An All-India Cambridge Crime Harm Index

The Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing and its Director, Professor Lawrence Sherman, have been developing the idea of a crime harm index since 2007 (see references below). Since 2018, Professor Sherman and his colleagues have been teaching that idea at the SV Patel National Police Academy of India, to some of the successive batches of the NPA’s Mid-Career Training Programme Phase 4 (MCTP-4), as part of their long association since the launch of MCTP-4 in 2010. In 2019, graduates of the Cambridge MCTP-4 arranged for Cambridge Professor Peter Neyroud, a co-author of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index who had directed the 2018-19 Batches of MCTP-4, to present the concept to a meeting of police leaders with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Neyroud’s presentation to the meeting was well-received, with encouragement from the Prime Minister for further development of the idea.

After a COVID hiatus in 2020, the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing team returned to the NPA in October 2021 to teach the next batch of the MCTP-4. During that course, Professor Sherman presented the first direct application of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index to Indian crime statistics on First Investigative Reports (FIRs) of violations of the Indian Penal Code, as published by the Indian National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The senior police leaders from across India who participated in the course expressed substantial interest in the concept and its application, as did members of the teaching faculty of the National Police Academy. By the end of the Batch, the Director of the National Police Academy encouraged the Cambridge team to publish a provisional Crime Harm Index based on the Cambridge system, and to propose a process for generating a truly Indian approach to the generic idea of weighting each crime type by seriousness—since crimes are not created equal in the harm they cause.

This process began with the work of Eleanor Neyroud, who took the Indian Penal Code statistics reported by the NCRB and produced a transposition of the Indian Penal Code definitions into the comparable offences covered by sentencing guidelines in England and Wales—to the extent possible. These transpositions are not a prefect fit in every case, although they are remarkably close in many of the high-harm categories.

The Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing is publishing, on this page, Ms. Neyroud’s initial transposition of the weightings (measured in recommended days of imprisonment), in a spreadsheet posted here. Each offence type in the Indian Penal Code is linked to its closest counterpart with the categories used by the Sentencing Council for England & Wales, along with her explanatory notes for how the decision was made, or not, in each case. Further explications of this process, as well as general information about the idea of a crime harm index, are found in these articles published at the links indicated:

Sherman, Neyroud & Neyroud (2016). The Cambridge Crime Harm Index https://academic.oup.com/policing/article/10/3/171/1753592?login=true

Sherman et al (2020). How to Count Crime: The Cambridge Consensus Statement. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41887-020-00043-2

Neyroud, E. & L.W. Sherman (2022) The Indian Cambridge Crime Harm Index (ICCHI): A User’s Guide to Calculation [Link to be added upon publication in early 2022]

The weights in the ICCHI 2021 spreadsheet are offered as a proof of concept and, ideally, as a temporary substitute, for a truly Indian Crime Harm Index based on Indian values or institutional processes. Further detail on the decisions made for transposing the Cambridge Crime Harm Index into the provisional Indian version of that Index can be provided by writing to Eleanor Neyroud at eleanorneyroud@cambridge-ebp.co.uk.