era America, little is known about when and why people start carrying handguns.

̽��ֱ��latest study was conducted by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Pennsylvania and Harvard ̽��ֱ��. Data was taken from a representative sample of 3,403 children originally from Chicago who were tracked over a 25-year period between 1994 and 2021.

When data-gathering began in the mid-90s, children were drawn at random from 80 of Chicago’s 343 neighbourhoods and from across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum, as part of a major longitudinal study run by Harvard.

̽��ֱ��new analysis of this huge tranche of data reveals what researchers have called ‘dual pathways’ of concealed gun carrying: those who start in adolescence and those who start in adulthood, with the cut-off being the 21st birthday – the legal age for purchasing and carrying a handgun.

In addition to findings on why people carry, the team discovered that most people who carry a gun in their teens do not continue in later life, with only 37% still carrying in 2021. Those who start carrying handguns in adulthood are more persistent, with 85% still taking a gun out in public in 2021.

Moreover, the use of guns – whether it be shooting someone, shooting at someone, or brandishing a gun in self-defence – differs among the 2 groups.

Teenage gun-carriers that fired or brandished their weapons all did so for the first time before adulthood. “We found that no one who began carrying a gun in adolescence ended up using it for the first time after the age of twenty-one,” said Lanfear.

Those who picked up a gun in adulthood had a relatively steady rate of first usage over time, so that by middle age (40 years old) both groups of carriers had reached almost identical levels of gun usage: with around 40% of carriers having used a gun.

Researchers found a racial component to gun-carrying. Black individuals carried at rates over 2 times as great as those of Hispanic and white individuals. However, a previous study by the same team showed that Black city residents were twice as likely as White residents to witness a shooting by age 40.

In fact, the research found that those least likely to witness gun violence – White residents – are the most likely to start carrying a firearm in response to gun violence exposure.

While all self-described gun-carriers – whether they started in adolescence or adulthood –are more likely to have an arrest history compared to those who don’t carry guns, the researchers say their study reveals ‘stark’ differences in why and when and for how long people take guns onto the streets.

Added Lanfear: “These findings take on new relevance given recent social changes in America. In 2020 and 2021 the nation saw a sharp increase in adult gun carrying, coinciding with an uptick in gun purchases following the outbreak of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. We found the same trends in adult gun-carrying among our study sample.”

Major 25-year study reveals a ‘dual pathway’ for when people start carrying.

Carrying a concealed firearm is now a common event in the life course for Americans

Charles Lanfear

Jamie Carroll/Getty

A man drawing a conceal carry pistol from an inside the waistband holster

Notes:

* ̽��ֱ��researchers found female gun-carrying to be uncommon. However, they detected a rapid increase in some cohorts at the age of 35, but these increases all occurred during the first year of COVID-19 (2020). Researchers say this is consistent with other research finding large COVID-era increases in gun ownership among groups with historically lower rates of ownership.

**Exposure to gun violence before age 15 is associated with a doubling in the probability of carrying a concealed gun between ages 15 and 21. Around 44% of adolescent gun carriers started carrying after being exposed to gun violence. In contrast, exposure to gun violence at an older age is not statistically or substantively associated with gun-carrying. Direct exposure to gun violence after age 21 is far less frequent than during adolescence.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Airbnb rentals linked to increased crime rates in London neighbourhoods

fpjl2 — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:24:17 +0000

Latest research has revealed a ‘positive association’ between the number of properties listed as Airbnb rentals and police-reported robberies and violent crimes in thousands of London neighbourhoods between 2015 and 2018.

In fact, the study led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge suggests that a 10% increase in active Airbnb rentals in the city would correspond to an additional 1,000 robberies per year across London.*

Urban sociologists say the rapid pace at which crime rises in conjunction with new rentals suggests that the link is related more to opportunities for crime, rather than loss of cohesion within communities – although both are likely contributing factors.

“We tested for the most plausible alternative explanations, from changes in police patrols to tourist hotspots and even football matches,” said Dr Charles Lanfear from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, co-author of the study published today in the journal Criminology.

“Nothing changed the core finding that Airbnb rentals are related to higher crime rates in London neighbourhoods.”

“While Airbnb offers benefits to tourists and hosts in terms of ease and financial reward, there may be social consequences to turning large swathes of city neighbourhoods into hotels with little regulation,” Lanfear said.

Founded in 2008, Airbnb is a giant of the digital economy, with more than 5 million property hosts now active on the platform in some 100,000 cities worldwide.

