Targeting Risks of Serious Violence Course
Monday 23rd - Friday 27th September 2024
Challenge. How do we identify the people and places at highest risks of serious violence? How do we update those forecasts, every day, to better use police resources to prevent crime? The answer lies in more and better crime analysis.
Objectives. Applying rapid advances in IT and other technology, this course will help police force leaders (and aspiring leaders) and crime analysts to become more skilled and effective at the following urgent tasks:
Identifying people most likely to be victimized by serious violence
Tracking serious violent crime using the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CCHI)
Predicting micro-hot spots where murders and GBH assaults are most likely to occur
Tracking police activities by hot spots in relation to crime trends
Generating feedback and digital alarms to patrol teams for delivery of patrol time by hot spot
Tracking criminal networks and their trends in serious violence
Testing the impact of police strategies applied to specific targets
The use of algorithmic forecasting to predict which police officers are at greater future risk of gross misconduct allegations
Innovations in domestic abuse targeting and prevention
Integrating Hot Spot Policing programs into longer term Problem Oriented Policing approaches
Course structure.
Day one begins with an introduction to 50 key concepts in Evidence-Based Policing. These ideas will be returned to throughout the week. The morning of day one also includes an introduction to the use of weighted crime indices to map crime harm rather than crime count. This can enable Forces to target scarce resources more effectively. Day one also includes three different case studies of the successful application of an evidence-based policing approach. The case studies are presented so that participants can see how the theories and ideas that have been presented have already been applied in practice. In the evening of day one, a group social networking event is organised.
Day two begins with presentations regarding there the effectiveness of systematic and intuitive targeting systems in policing have been tested, as well as different approaches to targeting and a distillation of the identified good practice in UK policing from the 2022 review of eighteen Forces approach to targeting serious violent crime. CCEBP conducted this review for the College of Policing. Day two continues with case studies of good and bad implementation and examples of flawed research. This is in order to enable participants to become more intelligent and sceptical consumers of what may not be “best practice” or good research that they may be presented with.
Day three begins with the presentation of a systematic method to rate and assess the merits of any research (Maryland Scale). The rest of day three has a focus on domestic abuse and sexual violence. The presentations and inputs include the evaluation of independent domestic violence advocates at court, domestic abuse panic alarms, suspended prosecution programs for domestic abuse and a live experiment in relation to the use of polygraphs for domestic abuse parolees as a condition of license.. We look at what works, what does not work and what appears to backfire. There will also be a social networking event on the Wednesday evening.
Day four begins with a look at algorithmic forecasting as a tool to manage future risk of offending, as well as the use of algorithms to predict future police misconduct. Day four also includes inputs on Restorative Justice Conferencing, which can reduce future harm and reduce trauma experienced by victims, as well as introducing criminal network analysis as a tool to target hidden harm.
The last day, day five, begins with some case studies of research from outside the UK to explore the issues of external validity (what may not apply in a different context) as well as inputs on measuring police performance and understanding the opportunities that arise from the victim offender overlap.
Through the week space has been built into the timetable to allow group work. On the Friday afternoon there are short group presentations where small diverse syndicates (drawn from different Forces and countries) are tasked to present short proposals of how they will address specific violent crime problems. After each presentation there is a Q&A session where we will link the proposals back to the concepts and theories from earlier in the week and suggest how other ideas might be applied to the fictitious problem in order to improve the response. The course will finish by 4pm on the Friday.
Faculty. The Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing faculty teaching this one-week, high intensity course includes the following instructors:
Dr. Heather Strang PhD Director of the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge
Dr. Eleanor Neyroud PhD, University of Cambridge
Dr. Sara Valdebenito, PhD, University of Cambridge
Detective Chief Superintendent (Retired) Simon Rose MBA, MSt, Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing
Cost.
This five-day course, per person, offers two pricing options:
· Residential, inclusive of 4 nights bed & Breakfast = £1,810.00 + VAT;
Non-Residential = £1,350 + VAT.