Crime count and crime harm in a post-socialist city: How does the law of crime concentration at places apply?

This article reports on a new empirical study evaluating crime concentration at places in a post-socialist city. We use principles of the law of crime concentration at places and the Cambridge Crime Harm Index to measure crime count and crime harm concentration at the level of street segments. The research found differences between crime concentration in a post-socialist city and crime concentration reported by recent studies from US or UK cities. Both crime and harm concentration are consistently less spatially clustered than expected by the theory in a post-socialist city. This finding has significance for both international criminology and national policing authorities, because the success of place-based policing is highly dependent on strong spatial clustering of crime. The study underlines the importance of experimental criminology and theory testing for the transfer of crime prevention approaches from their original contexts.

Experimental Criminology and the Free-Rider Dilemma

Experimental criminology promises a public good: when experiments generate findings about criminal justice interventions, everyone benefits from that knowledge. However, experimental criminology also produces a free-rider problem: when experiments test interventions on the units where problems concentrate, only the sample assumes the risk of backfire. This mismatch between who pays for criminological knowledge and who rides on it persists even after traditional critiques of experimental social science are addressed. We draw from medicine and economics to define experimental criminology’s free-rider problem and expose a dilemma. Either we distribute the costs of producing policy-actionable knowledge to the entire beneficiary population or we justify isolating the risk of experimental harm on that class of the population where ethical concerns are most acute.

Randomized experiments in Scandinavian criminal justice: Reviewing the past and looking to the future

Randomized controlled trials are reported on with increasing frequency within the criminological literature. This development, which is commonly seen as being a part of a global shift towards evidence-based policies, relies heavily on reviews of American research. However, other regions face distinct challenges and employ distinct policy solutions, potentially undermining the uniformity of this trend. In particular, the Scandinavian nations (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), with distinct penal philosophies, may offer a counter-narrative. Here, we conduct a multi-lingual systematic review of crime-related experiments in Scandinavia. Findings show that only eight experiments with an offending or delinquency outcome were published before 2015, six of which focused primarily on medical or psychological treatments. We suggest this distribution is driven by unique, regional epistemological traditions and conclude by outlining distinctive opportunities for experimental criminology in Scandinavia.

Extending the remit of evidence-based policing

Evidence-based policing (EBP) is an important strand of the UK’s College of Policing’s Police Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF), itself a component of a professionalisation agenda. This article argues that the two dominant approaches to EBP, experimental criminology and crime science, offer limited scope for the development of a comprehensive knowledge base for policing. Although both approaches share a common commitment to the values of science, each recognizes their limited coverage of policing topics. The fundamental difference between them is what each considers ‘best’ evidence. This article critically examines the generation of evidence by these two approaches and proposes an extension to the range of issues EBP should cover by utilizing a greater plurality of methods to exploit relevant research. Widening the scope of EBP would provide a broader foundational framework for inclusion in the PEQF and offers the potential for identifying gaps in the research, constructing blocks for knowledge building, and syllabus development in higher level police education.