However, concerns that Airbnb is contributing to unaffordable housing costs has led to a backlash among residents of cities such as Barcelona, and calls for greater regulation.

London is one of the most popular Airbnb markets in the world. An estimated 4.5 million guests stayed in a London Airbnb during the period covered by the study.

Lanfear and his ̽��ֱ�� of Pennsylvania co-author Professor David Kirk used masses of data from AirDNA: a site that scrapes Airbnb to provide figures, trends and approximate geolocations for the short-term letting market.

They mapped AirDNA data from 13 calendar quarters (January 2015 to March 2018) onto ‘Lower Layer Super Output Areas’, or LSOAs.

These are designated areas of a few streets containing around two thousand residents, used primarily for UK census purposes. There are 4,835 LSOAs in London, and all were included in the study.

Crime statistics from the UK Home Office and Greater London Authority for 6 categories – robbery, burglary, theft, anti-social behaviour, any violence, and bodily harm – were then mapped onto LSOAs populated with AirDNA data.

̽��ֱ��researchers analysed all forms of Airbnb lets, but found the link between active Airbnbs and crime is primarily down to entire properties for rent, rather than spare or shared rooms.

̽��ֱ��association between active Airbnb rentals and crime was most significant for robbery and burglary, followed by theft and any violence. No link was found for anti-social behaviour and bodily harm.

On average across London, an additional Airbnb property was associated with a 2% increase in the robbery rate within an LSOA. This association was 1% for thefts, 0.9% for burglaries, and 0.5% for violence.

“While the potential criminogenic effect for each Airbnb rental is small, the accumulative effect of dozens in a neighbourhood, or tens of thousands across the city, is potentially huge,” Lanfear said.

He points out that London had an average of 53,000 active lettings in each calendar-quarter of the study period, and an average of 11 lettings per LSOA.

At its most extreme, one neighbourhood in Soho, an area famed for nightlife, had a high of 318 dedicated Airbnbs – some 30% of all households in the LSOA.

̽��ֱ��data models suggest that a 3.2% increase in all types of Airbnb rentals per LSOA would correspond to a 1% increase in robberies city-wide: 325 additional robberies based on the figure of 32,500 recorded robberies in London in 2018.

Lanfear and Kirk extensively stress-tested the association between Airbnb listings and London crime rates.

This included factoring in ‘criminogenic variables’ such as property prices, police stops, the regularity of police patrols, and even English Premier League football games (by both incorporating attendance into data modelling, and removing all LSOAs within a kilometre of major games).

̽��ֱ��duo re-ran their data models excluding all the 259 LSOAs in central London’s Zone One, to see if the association was limited to high tourism areas with lots of Airbnb listings. ̽��ֱ��data models even incorporated the seasonal ‘ebb and flow’ of London tourism. Nothing changed the overall trends.

Prior to crunching the numbers, the researchers speculated that any link might be down to Airbnbs affecting ‘collective efficacy’: the social cohesion within a community, combined with a willingness to intervene for the public good.

̽��ֱ��study measured levels of collective efficacy across the city using data from both the Metropolitan Police and the Mayor of London’s Office, who conduct surveys on public perceptions of criminal activity and the likely responses of their community.

Collective efficacy across London is not only consistently high, but did not explain the association between Airbnbs and crime in the data models.

Moreover, when Airbnb listings rise, the effect on crime is more immediate than one caused by a slow erosion of collective efficacy. “Crime seems to go up as soon as Airbnbs appear, and stays elevated for as long as they are active,” said Lanfear.

̽��ֱ��researchers conclude it is likely driven by criminal opportunity. “A single Airbnb rental can create different types of criminal opportunity,” said Lanfear.

“An Airbnb rental can provide an easy potential victim such as a tourist unfamiliar with the area, or a property that is regularly vacant and so easier to burgle. A very temporary occupant may be more likely to cause criminal damage.”

“Offenders may learn to return to areas with more Airbnbs to find unguarded targets,” said Lanfear. “More dedicated Airbnb properties may mean fewer long-term residents with a personal stake in the area who are willing to report potential criminal activity.”

Airbnb has taken steps to prevent crime, including some background checks as well as requirements for extended bookings on occasions popular for one-night parties, such as New Year’s Eve. “ ̽��ֱ��fact that we still find an increase in crime despite Airbnb’s efforts to curtail it reveals the severity of the predicament,” said Kirk.

