̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - police

UK police fail to meet 'legal and ethical standards' in use of facial recognition

fpjl2 — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 15:13:25 +0000

A team from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy created the new audit tool to evaluate “compliance with the law and national guidance” around issues such as privacy, equality, and freedom of expression and assembly.

Based on the findings, published in a new report, the experts are joining calls for a ban on police use of facial recognition in public spaces.

“There is a lack of robust redress mechanisms for individuals and communities harmed by police deployments of the technology,” said the report’s lead author Evani Radiya-Dixit, a visiting fellow at Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre.

“To protect human rights and improve accountability in how technology is used, we must ask what values we want to embed in technology.”

Researchers constructed the audit tool based on current legal guidelines – including the UK’s Data Protection and Equality acts – as well as outcomes from UK court cases and feedback from civil society organisations and the Information Commissioner's Office.

They applied their ethical and legal standards to three uses of facial recognition technology (FRT) by UK police. One was the Bridges court case, in which a Cardiff-based civil liberties campaigner appealed against South Wales Police’s use of automated FRT to live-scan crowds and compare faces to those on a criminal “watch list”.

̽��ֱ��researchers also tested the Metropolitan Police’s trials of similar live FRT use, and a further example from South Wales Police in which officers used FRT apps on their smartphones to scan crowds in order to identify “wanted individuals in real time”.

In all three cases, they found that important information about police use of FRT is “kept from view”, including scant demographic data published on arrests or other outcomes, making it difficult to evaluate whether the tools “perpetuate racial profiling” say researchers.

In addition to lack of transparency, the researchers found little in the way of accountability – with no clear recourse for people or communities negatively affected by police use, or misuse, of the tech. “Police forces are not necessarily answerable or held responsible for harms caused by facial recognition technology,” said Radiya-Dixit.

Some of the FRT uses lacked regular oversight from an independent ethics committee or indeed the public, say the researchers, and did not do enough to ensure there was a reliable “human in the loop” when scanning untold numbers of faces among crowds of thousands while hunting for criminals.

In the South Wales Police’s smartphone app trial, even the “watch list” included images of people innocent under UK law – those previously arrested but not convicted – despite the fact that retention of such images is unlawful.

“We find that all three of these deployments fail to meet the minimum ethical and legal standards based on our research on police use of facial recognition," said Radiya-Dixit.

Prof Gina Neff, Executive Director at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, said: “Over the last few years, police forces around the world, including in England and Wales, have deployed facial recognition technologies. Our goal was to assess whether these deployments used known practices for the safe and ethical use of these technologies.”

“Building a unique audit system enabled us to examine the issues of privacy, equality, accountability, and oversight that should accompany any use of such technologies by the police,” Neff said.

Officers are increasingly under-resourced and overburdened, write the researchers, and FRT is seen as a fast, efficient and cheap way to track down persons of interest.

At least ten police forces in England and Wales have trialled facial recognition, with trials involving FRT use for operational policing purposes – although different forces use different standards.

Questions of privacy run deep for policing technology that scans and potentially retains vast numbers of facial images without knowledge or consent. ̽��ֱ��researchers highlight a possible “chilling effect” if FRT leads to a reluctance to exercise fundamental rights among the public – right to protest, for example – for fear of potential consequences.

Use of FRT also raises discrimination concerns. ̽��ֱ��researchers point out that, historically, surveillance systems are used to monitor marginalised groups, and recent studies suggest the technology itself contains inherent bias that disproportionately misidentifies women, people of colour, and people with disabilities.

Given regulatory gaps and failures to meet minimum standards set out by the new audit toolkit, the researchers write that they support calls for a “ban on police use of facial recognition in publicly accessible spaces”.

Researchers devise an audit tool to test whether police use of facial recognition poses a threat to fundamental human rights, and analyse three deployments of the technology by British forces – with all three failing to meet “minimum ethical and legal standards”.

Building a unique audit system enabled us to examine the issues of privacy, equality, accountability, and oversight that should accompany any use of such technologies by the police

Gina Neff

Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy

Image from the report 'A Sociotechnical Audit: Assessing Police use of Facial Recognition'

̽��ֱ��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.

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Police workforce: almost one in five suffer with a form of PTSD

fpjl2 — Wed, 08 May 2019 23:29:37 +0000

Rates of PTSD in the police service revealed as close to five times higher than in the UK population. Cambridge researchers and a policing charity are calling for “national mental health strategy” in UK law enforcement.

