I don’t seem to be able to send you a DM, but I am very happy to be involved in this. I maintain a couple of R packages, but I also use R heavily in research as well as teaching.
Some examples:
bsky.app/profile/matt...
bsky.app/profile/matt...
The full report is available here and contains lots of other useful information about how police spend their time.
www.gov.uk/government/p...
Despite much media commentary that police don't do enough to tackle shoplifting, this report estimates police use resources costing between £132 million and £212 million each year responding to shoplifting.
(The people best-placed to reduce shoplifting, of course, are retailers)
Overall, police only spend 7% of their time in visible patrol and 0.8% on crime prevention. Even neighbourhood teams spend only 18% of their time on patrol and 1.6% on crime prevention. That's a big reason public confidence in police has dipped.
See also: x.com/LessCrime/st...
Figure 3 bar chart showing proportion of time spent on specific crime incident activities by type. “Violence with injury” is highest at 14.7%, followed by “Violence without injury” (8.3%) and “Other sexual offences” (8.1%). Mid-range categories include rape (7.2%), homicide (6.4%), trafficking of drugs (5.6%), and vehicle offences (4.8%). Several categories cluster around 3–4%, including stalking and harassment, public order offences, and fraud/forgery. Lower proportions include possession of weapons (2.7%), shoplifting (2.4%), robbery (2.2%), and burglary business/community (1.5%). The smallest shares are theft from the person (0.9%), arson (0.7%), and bicycle theft (0.2%). Overall, time is concentrated in violent offences.
Figure 5 bar chart showing proportion of time spent on PSW incident activities by type. “Missing person” dominates at 16.0%, followed by “Concern for safety” (14.2%) and “Police-generated resource activity” (12.2%). Next are ASB/nuisance (5.6%), unknown (5.5%), and domestic incidents (4.8%). Many categories fall between 2–4%, including messages, welfare checks, road-related offences, and collisions. Smaller categories include suspicious circumstances (1.8%), personal incidents (1.7%), highway disruption (1.3%), and contact records (1.2%). Very low proportions (under 1%) include firearms, environmental incidents, civil disputes, protests, lost property, hoax calls, alarms, and others, with several near 0%. Time is heavily concentrated in safeguarding-related incidents.
Loads of interesting findings in a new report on how police (🏴/🏴) spend their time, including that police spend more time investigating violent crime than any other crime type, and they spend almost no time investigating people's social-media posts.
Some other highlights …
I’m aware I have mentioned this many times before. But if you want to communicate clearly, just use plain English rather than clogging up your writing with abbreviations that other people might not know:
And it’s spooky how accurate @gmhales.bsky.social was in pointing that out when the orders were first proposed!
x.com/gmhales/stat...
That’s worth pointing out, and I think you do it well in the report. But I’d have been amazed if these orders had had an effect, given how little they actually allow police to do relative to what they could do anyway.
The thing I find fascinating about this intervention is the Home Office implemented a scheme that effectively only gives police powers to search a repeat offender when police *don't* suspect they're carrying a weapon (because if police did suspect that, they could search them under existing law).
Serious Violence Reduction Orders (introduced in 2022) didn’t actually reduce serious violence – the people given an order in court were just as likely to commit further violent crimes as those who weren’t.
That’s disappointing to hear. There is a national shortage of detectives, but you’d expect a rape investigation into a police officer to be well resourced. Out of interest, what part of the investigation did you feel was half-arsed?
Well if it does end up going viral, you should at least be ready to exploit your new-found fame with a meme-coin (BeestonCoin?) or a line of health supplements (NutriBeeston?). In the modern world, no pratfall goes un-monetised.
I can see why police would want to get rid of a sexual predator as quickly as possible, but in reality police have almost no influence on how quickly a case comes to trial once the suspect has been charged. Police officers are usually just as frustrated by court delays as everybody else.
Had the defendant been remanded in custody? If so then the trial happens sooner than it would otherwise.
If police charge someone with a serious crime today, in some parts of England that case might not come to trial until the autumn of 2030!
This is obviously a scandal government should fix, but it shows the limitations of relying on deterrence to prevent crime. The CJS just isn’t built to do that.
Interesting paper on how police officer discretion meant that a drug diversion programme often wasn’t used as it was designed to be.
An important reminder for anyone designing programmes: you must think about how it will be implemented on the front line.
The Tube gets most of the attention when people think about public transport in London. But London Buses carry far more people: 9.7 million bus journeys a year start or end at Brixton Station, more than the total number of buses journeys in the counties of Dorset, Leicestershire or Shropshire.
Reducing the drink-drive limit had no effect on alcohol-related traffic fatalities (🇺🇸), possibly because the change wasn’t backed up by any extra enforcement. Notable because the limit in England and Wales is the highest in Europe.
I have often cursed the existence of that shop because I have never once succeeded in walking past without buying a bagel (however spelled). Fortunately for my waistline, I’m not in Finsbury Park that often.
The ones on the top of Brick Lane use the Beigel spelling, but I can’t remember if the Finsbury Park one used to. Maybe try the Google Street View timeline?
I’m quite shocked by that. Knowing where your data has come from and how the journey influenced what data you have is a huge part of lots of data analysis.
Don’t statistics degrees already require an empirical research project!? 😳
Were they people smuggling or people trafficking?
I appreciate you need a second reference, but you mentioned both terms in your post and they are quite different.
Police calls to mental-health incidents (🇺🇸) were heavily concentrated on a small number of streets, with hotspots usually stable over several years. Would be interesting to see if this is true outside the US, given their poor public mental-healthcare system for a developed country.
One issue is that the number of people using TfL services is so huge. In a typical year, TfL prosecutes about 18,000 people for fare evasion and issues another 60,000+ penalty fares. But with 3 billion journeys a year, someone can still fare evade every day and be unlikely to get caught.
Small-scale hotspot policing patrols (🇸🇪) reduced violence and vandalism (and increased how many crimes were solved) but had no effect on robbery or theft. The patrols had no effect on district-wide crime totals, though.
Yes, case loads for detectives in lots of forces are eye-popping. And, of course, many investigations are now much more resource intensive than they used to be.
One of the things you gain from befriending criminal lawyers is an insight into how stupid most criminals are.
Investigations of rape and seriously sexual offences (🏴/🏴) are less effective because of (1) lack of police resources, (2) lack of specialist training and (3) unhelpful technology, according to sex-offence investigators.
I know that you and some of the authors submitting to your journal have tried to ameliorate this issue by posting pre-prints on @crimrxiv.com but I am interested in why the editorial team chose not to eliminate the problem at source. Was there, for example, a systematic barrier?