Added Lanfear: “Short-term letting sites such as Airbnb create incentives for landlords that lead to property speculation, and we can see the effect on urban housing markets. We can now see that the expansion of Airbnb may contribute to city crime rates.”

“It is not the company or even the property owners who experience the criminogenic side effects of Airbnb, it is the local residents building their lives in the neighbourhood.”

Notes:

*Above 2018 levels, which is when the study data ends.

Rising numbers of houses and flats listed as short-term lets on Airbnb are associated with higher rates of crimes such as burglaries and street robberies right across London, according to the most detailed study of its kind.

There may be social consequences to turning large swathes of city neighbourhoods into hotels with little regulation

Charles Lanfear

Karl Hendon/Getty

London townhouses in Greenwich

Yes

Medieval Murder Maps: homicidal Oxford students in the 14th century

fpjl2 — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 05:59:43 +0000

A project mapping medieval England’s known murder cases has now added Oxford and York to its street plan of London’s 14th century slayings.

US gun violence: half of people from Chicago witness a shooting by age 40, study suggests

fpjl2 — Tue, 09 May 2023 15:07:11 +0000

A study tracking the lives of Chicagoans from childhood and adolescence in the 1990s to the start of middle age has found that 56% of Black and Hispanic residents from across the city witnessed at least one shooting by the time they turned 40.

White residents were exposed to gun violence at less than half the rate of Black and Hispanic residents, although it was still high: 25% of White Chicagoans had witnessed a shooting before turning forty.

Across racial categories, 50% of all the study’s participants had been exposed to gun violence by age 40. ̽��ֱ��average age to witness a shooting was just 14 years old.

Of those in the study, more than 7% of Black and Hispanic people had themselves been shot before turning forty, compared to 3% of White people. ̽��ֱ��average age for being shot was 17 years old.

Researchers also compared the locations of gun violence incidents* in the year leading up to recent study interviews in 2021. Rates of shootings within a 250-metre radius of the homes of Black participants were over 12 times higher than those of White participants. Rates of shootings near the homes of Hispanic people were almost four times higher than for White people.

̽��ֱ��research team continued to gather data for participants who had moved out of the city, although the vast majority of gun violence took place within Chicago.

̽��ֱ��sustained stress of living with the potential for gun violence likely takes a “cumulative physiological toll” on Chicago’s citizens – and people in cities across the US, argue researchers.

Findings from the latest study, led by a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge criminologist in collaboration with researchers from Harvard and Oxford universities, are published in JAMA Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association

“Existing evidence suggests that the long-term stress of exposure to firearm violence can contribute to everything from lower test scores for schoolkids to diminished life expectancy through heart disease,” said study lead author Dr Charles Lanfear, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“We expected levels of exposure to gun violence to be high, but not this high. Our findings are frankly startling and disturbing,” said Lanfear. “A substantial portion of Chicago’s population could be living with trauma as a result of witnessing shootings and homicides, often at a very young age.”

“It is clear that Black people in particular are often living in a very different social context, with far higher risks of seeing and becoming victims of gun violence in the streets near their homes lasting into middle age.”

̽��ֱ��Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), a Harvard ̽��ֱ�� study, has followed thousands of children since they were first surveyed in the 1990s, gathering life experiences as they grow up in the city or move away. Participants are from households selected at random from a set list of eighty Chicago districts – carefully chosen to reflect Chicago’s spectrum of race and levels of social advantage, or lack thereof.

̽��ֱ��latest research focused on data gathered from 2,418 of participants born in the early 1980s through to the mid-1990s, equally split between men and women.**

̽��ֱ��oldest study participants, born in 1981, hit adolescence in the early-to-mid 1990s when lethal violence reached a peak in the US. “ ̽��ֱ��nineties saw a demographic bump collide with high poverty levels and rises in gang crime resulting in part from the crack epidemic,” said Lanfear.

“However, since 2016 we have seen another surge in gun violence. Rates of fatal shootings in Chicago are now higher than they ever were in the nineties.”

Men are far more likely to be involved in violent crime, and this is reflected in the risks of actually being shot by age 40, which are five times higher for men than women. However, there was a much smaller difference between the sexes for exposure to gun violence: 43% of women and 58% of men had seen someone shot.

“ ̽��ֱ��chronic stress effects on women from being so highly exposed to firearm violence may well be substantial in Chicago, and indeed in many US cities,” said Lanfear.