Helping police make custody decisions using artificial intelligence

lw355 — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 13:20:08 +0000

"It’s 3am on Saturday morning. ̽��ֱ��man in front of you has been caught in possession of drugs. He has no weapons, and no record of any violent or serious crimes. Do you let the man out on police bail the next morning, or keep him locked up for two days to ensure he comes to court on Monday?”

̽��ֱ��kind of scenario Dr Geoffrey Barnes is describing – whether to detain a suspect in police custody or release them on bail – occurs hundreds of thousands of times a year across the UK. ̽��ֱ��outcome of this decision could be major for the suspect, for public safety and for the police.

“ ̽��ֱ��police officers who make these custody decisions are highly experienced,” explains Barnes. “But all their knowledge and policing skills can’t tell them the one thing they need to now most about the suspect – how likely is it that he or she is going to cause major harm if they are released? This is a job that really scares people – they are at the front line of risk-based decision-making.”

Barnes and Professor Lawrence Sherman, who leads the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, have been working with police forces around the world to ask whether AI can help.

“Imagine a situation where the officer has the benefit of a hundred thousand, and more, real previous experiences of custody decisions?” says Sherman. “No one person can have that number of experiences, but a machine can.”

In mid-2016, with funding from the Monument Trust, the researchers installed the world’s first AI tool for helping police make custodial decisions in Durham Constabulary.

Called the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), the AI-based technology uses 104,000 histories of people previously arrested and processed in Durham custody suites over the course of five years, with a two-year follow-up for each custody decision. Using a method called “random forests”, the model looks at vast numbers of combinations of ‘predictor values’, the majority of which focus on the suspect’s offending history, as well as age, gender and geographical area.

“These variables are combined in thousands of different ways before a final forecasted conclusion is reached,” explains Barnes. “Imagine a human holding this number of variables in their head, and making all of these connections before making a decision. Our minds simply can’t do it.”

̽��ֱ��aim of HART is to categorise whether in the next two years an offender is high risk (highly likely to commit a new serious offence such as murder, aggravated violence, sexual crimes or robbery); moderate risk (likely to commit a non-serious offence); or low risk (unlikely to commit any offence).

“ ̽��ֱ��need for good prediction is not just about identifying the dangerous people,” explains Sherman. “It’s also about identifying people who definitely are not dangerous. For every case of a suspect on bail who kills someone, there are tens of thousands of non-violent suspects who are locked up longer than necessary.”

Durham Constabulary want to identify the ‘moderate-risk’ group – who account for just under half of all suspects according to the statistics generated by HART. These individuals might benefit from their Checkpoint programme, which aims to tackle the root causes of offending and offer an alternative to prosecution that they hope will turn moderate risks into low risks.

“It’s needles and haystacks,” says Sherman. “On the one hand, the dangerous ‘needles’ are too rare for anyone to meet often enough to spot them on sight. On the other, the ‘hay’ poses no threat and keeping them in custody wastes resources and may even do more harm than good.” A randomised controlled trial is currently under way in Durham to test the use of Checkpoint among those forecast as moderate risk.

HART is also being refreshed with more recent data – a step that Barnes explains will be an important part of this sort of tool: “A human decision-maker might adapt immediately to a changing context – such as a prioritisation of certain offences, like hate crime – but the same cannot necessarily be said of an algorithmic tool. This suggests the need for careful and constant scrutiny of the predictors used and for frequently refreshing the algorithm with more recent historical data.”

No prediction tool can be perfect. An independent validation study of HART found an overall accuracy of around 63%. But, says Barnes, the real power of machine learning comes not from the avoidance of any error at all but from deciding which errors you most want to avoid.

“Not all errors are equal,” says Sheena Urwin, head of criminal justice at Durham Constabulary and a graduate of the Institute of Criminology’s Police Executive Master of Studies Programme. “ ̽��ֱ��worst error would be if the model forecasts low and the offender turned out high.”

“In consultation with the Durham police, we built a system that is 98% accurate at avoiding this most dangerous form of error – the ‘false negative’ – the offender who is predicted to be relatively safe, but then goes on to commit a serious violent offence,” adds Barnes. “AI is infinitely adjustable and when constructing an AI tool it’s important to weigh up the most ethically appropriate route to take.”

̽��ֱ��researchers also stress that HART’s output is for guidance only, and that the ultimate decision is that of the police officer in charge.

“HART uses Durham’s data and so it’s only relevant for offences committed in the jurisdiction of Durham Constabulary. This limitation is one of the reasons why such models should be regarded as supporting human decision-makers not replacing them,” explains Barnes. “These technologies are not, of themselves, silver bullets for law enforcement, and neither are they sinister machinations of a so-called surveillance state.”

