This post first appeared on the #CrimComm Blog You’re a criminal-justice researcher and you’ve just published an article in a top journal. It was a lot of work: you spent months securing ethical approval, collecting data or negotiating access to secondary data, completing the analysis, writing up the results and responding to reviews.

This post first appeared on the Social Research Association blog. Understanding if some event is associated with a change in the frequency of crime is a common question, both in practice and in research.

Some serious crime investigations are surprisingly quick: half of murder prosecutions involve a suspect being charged in five days or fewer. But for many serious crimes, justice is often slow: half of fraud prosecutions don’t conclude until almost two years after the crime occurred.

Once police have enough evidence to prosecute an offender, they or prosecutors must decide whether to send the case to court or deal with it informally. For violent crimes, the likelihood of a case going to court varies substantially across police forces, with some prosecuting over 80% of cases and others diverting two thirds to other resolutions such as paying compensation.

The government recently doubled the maximum sentence for assaulting a police officer to 12 months in prison, introducing a new offence of assaulting an emergency worker. So far, this change is associated with only small increases in sentences handed down in court.

Criminology produces policy-relevant research and criminologists often seek to influence practice, but most criminological research is …

The coronavirus pandemic poses multiple challenges for policing, including the need to continue responding to calls from the public. …

The COVID-19 pandemic led to substantial changes in the daily activities of millions of Americans, with many businesses and schools …

The study of spatial and temporal crime patterns is important for both academic understanding of crime-generating processes and for …

Objectives: Research evidence on schools as a factor in the distribution of neighborhood violence has produced varying and at-times …