“ ̽��ֱ��study participants are taken from right across Chicago, and only a tiny fraction will be involved in any kind of crime. Given the levels of women and children witnessing gun violence in the city, the vast majority of this exposure will be as bystanders in public spaces, in streets or outside schools.”

“ ̽��ֱ��public health consequences of life in violent and traumatised neighbourhoods will be playing out not just in Chicago, but in many cities right across the United States,” Lanfear said.

Study following thousands of Chicagoans from across the city over a 25-year period found that 50% of the study participants had seen a shooting before middle age.

A substantial portion of Chicago’s population could be living with trauma as a result of witnessing shootings and homicides

Charles Lanfear

Getty images

Police line in Chicago, Illinois, USA

Notes

*Taken from the Gun Violence Archive, and not-for-profit organisation that collates data on gun violence drawn from sources including police departments, media and government agencies.
** Racial make-up of the study participants as follows: 890 Black respondents, 1146 Hispanic respondents, and 382 White respondents. ̽��ֱ��research looked at data from PHDCN study groups born in 1984, 1987 and 1996. ̽��ֱ��research team say they can safely estimate exposure to gun violence up to age 40 for the majority of the study participants. Even the younger group, now 27, are on track to compare with older cohorts, as most shootings are witnessed during youth.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

UK-US Summit for Democracy announces Cambridge team as joint winners of challenge to detect financial crime

cjb250 — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:53:46 +0000

̽��ֱ��announcement came at the second UK-US Summit for Democracy on 30 March 2023. ̽��ֱ��prize challenges innovators on both sides of the Atlantic to build solutions that enable collaborative development of artificial intelligence (AI) models, while keeping sensitive information private.

Driven by a shared priority to employ data to help solve critical global challenges in a manner that supports US and UK commitments to democratic values and the fundamental right to privacy, the challenges focused on developing PETs solutions for two scenarios: forecasting pandemic infection and detecting financial crime.

A team led by Professor Nic Lane from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge was named joint winner in the financial crime category. Their challenge was to develop a privacy-preserving solution to help tackle the challenge of international money laundering.

Xinchi Qiu, a PhD student in Professor Lane’s lab, said: “We developed an end-to-end privacy-preserving federated learning solution to detect potentially anomalous payments, leveraging a combination of inputs from a number of financial institution and different banks. Our project aims to develop a method that can utilise all the inputs from different institutions while protecting the original data.”

Professor Lane said: "Right now, machine learning with federated and other privacy preserving methods are niche. But in the near future they will be the norm. Most of the world's data is inaccessible for machine learning – however these new methods are making such data available in safe manner. This will be a game changer for many high impact domains that are currently starved of sufficient data, such as health, finance and legal. Our solution shows how this can be done effectively for money laundering, but our methods can migrate to these other domains."

Experts from academic institutions, global technology companies, and privacy start-ups competed for cash prizes from a combined UK-US prize pool of $1.6 million (£1.3 million). ̽��ֱ��winning solutions combined different PETs to allow the AI models to learn to make better predictions without exposing any sensitive data. This focus on combining privacy approaches encouraged the development of innovative solutions that address practical data privacy concerns in real world scenarios.

In the final phase of the challenges, the privacy guarantees of the solutions were put to the test by ‘red teams’, who attempted to reveal the original data used for training the models. ̽��ֱ��resilience of the solutions to these attacks determined the final winners.

Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said: “Never before has our privacy been so important and we must protect our democratic values by safeguarding the right to privacy. That is why the UK and its allies are collaborating to create innovative technologies that enable public institutions to combat financial crime and promote public health without compromising the confidentiality of the sensitive data they manage.”

UK participants also received support from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office to help them consider how their solutions could demonstrate compliance with key UK data protection regulation principles.

John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, said: “Privacy enhancing technologies can help analyse data responsibly, lawfully and securely and it will be important for regulators and industry to continue to work together to support responsible innovation in these technologies.”

Arati Prabhakar, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, added: “Data has the power to drive solutions to some of our biggest shared challenges, but much of that data is sensitive and needs to be protected.”

Adapted from a press release from the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation

A Cambridge team has been announced as one of the winners of a prize to drive ‘innovation in privacy-enhancing technologies that reinforce democratic values’ for its work on tackling international money laundering.