Some decisions, says Sherman, have too great an impact on society and the welfare of individuals for them to be influenced by an emerging technology.

Where AI-based tools provide great promise, however, is to use the forecasting of offenders’ risk level for effective ‘triage’, as Sherman describes: “ ̽��ֱ��police service is under pressure to do more with less, to target resources more efficiently, and to keep the public safe.

“ ̽��ֱ��tool helps identify the few ‘needles in the haystack’ who pose a major danger to the community, and whose release should be subject to additional layers of review. At the same time, better triaging can lead to the right offenders receiving release decisions that benefit both them and society.”

Inset image: read more about our AI research in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

Police at the “front line” of difficult risk-based judgements are trialling an AI system trained by ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge criminologists to give guidance using the outcomes of five years of criminal histories.

̽��ֱ��tool helps identify the few ‘needles in the haystack’ who pose a major danger to the community, and whose release should be subject to additional layers of review

Lawrence Sherman

Rene Böhmer on Unsplash

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System is failing to prevent deaths following police custody and prison, study suggests

fpjl2 — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 16:31:20 +0000

Getting released from prison or police custody can be a huge shock to those who have been incarcerated. Our new research gives an indication of just how vulnerable these people can be. We found that over a seven-year period, 400 people died of a suspected suicide within 48 hours of leaving police detention.

̽��ֱ��number of people dying in prisons and in police custody has been increasing for several years. There is, rightly, a statutory obligation for every death that occurs within a state institution to be investigated by an independent body. So each death in a prison is investigated by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO), while the equivalent in police stations are investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).

But for people who die shortly after release from police or prison custody, their deaths are not subject to statutory investigation and are too often invisible.

A dangerous transition

Our research, published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, looked into non-natural deaths of people who have been released from police detention or prison custody. We found that the data on these deaths is contingent upon the relevant institutions (prisons, police or probation) finding out about the death in the first place – and this can be difficult.

We examined two sets of data: IPCC data on suspected suicides that occurred within 48 hours of release from police detention and data from the National Offender Management Service on deaths of people under probation supervision, which includes those released from prison. We also conducted interviews with 15 custody sergeants – police officers who are responsible for the welfare of a detainee while in a police station – prison officers and others such as representatives of police and crime commissioners (PCCs) and Public Health England.

̽��ֱ��IPCC data suggest that 400 people died between 2009 and 2016 of a suspected suicide within 48 hours of release, although this number declined between the years 2014-15 and 2015-16, as the graph below shows. People who had been detained on suspicion of sex offences accounted for 32% of the 400 total suspected suicides.

We also examined a selection of 41 investigations and summaries of investigations into apparent post-release suicides that were provided to us by the IPCC. Half of these people had pre-existing mental health conditions. These referrals also pointed to inadequate risk assessment, record keeping and onward referral to relevant community-based care providers such as mental health or drug treatment providers.

We then looked at deaths that had occurred within 28 days of release from prison. Despite some issues with the accuracy and completeness of the data, we identified 66 people between 2010 and 2015 who had died from non-natural causes within 28 days of leaving prison. ̽��ֱ��numbers are small and so it is difficult to draw wider conclusions, but we found that 44 of those 66 died from a drug-related death. Of the 66, 35 had served a sentence for an acquisitive offence such as theft, shoplifting or robbery, offences which are commonly associated with drug use.

We also analysed investigations conducted between 2010 and 2015 by the PPO into deaths that occurred in approved premises, also known as bail hostels, within 28 days of release from custody. These investigations seek to understand what, if anything, could have been done to prevent the death. This highlighted problems with supporting drug-using offenders, a lack of confidence among staff and a failure to create a smooth transition from prison into the community.

Staff under strain

These analyses only tell part of the story. Our discussions with custody officers painted a complex picture. They argued that they were getting better at identifying people in custody with mental health conditions but that their ability to deal with them effectively was restricted by factors beyond their control such as a lack of appropriate treatment for people after leaving their care and an inadequate number of beds in mental health hospitals. They told us that the risk assessment tool they use for identifying such people was not fit for purpose because it did not go into enough detail and that they would benefit from additional mental health training. They were also strongly in favour of the responsibility for healthcare commissioning in police stations being handed to the NHS, rather than PCCs, a proposal which was dropped in December 2015.

̽��ֱ��story from prison staff was similar, but they also talked about the use of new psychoactive substances and the negative effects these substances are having on mental health and safety in the prison.

