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According to the Home Office's 2009 report on organised crime, Extending our Reach, A Comprehensive Approach to tackling Organised Crime, serious organised crime is perceived as a local problem by British citizens. Foreign organised crime groups are not even mentioned. Allum's (Lecturer at Bath since 2002) research on the activities of the Neapolitan Mafia, the Camorra, in Naples and across Europe has highlighted the pervasive nature of this organised crime group, especially in its relationship with local economies and political elites. More importantly, her research has identified that English law enforcement agencies do not have the tools that are fit for the purpose of identifying the activities of the various Italian organised crime groups in the UK. Allum's research has thus informed policy debate and practice around the issues relating to Italian organised crime groups in Italy, in the UK and Europe. It has also improved the quality of evidence around Italian organised crime groups to enhance public understanding of the harm they pose to societies, the economy (in particular, in relation to money laundering activities), and the resilience of local politics in Italy and abroad.
PADS+ casts light on the causal mechanisms for crime, highlighting how the interaction between people and settings leads to acts of crime. As a result PADS+ has advanced the scientific basis on which policing and criminal justice strategy and crime prevention policies can be formulated in the UK and abroad. Three types of impact are claimed: (1) initiating a move away from a broad-brush risk factor approach to the explanation and prevention of crime towards a focus on key causal factors and mechanisms; (2) being recognized and utilized by policy makers; (3) contributing to social science education nationally and internationally.
Professor Ian Loader's research on the concept of `penal moderation' shaped the final report of the Commission on English Prisons Today and helped to inform the policy arguments of the UK's leading penal reform charity — the Howard League for Penal Reform. These arguments, in turn, influenced the criminal justice agenda of the Coalition Government. Loader's research on the politicization of crime and justice was also influential on the final report of the Justice Select Committee of the House of Commons on `Justice Reinvestment' (an initiative which seeks to create local financial incentives to invest in community penalties). Loader's research shaped the views of the Committee on how to build a political consensus for alternatives to imprisonment.
Critical public policy debates on the likely effect of reductions in police staffing levels and on understanding the implications of crime patterns have been informed by findings from research conducted at the University of Birmingham by Dr Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay. The novel research contributed to raising public and practitioner awareness and understanding of the possible impact of cuts in police staffing, whether or not "prison works" and in explaining the apparent paradox of a fall in recorded acquisitive crime during a recession. These findings, which often challenged political perspectives and conventional wisdom, were initially publicised by an independent think-tank, Civitas, and followed-up in national press articles (one of which generated approximately 450 reader comments) and presentations to stakeholder agencies including central UK Government.
Research undertaken by Armitage and Hirschfield and colleagues from the Applied Criminology Centre (ACC) has made a significant contribution to crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED). Emerging from a wider programme of study in the field of environmental criminology, research completed at the University of Huddersfield since 2004 into `designing out' crime has been incorporated into national and local planning policy and procedures and has influenced international urban planning. This research has underpinned the UK Association of Chief Police Officers' (ACPO) success in extending the designing out crime initiative, Secured By Design (SBD), to 350,000 homes, and in reducing burglary rates by more than half in housing designed to this standard.
Research in this Unit at NTU has:
(a) Changed the way victimisation is conceptualised, measured, and reported within official crime surveys;
(b) Transformed the methodological evaluation of the impact of security devices upon crime and repeat victimisation through the introduction of multi-level statistical modelling as opposed to bivariate cross-tabulations which constituted the state of the art prior to her work.
Professor Tseloni's research has directly informed the methodological training of crime survey analysts (including those working on the Home Office British Crime Survey), and contributed through the dissemination of Home Office guidelines to the day-to-day crime reduction practices and responses to crime of police forces in England and Wales.
Since the 1980s, there has been a wave of global activity seeking improved control of money laundering and confiscation of crime proceeds. This set of research studies, based around the work of Professor Mike Levi, constitutes core empirical analysis of the scale of financial crimes, and what can be properly said about the impacts of social and formal control measures against them. The studies have informed and helped to shape the fraud, money laundering and organised crime strategies of the UK Home Office, UK enforcement agencies, and international bodies such as the EC Justice and Home Affairs and IMF post-2008.
Of the 200,000 offenders supervised in the community by Probation Area Trusts (PATs) in England and Wales, around half are reconvicted of another offence within two years. University of Sheffield research into why people stop offending (`desistance'), funded by the ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust, has provided evidence to senior staff in PATs, government departments, and the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) enabling the development of initiatives aimed at supporting service users in their efforts to desist. The research has increased awareness and understanding on the part of professionals of the factors associated with desistance. Through the medium of a film about how people desist, the research has helped both to reinvigorate probation services' professional practice and to develop training programmes with an emphasis on helping people to stop offending in place of the hitherto dominant focus on enforcement.
Research on spatial patterns of crime at UCL has influenced police practice and has informed policy and its implementation in countries including Australia, Canada, UK, and USA. Our research has challenged conventional wisdom amongst police and policymakers about spatial patterns of crime. Working directly with police forces and through our continuing professional development training, we have spearheaded the use of crime mapping and forecasting methods in practice. Implementation has led to documented reductions in crimes such as burglary of between 20-66%.
Research at UCL spread public understanding of mafias around the world, contributed to the professional preparation and development of law enforcement officers and investigating magistrates engaged in front-line work against the mafias, provided historical evidence supporting magistrates in Reggio Calabria seeking to create a legal precedent for the successful prosecution of the `ndrangheta under anti-mafia laws. It contributed to the memorialisation of victims of mafia violence in Sicily, aided the work of the anti-protection racket organisation Addiopizzo by influencing its staff and alerting visitors to Sicily to the importance of critical consumption in order to avoid involuntarily funding the mafia.