Most of the world's data is inaccessible for machine learning – however, these new methods are making such data available in a safe manner. This will be a game changer for many high impact domains

Nic Lane

Geralt

Networks

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Licence type:

Public Domain

Black Ned Kelly? ̽��ֱ��truth about an infamous Australian bandit

ta385 — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 08:30:00 +0000

Historian Dr Meg Foster shatters the myth that “Black Douglas” murdered a white woman and tells the story of an intelligent survivor

Opinion: I spent three years in a paedophile hunting team – here’s what I learned

Anonymous — Wed, 11 May 2022 23:00:02 +0000

By the time you finish reading this article, at least one new case of child sexual abuse will have been reported. In the US, a child is sexually assaulted every nine minutes. In the UK, this figure is closer to one every seven minutes. ̽��ֱ��sexual abuse of children is a horrifying and widespread problem that police admit they cannot arrest their way out of.

High-profile cases of systemic child sexual abuse – Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nassar, cardinals, bishops and priests – have placed the threat front of mind and led members of the public to take matters into their own hands. Social media has given them the means to do so effectively.

Pretending to be children online, hunters wait for predators to initiate sexual communications. When predators ignore reminders that they are talking to “children”, hunters expose them in livestreamed “stings” once they have sufficient evidence of grooming. Several cases have shown that talking to decoys as though they were a real child can be grounds enough for sentencing.

These stings take place in public (where a predator has asked a child to meet him in a park or shopping mall) or at the predator’s home. In the UK alone, over 150 hunting teams were collectively responsible for 1,148 confrontations with suspected paedophiles in 2021. Their evidence helped secure prosecutions in hundreds of cases.

I spent three years embedded with one of the UK’s most prolific hunting teams. An analysis of 356,799 words of private, online team chats during this period, and 831 pages of field notes and interviews, offers unique insights into what it’s like to hunt another human being.

For many involved in these groups, there’s the thrill of the chase. But some also found a deep sense of purpose in confronting a moral pandemic. Many hunters themselves have experienced abuse, and this colours how they view their hunting activities. “So many in this community have been deeply affected by these scum”, one said. “If I can save one child from seeing the world through a survivor’s life then I am blessed”, another added.

Hunters spend nearly as much time judging each other’s stings as they do baiting predators. They do so to reaffirm the purity of their motive – to keep children safe – compared to other teams they accuse of hunting purely for entertainment by poking fun at predators or being physically or verbally abusive.

Still, almost all teams value viewing figures and having an audience. As one explained: " ̽��ֱ��two we did this weekend have some great exposure: a quarter of a million and 200,000 [viewers]."

̽��ֱ��hero’s journey

̽��ֱ��way paedophile hunters talk about their work follows a narrative akin to the hero’s journey found in tales like Batman. A selfless hero saves his community from an evil threat when formal institutions (police, politicians) fail to do so. Having restored the moral order, the superhero recedes into obscurity.

Hunters refer to sexual predators as “monsters” and “vile beasts” that prey on “the innocent”. They constantly remind each other to “keep safe” during stings, even as hunters outnumber predators four or more to one.

This attitude offers a logic and a moral justification for what hunters do. Believing that “police should be grateful we are doing their job for them”, they position themselves as society’s last line of defence.

These characters feed off each other: the more impotent the police or parents are perceived to be, the more vulnerable the child, the more beastly the monster, the more heroic the hunter.

Relationship with police

While police broadly welcome citizen involvement in fighting crime, they think hunters unhelpful, even given the role of the evidence they collect. ̽��ֱ��police accuse hunters of acting on insufficiently robust evidence and jeopardising ongoing investigations. They also say hunters fail to safeguard suspects with learning difficulties who may prove difficult to prosecute, nor do they take sufficient action to protect suspects and their families from reprisals by neighbours and psychological injury.

It can be difficult to understand why hunting teams persist with live streaming stings when less harmful alternatives are easily available. They could, for example, simply hand any evidence to police, upload sting footage only after convictions are secured in court or avoid filming the target’s face to not reveal his identity online.

Since predators are typically released on bail following arrest, hunters argue that live streaming alerts the public of a predator in their midst. Parents deserve to know “there’s a nonce roaming the neighbourhood”, they reason.

My experience suggests that hunters persist with live streaming stings not because they are not aware of less harmful alternatives, but because it is the apotheosis of their quest. ̽��ֱ��sting is the final battle between good and evil that tests the character of a hunter and must be played out before a live audience – any subsequent convictions in court are, for some teams, neither here nor there. What police presume is a means to an end is, for hunters as heroes, an end itself.

Mark de Rond, Professor of Organisational Ethnography, Cambridge Judge Business School

This article is republished from ̽��ֱ��Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professor Mark de Rond from Cambridge Judge Business School discusses his three years embedded with one of the UK's most prolific paedophile hunting teams, in this article for ̽��ֱ��Conversation.