Problems also exist when it comes to the provision of community-based care after people are released. These include cuts to community mental health services and drug services, as well as recent changes to the probation service, which have seen 70% of the service outsourced to the private sector. Such reforms have made communication between prisons and probation providers more difficult. These budget cuts and public sector reforms are having a serious impact on the ability of criminal justice agencies to deal with these issues and prevent any future deaths.

There needs to be an improvement in the way in which data on non-natural deaths is collected. Deaths post-detention should also be subject to similar levels of investigation as those that occur in police custody and prison. It would be naive to suggest that all deaths of people leaving state detention can be investigated, but there is scope for more oversight from both the IPCC and PPO, at least while they are adjusting to life back in the community. At the same time, the government must maintain investment in mental health and drug services to help prevent those most vulnerable when they are released from detention from taking their own life.

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe is Deputy Director of the Institute of Criminology, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Nicola Padfield is Master, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and a Reader in Criminal and Penal Justice, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Jake Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Sheffield Hallam ̽��ֱ��.

Poor access to health care and confusion over post-detention care may have contributed to more than 400 deaths following police custody and prison detention since 2009, a new report has claimed. Here, in an article first published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation, report authors Loraine Gelsthorpe and Nicola Padfield of Cambridge's Faculty of Law, along with their colleague Jake Phillips from Sheffield Hallam ̽��ֱ��, discuss their findings.

Deaths post-detention should also be subject to similar levels of investigation as those that occur in police custody and prison

West Midlands Police

Custody officer assistant

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Use of body-worn cameras sees complaints against police ‘virtually vanish’, study finds

fpjl2 — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 05:05:57 +0000

Body-worn cameras are fast becoming standard kit for frontline law enforcers, trumpeted by senior officers and even the US President as a technological ‘fix’ for what some see as a crisis of police legitimacy. Evidence of effectiveness has, however, been limited in its scope.

Now, new results from one of the largest randomised-controlled experiments in the history of criminal justice research, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, show that the use by officers of body-worn cameras is associated with a startling 93% reduction in citizen complaints against police.

Researchers say this may be down to wearable cameras modifying behaviour through an ‘observer effect’: the awareness that encounters are recorded improves both suspect demeanour and police procedural compliance. Essentially, the “digital witness” of the camera encourages cooler heads to prevail.

̽��ֱ��experiment took place across seven sites during 2014 and early 2015, including police from areas such as the UK Midlands and the Californian coast, and encompassing 1,429,868 officer hours across 4,264 shifts in jurisdictions that cover a total population of two million citizens. ̽��ֱ��findings are published today in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour.

̽��ֱ��researchers write that, if levels of complaints offer at least some guide to standards of police conduct – and misconduct – these findings suggest that use of body-worn cameras are a “profound sea change in modern policing”.

“Cooling down potentially volatile police-public interactions to the point where official grievances against the police have virtually vanished may well lead to the conclusion that the use of body-worn cameras represents a turning point in policing,” said Cambridge criminologist and lead author Dr Barak Ariel.

“There can be no doubt that body-worn cameras increase the transparency of frontline policing. Anything that has been recorded can be subsequently reviewed, scrutinised and submitted as evidence.”

“Individual officers become more accountable, and modify their behaviour accordingly, while the more disingenuous complaints from the public fall by the wayside once footage is likely to reveal them as frivolous.

“ ̽��ֱ��cameras create an equilibrium between the account of the officer and the account of the suspect about the same event – increasing accountability on both sides.”

However, Ariel cautions that one innovation, no matter how positive, is unlikely to provide a panacea for a deeply rooted issue such as police legitimacy.

Complaints against police are costly: both financially and in terms of public trust, say researchers. In the US, complaints can be hugely expense – not least through multimillion-dollar lawsuits. In the UK last year, the IPCC reported a continuous rise in complaints across the majority of forces.

Ariel worked with colleagues from RAND Europe and six different police forces: West Midlands, Cambridgeshire, West Yorkshire, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and Rialto and Ventura in California, to conduct the vast experiment.

Each trial was managed by a local point of contact, either an officer or civilian staff member – all graduates of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Police Executive Programme.

Every week for a year, the researchers randomly assigned each officer shift as either with cameras (treatment) or without (control), with all officers experiencing both conditions.

Across all seven trial sites during the 12 months preceding the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were lodged against police, amounting to 1.2 complaints per officer. By the end of the experiment, complaints had dropped to 113 for the year across all sites – just 0.08 complaints per officer – marking a total reduction of 93%.

