Crime Trends and Patterns in England and Wales

A short set of Notes looking at crime trends and patterns in England and Wales over the past 50-odd years. While students don’t require a detailed factual knowledge of trends and patterns they do provide a useful introduction to the next set of Notes covering theoretical explanations for crime and deviance. One reason for measuring […]

Defining and Measuring Crime

Some Notes that have been hanging around on my hard drive doing nothing useful that I’ve finally got around to posting. There are plenty more where these came from but whether or not I’ll ever get around to digging them out is anyone’s guess. Defining Crime and Deviance Deviance ‘To deviate’ means ‘to stray from […]

Crime Prevention Strategies: Plain Language Summaries

Although keeping up-to-date with the latest research is something that should happen in an ideal world, the reality is that few of us have either the time or inclination to: a. Find and read a whole bunch of often-obscure research publications. b. Summarise this meta-analysis in a pithy, student-friendly, way. c. Present the information so […]

Geographical Profiling Applied: The M25 Rapist

Continuing the recent Crime and Criminology vibe with our films (if you’re interested in Geographic Profiling you might also be interested in it’s better-known counterpart Offender Profiling), this companion-piece to Introducing Geographical Offender Profiling complements the original film by using the example of Antoni Imiela, the man the media dubbed the M25 Rapist because the […]

Crime in England and Wales: March 2022

While the latest set of Official Crime Statistics covering England and Wales come with what should, by now, be the familiar methodological qualifications concerning both their reliability – or, more pertinently perhaps, their unreliability – and validity, they are nevertheless useful as general indicators of crime patterns. As such, they’re worth perusing if you have […]

Methods in Context: Crime in England and Wales

Keeping abreast of the various statistical sources and data on crime can be both time-consuming and somewhat confusing for teachers and students – both in terms of the volume of data and the reliability and validity of different data sources. For these reasons the Office for National Statistics statistical bulletin is a brilliant resource for […]

Victim Survey Report

The study of crime victims has, until quite recently, been a largely-neglected aspect of policing in England and Wales (and everywhere else come to that) so it may surprise you to know that since the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), there have been a succession of Victims’ Commissioners whose role is: “To promote […]

Home Office Research Findings

Between 1992 and 2008 the Home Office published around 250 “Research Fundings” – a heady mixture of sociological research, British Crime Survey data, evaluations of crime policies and the like – in a short-form that consisted of 4 – 6 pages built around summaries of: Key Points Methods and Methodology (where relevant) Key Findings Conclusions. […]

Revision Tools: Personal Learning Checklists

Personal Learning Checklists (PLCs) are a useful revision tool for both students and teachers because they allow both to identify areas of strength and weakness in an overall revision strategy: students, for example, have a list of everything they’re expected to know by way of preparation for their exams and teachers can identify any areas […]

Left Realism: Key Ideas and Criticisms

Left Realism is one of the major criminological theories at A-level  and, for this reason, it’s one that students need to know well. The following, therefore, is a basic overview of Left Realism’s key ideas: from how they conceptualise crime through to what they see as the main problem of crime and possible solutions to […]

Left Realism: The Islington Crime Surveys 1986 – 2016

One of the initial features of Left Realism, as it was developed by writers such as Young, Matthews and Lea, was the use of a very particular survey method aimed at gathering large amounts of data about a relatively small location: the local crime survey carried-out, in this instance, by Young et. al. (1986) in […]