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Hooded figure using a laptop computer

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Co-offenders likely to violently turn on one another, UK crime gang study shows

fpjl2 — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:55:15 +0000

̽��ֱ��first study to take a 'network analysis' approach to patterns of violence within UK organised crime gangs (OCG) has shown that OCG members who previously offended together are likely to end up attacking one another.

̽��ֱ��research also reveals cycles of escalating violence within the criminal milieu of Thames Valley. For example, OCG members who harass other members are far more likely to become victims of violence, primarily from those they harassed.

Researchers found these 'relational effects' – whether one OCG member has worked with or fallen out with another – to be much stronger predictors of violent crime than more traditional ‘rap sheets’: prior offence lists of individuals.

̽��ֱ��study, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and using 16 years of data from Thames Valley Police, is published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. It marks an initial foray into 'networks of violence' research for the UK.

While network analyses have previously been used to help police some of the most violent cities in the USA, such as Chicago and Boston, this is the first time the technique has been deployed in a less violent European context.

“Our work shows the importance of taking relationships into account when developing policing risk factors and ‘red flags’,” said Dr Paolo Campana from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. “These techniques could help police identify at an earlier stage the social networks set to spiral into violence.”

Within the wider milieu of hardened OCG and all their known current and former associates, having co-offended – or been suspected of offending – with an OCG member dramatically increased the odds of becoming a victim of OCG violence by 56 times, typically from the former partner-in-crime.

Having harassed an OCG member or associate increased the odds of violent victimisation by a factor of 243, while those who had attacked someone in the network were 479 times more likely to become victims of violence themselves.

However, simply having a record of criminal violence, or of hard drugs offences, was found to have no significant effect on the potential for future violence.

Researchers say that such high odds ratios are due in part to limited data in this early study, but expect to see similarly strong correlations in future research. Campana is working with Cambridgeshire and Merseyside police to build bigger datasets.

“It often comes down to tit-for-tat retaliation that generates circuits of violence,” said Campana.

“In the Thames Valley data we can see how prior co-offending relationships turn sour and become a mechanism for further violence. Harassment within criminal networks also dramatically increases the potential for violence.”

“Violence is like a virus, it spreads through proximity and familiarity. Those within certain social bubbles are most at risk. In some US cities, co-offending bubbles account for over 80% of the violence,” he said.

“As we collect more data, we can expect to identify more of the chains and feedback loops that sustain violence and render it endemic within groups and locations.”

̽��ֱ��study used anonymised records from Thames Valley Police between 2000 and 2016 to build a network model for organised crime across a population of just over two million, including cities such as Oxford and Reading.

Definitions of an OCG member includes those working with others to 'commit serious crime on a continuing basis', with elements of planning, structure and coordination.

Campana and his colleague Dr Nynke Niezink from Carnegie Mellon ̽��ֱ�� in the USA analysed a criminal environment of 6,234 individuals, of which 833 were longstanding OCG: active as part of a gang for two years both before and after their first and last recorded offences.

Overall, belonging to an OCG carried a slightly lower risk of becoming a victim of violence than those in the wider criminal network, but it increased the risk of being attack by fellow gang members.

Researchers whittled over 23,000 events down to 156 OCG-instigated violent acts with sufficient data on the connections and criminal histories of the gang members involved.

Acts included murder and attempted murder, manslaughter, assault, and actual and grievous bodily harm with and without intent. Related incidents of threats and harassment were added to data models in addition to core acts of violence.

̽��ֱ��hardened OCG members were overwhelmingly male (93%), and most had been active in drug dealing. Half (51%) had been involved in a violent act, while a quarter (26%) had been a victim of violence.

̽��ֱ��few female OCG members were twice as likely as male members to be victims of violence. This was despite researchers removing incidents related to domestic violence.

Police initially supplied records on all events involving at least one OCG member as offender or victim, along with information on all others connected to the event.

Over the data period, the average size of a crime gang in Thames Valley’s jurisdiction – which includes cities such as Oxford and Reading – was 5-6 members, with the largest composed of 21 members.

Researchers use over a decade of data from Thames Valley Police to reveal 'mechanisms' that generate and sustain violence within networks of organised crime.

Violence is like a virus, it spreads through proximity and familiarity

Paolo Campana

West Midlands Police

Arrest warrant executed in West Bromwich, UK

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