Surprisingly, the difference between the treatment and control groups once the experiment began was not statistically significant; nor was the variations between the different sites.

Yet the before/after difference caused by the overall experimental conditions across all forces was enormous. While only around half the officers were wearing cameras at any one time, complaints against police right across all shifts in all participating forces almost disappeared.

Researchers say this may be an example of “contagious accountability”: with large scale behavioural change – in officers but also perhaps in the public – seeping into almost all interactions, even during camera-less control shifts, once the experiment had introduced camera protocols to participating forces.

“It may be that, by repeated exposure to the surveillance of the cameras, officers changed their reactive behaviour on the streets – changes that proved more effective and so stuck,” said co-author Dr Alex Sutherland of RAND Europe.

“With a complaints reduction of nearly 100% across the board, we find it difficult to consider alternatives to be honest,” he said.

Critically, researchers say these behaviour changes rely on cameras recording entire encounters, and officers issuing an early warning that the camera is on – reminding all parties that the ‘digital witness’ is in play right from the start, and triggering the observer effect.

In fact, results from the same experiment, published earlier this year, suggest that police use-of-force and assaults on officers actually increase if a camera is switched on in the middle of an interaction, as this can be taken as an escalation of the situation by both officer and suspect.

“ ̽��ֱ��jolt of issuing a verbal reminder of filming at the start of an encounter nudges everyone to think about their actions more consciously. This might mean that officers begin encounters with more awareness of rules of conduct, and members of the public are less inclined to respond aggressively,” explained Ariel.

“We suspect that this is the ‘treatment’ that body-worn cameras provide, and the mechanism behind the dramatic reduction in complaints against police we have observed in our research.”

Drs Barak Ariel and Alex Sutherland will be giving a public talk on this research and the future of policing at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on Monday 17 October. Book a free place here: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/body-worn-cameras-safety-or-...

Year-long study of almost 2,000 officers across UK and US forces shows introduction of wearable cameras led to a 93% drop in complaints made against police by the public – suggesting the cameras result in behavioural changes that ‘cool down’ potentially volatile encounters.

There can be no doubt that body-worn cameras increase the transparency of frontline policing. Anything that has been recorded can be subsequently reviewed, scrutinised and submitted as evidence

Barak Ariel

Body-worn video - ̽��ֱ��independent witness

Image from a body-worn camera

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Yes

Policing: two officers ‘on the beat’ prevent 86 assaults and save thousands in prison costs

fpjl2 — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 15:05:10 +0000

New research shows that targeting each crime ‘hot spot’ in a city with 21 extra minutes of daily foot patrolling by Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) could save the justice system hundreds of thousands of pounds through prevented crime.

Working with Cambridgeshire Constabulary to conduct a year-long experiment in Peterborough, researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge randomly allocated 34 crime-prone areas to get 21 minutes of extra PCSO patrols a day.

They compared offences before and after the experiment between 38 hot spots with no increased patrol and the 34 with the increase using the Cambridge Crime Harm Index: a new tool that measures “harm caused to victims” by modelling severities in sentencing for different offences, rather than just totting up overall crime figures.

̽��ֱ��research team calculated that targeted patrol time equal to two full-time PCSOs would prevent 86 assaults a year, or incidents of the equivalent crime ‘harm value’, saving potential costs to the public of eight years of imprisonment.

̽��ֱ��findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, suggest that every £10 spent on targeted foot patrols prevents a further £56 in prison costs – a five-to-one return on investment.

While modern policing is characterised by a “reactive, fire-brigade” approach, usually vehicle-based, the researchers say their evidence strengthens support for the historic “bobbies on the beat” mode of policing focused on crime-prone areas.

“By working with us to conduct this experiment, Cambridgeshire Constabulary has set the standard for cost-effectiveness in policing,” said study co-author Professor Lawrence Sherman, Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and its Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology.

“Any other investment in policing can now be challenged to match the benefits of foot patrols in preventing the equivalent of either 86 assaults, or six burglaries, or six sexual crimes.”

‘Hot spots’ are small urban areas, streets or intersections, where there is a concentration of crime – usually offences such as theft, burglary, violence and criminal damage.

During the experiment, 72 of Peterborough’s ‘hottest’ hot spots randomly received either standard patrols (the control) or an average extra 21 minutes PCSO foot patrol per day (the treatment) over the course of a year.

In the ‘treated’ hot spots, these additional patrols – combined with vehicle patrols by Police Constables (PCs) these areas already received – amounted to an average increase of 56% in daily patrol time.

GPS devices embedded in the radios of both PCs and PCSOs were used to track time spent in each location, a precise measure of the “treatment dosage” of police presence.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that, on average per hot spot, 39% fewer crime incidents were reported by victims and 20% fewer 999 emergency calls to the police occurred in the 34 treated hot spots compared with the 38 control hot spots.

̽��ֱ��extra 21 minutes of PCSO time per day for each of the hot spots amounts to 3,094 hours across all treatment areas, roughly equivalent to two fulltime PCSOs – no more than £50,000 on current salaries.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Crime Harm Index analysis suggests that, across all 34 treated hot spots, the equivalent of these two extra officers prevented crime amounting to 2,914 days – around eight years – of imprisonment, at a potential cost to the public of £280,000 under English sentencing guidelines.

“ ̽��ֱ��use of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index and the Peterborough cost-effectiveness results provides a like-for-like metric to challenge those who demand more PC or PCSO time in patrolling schools, low-crime neighbourhoods, or traffic accident hot spots,” Sherman said.

“This study should give both Police and Crime Commissioners and Chief Constables a benchmark for evaluating any other uses of police time other than hot spots patrols.”

PCSOs are civilian members of police staff, used to bolster police presence and support PCs. They have no power of arrest, and cannot investigate crimes, but have specific powers to deal with minor public order offices – what’s known as “soft policing”.

Budgetary constraints in British policing mean PCSOs are the only officers who now conduct proactive and visible foot patrols. During the experiment, the PCSOs were told to concentrate on being visible to the exclusion of any other task.

̽��ֱ��researchers’ experimental evidence showed that every additional PCSO visit per day to the treatment hot spots decreased calls for service by approximately 34, with the number of crimes declining by around four.

“ ̽��ֱ��experiment suggests that the number of visits to each hot spot may matter more than the total minutes – as if each time the police arrive they renew their deterrent effect on crime,” said Dr Barak Ariel of the Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology, who was lead researcher on the Peterborough experiment.

Sherman says the latest results show that, if deployed tactically and proactively, ‘soft’ policing can achieve comparable crime reductions to the ‘hard’ threat of immediate physical arrest.

“These findings suggest that the probability of encountering an officer is more important than the powers that officer has, and that the frequency and duration of proactive patrolling deserves far more attention,” said Sherman.

“More experiments like this one can produce an even more general estimate of the value of foot patrol activity, to make that value the ‘gold standard to beat’ in selecting cost-effective policing strategies,” he added.

Professor Lorraine Mazerolle of the ̽��ֱ�� of Queensland and Editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology said the Peterborough experiment showed that “the deterrent role of police and PCSOs patrolling crime-harm hotspots is now indisputable: the police can, and do, prevent crime, they just need to be appropriately deployed to crime-harm hotspots.”

Cambridgeshire Constabulary’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hopkins said: “We’re pleased to have worked with the Cambridge Institute of Criminology to conduct this research and we welcome the outcomes.

“We’re keen to look at the findings in further detail and explore how they could help to influence our future policing plan.”

̽��ֱ��results of a major criminology experiment in Peterborough suggest that investing in proactive PCSO foot patrols targeting crime ‘hot spots’ could yield a more than five-to-one return: with every £10 spent saving £56 in prison costs.

̽��ֱ��use of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index and the Peterborough cost-effectiveness results provides a like-for-like metric to challenge those who demand more PC or PCSO time in patrolling schools, low-crime neighbourhoods, or traffic accident hot spots

Lawrence Sherman

West Midlands Police

PCSOs from West Midlands Police on patrol

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Body-worn cameras associated with increased assaults against police, and increase in use-of-force if officers choose when to activate cameras

fpjl2 — Tue, 17 May 2016 08:10:07 +0000

New evidence from the largest-yet series of experiments on use of body-worn cameras by police has revealed that rates of assault against police by members of the public actually increased when officers wore the cameras.

̽��ֱ��research also found that on average across all officer-hours studied, and contrary to current thinking, the rate of use-of-force by police on citizens was unchanged by the presence of body-worn cameras, but a deeper analysis of the data showed that this finding varied depending on whether or not officers chose when to turn cameras on.

If officers turned cameras on and off during their shift then use-of-force increased, whereas if they kept the cameras rolling for their whole shift, use-of-force decreased.

̽��ֱ��findings are released today across two articles published in the European Journal of Criminology and the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

While researchers describe these findings as unexpected, they also urge caution as the work is ongoing, and say these early results demand further scrutiny. However, gathering evidence for what works in policing is vital, they say.

“At present, there is a worldwide uncontrolled social experiment taking place – underpinned by feverish public debate and billions of dollars of government expenditure. Robust evidence is only just keeping pace with the adoption of new technology,” write criminologists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and RAND Europe, who conducted the study.

For the latest findings, researchers worked with eight police forces across the UK and US – including West Midlands, Cambridgeshire and Northern Ireland’s PSNI, as well as Ventura, California and Rialto, California PDs in the United States – to conduct ten randomised-controlled trials.

Over the ten trials, the research team found that rates of assault against officers wearing cameras on their shift were an average of 15% higher, compared to shifts without cameras.

̽��ֱ��researchers say this could be due to officers feeling more able to report assaults once they are captured on camera – providing them the impetus and/or confidence to do so.

̽��ֱ��monitoring by camera also may make officers less assertive and more vulnerable to assault. However, they point out these are just possible explanations, and much more work is needed to unpick the reasons behind these surprising findings.

In the experimental design, the shift patterns of 2,122 participating officers across the forces were split at random between those allocated a camera and those without a camera. A total of 2.2 million officer-hours policing a total population of more than 2 million citizens were covered in the study.

̽��ֱ��researchers set out a protocol for officers allocated cameras during the trials: record all stages of every police-public interaction, and issue a warning of filming at the outset. However, many officers preferred to use their discretion, activating cameras depending on the situation.

Researchers found that during shifts with cameras in which officers stuck closer to the protocol, police use-of-force fell by 37% over camera-free shifts. During shifts in which officers tended to use their discretion, police use-of-force actually rose 71% over camera-free shifts.

“ ̽��ֱ��combination of the camera plus the early warning creates awareness that the encounter is being filmed, modifying the behaviour of all involved,” said principal investigator Barak Ariel from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“If an officer decides to announce mid-interaction they are beginning to film, for example, that could provoke a reaction that results in use-of-force,” Ariel said. “Our data suggests this could be what is driving the results.”

̽��ֱ��new results are the latest to come from the research team since their ground-breaking work reporting the first experimental evidence on body-worn cameras with Rialto PD in California – a study widely-cited as part of the rationale for huge investment in this policing technology.

“With so much at stake, these findings must continue to be scrutinised through further research and more studies. In the meantime, it’s clear that more training and engagement with police officers are required to ensure they are confident in the decisions they make while wearing cameras, and are safe in their job,” said co-author and RAND Europe researcher Alex Sutherland.

Ariel added, “It may be that in some places it’s a bad idea to use body-worn cameras, and the only way you can find that out is to keep doing these tests in different kinds of places. After all, what might work for a sheriff’s department in Iowa may not necessarily apply to the Tokyo PD.”

Preliminary results from eight UK and US police forces reveal rates of assault against officers are 15% higher when they use body-worn cameras. ̽��ֱ��latest findings, from one of the largest randomised-controlled trials in criminal justice research, highlight the need for cameras to be kept on and recording at all stages of police-public interaction – not just when an individual officer deems it necessary – if police use-of-force and assaults against police are to be reduced.

It may be that in some places it’s a bad idea to use body-worn cameras, and the only way you can find that out is to keep doing these tests in different kinds of places

Barak Ariel

Screenshot of footage from a police body-worn camera

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Crime: measuring by ‘damage to victims’ will improve policing and public safety

fpjl2 — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:31:17 +0000

A “menu of harm” that measures crime according to the price of damage inflicted on victims – rather than counting crimes as if they are all of equal seriousness – needs to be adopted worldwide to focus police resources on the worst criminal acts, say leading ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge criminologists.

They describe the UK’s current approach to crime metrics as a “paper-and-pencil legacy of the 19th century”, presenting crime in ‘grand totals’ that give equal weight to shoplifting and homicide, for example – an approach used to leverage ‘crime is down’ media reports, causing police to focus on minor yet high-volume offences that cause less harm than rarer but more serious crimes.

̽��ֱ��team, including Cambridge Institute of Criminology Director Professor Lawrence Sherman and his colleague Peter Neyroud, a former Chief Constable, are calling for a “meaningful measure of crime” grounded in the true societal cost: the harm done to its citizens.

Sherman, Neyroud and colleagues have devised the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CHI), which they describe as essentially a crime version of the cost-of-living index – a classification system weighted by, in this case, the likely impact of an offence on victims. ̽��ֱ��first detailed outline of the Cambridge CHI is published today in the academic journal Policing.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge criminologists say that this simple, cost-neutral ratio of harmful crime, based on sentencing guidelines and numbers of ‘imprisonable’ days, will dramatically improve identification and policing of areas where the most damaging crime occurs, so-called ‘harm spots’, as well as the most dangerous repeat offenders – who often fall between cracks in current overview analyses.

In the Policing journal paper, the researchers provide a ten-year UK comparison between current crime metrics and the Cambridge CHI. While overall crime counts between 2002 and 2012 showed a drop of 37%, the harm index reveals that this is an overestimation in terms of public safety, as imprisonable days reflecting ‘harm caused’ only dropped 21%.

Sherman believes that adoption of the Cambridge CHI would help make optimal use of scarce resources through more targeted policing, which could, in turn, reduce prison populations.

In fact, the Cambridge CHI is already being trialled by police units in a number of UK forces, including Leicestershire, whose Assistant Chief Constable, Phil Kay, will lecture at Cambridge this week on how his force has used it to identify crime ‘harm spots’ and the offenders who cause most harm, and have re-allocated resources, patrol patterns and offender management approaches accordingly.

In another recent example of Cambridge CHI use, mapping the harm index onto patterns of domestic violence helped Suffolk Constabulary reveal that – of the 25,000 couples coming to police attention over six years, resulting in some 36,000 callouts – fewer than 2% of couples generated 80% of all harm to each other.

̽��ֱ��criminologists say that their approach need not replace the current system, but simply be added to it to help improve understanding of what the crime counts really mean.

“Not all crimes are created equal. Counting them as if they are fosters distortion of risk and accountability,” said Professor Sherman, Director of the Cambridge Institute and Honorary President of the 2,000-member Society of Evidence-Based Policing.

“If shoplifting drops while murder triples, crime is reported as ‘down’ – yet any common sense view of public safety cries out for some adjustment for seriousness.

“Currently, there is no meaningful ‘bottom line’ indicator of whether public safety is actually improving or declining in any given year or place. Measuring by the number of days in prison each crime could attract ensures that police, policy makers and the public are better informed on rates and trends of crime, the risks posed and resources required,” Sherman said.

Any new approach to measuring crime must pass a three-pronged test, says Sherman: cost, reliability and democracy (“reflecting the will of the people”).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge crime harm index uses a fixed scale based on the number of prison days an offence would receive at its lowest starting point for a previously unconvicted offender, with sentence severity reflecting harm caused by the crime. Former Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, now a Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in Evidence-Based Policing, helped devise this approach as a former member of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales.

Where penalty guidelines are expressed in community service hours, the Cambridge Index converts them into days. Where the starting point is a fine, this is calculated by the number of hours/days needed to earn the fine at minimum adult wage.

Judicial attitudes can vary wildly depending on media panics and public mood, says Sherman. Relying only on the heavily-debated sentencing guidelines protects the Cambridge CHI from this instability, keeping it reliable, while retaining its basis in the democratically-authorised law of the land. This differs from other systems, such as Canada’s ‘crime severity index’, which rely on the “shifting sands” of actual sentencing practice.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge researchers say that their harm index can be easily calculated by citizens and officials alike, using data already published on a regular basis. “Policing budgets can ill afford to fund a new system of crime statistics, and we have shown they don’t have to,” said Sherman. “Our approach is essentially free of charge.”

Importantly, the Cambridge CHI distinguishes between crimes reported to the police and those “proactively generated” through enforcement – sidestepping what Sherman refers to as the “self-licking ice cream”: the idea that an unreported crime detected by police surveillance still counts as ‘one crime’, so police enforcement actually contributes to statistical crime increase.

Sherman uses the analogy of hedge funds to highlight the importance of a crime harm index: “Like police and justice agencies, investors have to achieve objectives such as growth and security, but face a vast array of choices about how best to invest their scarce resources.

“However, investors have one great advantage over police that makes their job much easier: a common currency. Now police can have a common currency as well, one that quantifies the true cost of all crime – the harm it causes.”

Reference:
Sherman, Lawrence et al. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Crime Harm Index: Measuring Total Harm from Crime Based on Sentencing Guidelines. Policing; 4 April 2016;10.1093/police/paw003.

New Cambridge ‘crime harm index’ published today quantifies true cost of crime: damage caused to victims and society. Experts call on UK government to adopt low-cost metric for greater transparency of crime trends and risks. Some UK forces have already used approach with early successes in identifying ‘harm spots’.

Now police can have a common currency as well, one that quantifies the true cost of all crime – the harm it causes

Lawrence Sherman

Evan Wood

police

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