China’s hukou system is a state-administered household registration system that registers citizens in particular localities and historically classified them as holding agricultural or non-agricultural hukou. These categories reflect rural and urban institutional status rather than necessarily current residence. Because household mobility can separate actual residence from the place of registration and associated social and institutional resources, hukou status may condition the relationship between household mobility and fraud vulnerability. Using data from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey, this study examines household-level fraud encounters, actual victimization, and monetary losses. A higher proportion of household members living away from home is associated with fewer fraud encounters overall but, conditional on an encounter, with a higher likelihood of victimization and larger reported losses. Subgroup analyses suggest that mobility is negatively associated with telecommunications or online fraud encounters among non-agricultural-hukou households. Among agricultural-hukou households, mobility is positively associated with face-to-face fraud encounters, actual victimization, and monetary losses, whereas the corresponding post-encounter associations are not statistically significant among non-agricultural-hukou households. Exploratory analyses are consistent with a possible role for changes in social interaction and communication needs, but do not establish a causal mechanism. The findings underscore the importance of distinguishing fraud encounters from actual victimization and indicate that mobility-related face-to-face fraud vulnerability may be particularly pronounced among agricultural-hukou households.
This article examines a paradox in the development of Irish criminology, where the importance of administrative (‘state’) data contrasts with its inaccessibility. The scarcity of state data has fostered a distinct research culture to administrative criminology elsewhere yet limits quantitative enquiry. By tracing the discipline’s history, the article highlights how Irish criminology has grown intuitively and independently despite these data constraints. This article argues that continued growth necessitates broader data access and points to alternative and underutilised data sources which may strengthen the empirical base of Irish criminology while respecting the discipline’s distinctive developmental ethos and capacity to flourish in constrained settings. The central proposition is that while the lack of state data promoted a distinct research ethos, a robust data infrastructure is essential for Irish criminology to continue to flourish and develop alternative spaces of criminological enquiry.
Ride-hailing has become an important part of urban mobility in Nigeria, yet concerns about passenger and driver safety persist. This study explores how victimisation is experienced, interpreted, and managed within ride-hailing services in Ibadan, Nigeria. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 27 passengers and drivers, the study examines experiences of robbery, harassment, intimidation, and coercive control. The findings show that victimisation is often a gradual process that develops through routine interactions, ambiguity, and shifting perceptions of risk. Participants frequently viewed platform safety features as reassuring but insufficient during critical incidents. Many chose not to report victimisation because of institutional distrust, emotional burden, fear of complications, and limited confidence in reporting outcomes. Instead, they relied on informal coping and risk-management strategies, including heightened vigilance, altered travel routines, and social support networks. The study highlights victimisation as a dynamic process shaped by situational vulnerability, interpretation, and adaptation within everyday mobility.
This study examines whether the supply of and demand for police services are associated with crime-clearance outcomes across several offense types in selected police stations in Santiago, Chile. Using station-level observational data, the analysis shows that the relationship between policing inputs and clearance outcomes is not uniform. Supply of police services was positively associated with violent robbery clearance, while court order demand was positively associated with homicide clearance. By contrast, this variable was negatively associated with snatch theft clearance, and several other models produced null or inconsistent results. These patterns suggest that clearance outcomes are context dependent and vary according to offense characteristics and local organizational conditions. Because the study relies on observational data, a small sample, and limited information on underlying mechanisms, the findings should be interpreted as exploratory rather than causal. Stronger research designs and richer case-level data are needed before firm policy recommendations can be made. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Police collect many kinds of data and are expected to analyze it for problem-solving. But there’s insufficient capacity to analyze all data. We show how police can apply large language models (LLMs) to unstructured data for problem-solving. We do this by applying LLMs to unstructured residents’ reports of homeless camping. LLMs are prompted to code resident concerns from 2021 to 2024 in Boulder, Colorado. A total of 10,286 reports were coded to identify 10 kind of problems. Substantial agreement between LLM coding was found (Cohen’s K = 0.67). Longer reports more frequently had concerns. 1
In this analytical book review, Gender-Based Violence: A Comprehensive Guide, edited by Ali and Rogers (2023), is examined through a critical lens that goes beyond a purely descriptive approach. Unlike traditional approaches that treat violence as isolated, individual criminological cases, this study conceptualizes gender-based violence (GBV) as a multidimensional continuum that feeds into one another across private, public, and virtual spaces. Within the scope of this review, the book’s main components have been analyzed in depth: the socio-political triad comprising the concepts of power, privilege, and positionality; the structural and operational dynamics of child abuse and exploitation; mechanisms of coercive control in intimate partner violence; new, institutionalized forms of post-separation economic exploitation; and the intersection matrix of mental health and substance abuse pressures. Finally, the study’s methodological limitations are addressed; despite the work’s theoretical commitments, its occasional return to the binary gender dogma and its dependence on the welfare systems of the Global North are examined with critical reflexivity.
Retail security and loss prevention remain critical challenges in urban commercial sectors, particularly in developing economies like Bangladesh. This study empirically evaluates retail security and loss prevention practices in the commercial sectors of Dhaka and Chittagong Metropolitan areas in Bangladesh, addressing a critical gap in South Asian retail security literature. Using a mixed-methods convergent parallel design, data were collected from 210 purposively sampled retail stores (105 each from Dhaka and Chittagong), categorised by type, size, employee count, and revenue, via structured questionnaires. The sample was dominated by small outlets: most participating stores had 1–3 employees (61.0
University is students first instance of independence however it comes with homesickness due to the removal of support systems leaving them susceptible to burglary. Students have to consider an accommodation based on safety. The present study aimed to determine students’ feelings of safety when comparing different accommodations. 211 participants from completed questionnaires to determine their feelings of safety, safety measure preferences and homesickness levels. ANCOVAs were ran to assess whether there was a difference between accommodation types on feelings of safety and security measures preferences. The homesickness questionnaire was entered as a covariant. It was found that levels of feelings of safety do vary between student accommodation types. Safety measures preference finding no significance. Overall, the data shows that whilst students feel generally safe, they are considered with the lack of security measures in their accommodation that could help in the prevention of a crime.
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) has been widely adopted to improve safety in the built environment, yet preventive effectiveness often weakens after installation. This study examines these limitations from a lifecycle governance perspective, arguing that CPTED sustainability depends not only on environmental design but also on how operational judgment is structured across time. Building on recent lifecycle- and process-oriented CPTED research, the study develops a conceptual framework identifying judgment points, judgment criteria, and judgment structures across planning, design, installation, operation, maintenance, and termination stages. The study further introduces the concept of the judgment gap to explain how preventive effectiveness may deteriorate when operational governance remains weakly structured after implementation. By reframing CPTED as a governance-oriented operational system involving continuous reassessment, accountability, feedback, and adaptation, the study provides an analytical foundation for future governance-oriented CPTED research and practice.
Intelligence-led policing depends on community cooperation, which in turn depends on trust. This study examines whether community-police feedback mechanisms in Anambra State, Nigeria, are building that trust. Drawing on procedural justice theory, a mixed-methods design combined survey data from 216 respondents across two high-crime Local Government Areas with qualitative interviews with senior police officers. The findings reveal a paradox: approximately 70
The theory of representative bureaucracy posits that the demographic reflection of disadvantaged societal groups within public institutions facilitates the substantive advocacy of their interests in policy outputs, thereby ensuring more equitable resource distribution and enhancing the perceived legitimacy of the state among those populations. This study presents a systematic literature review of representative bureaucracy in policing, analyzing 160 empirical studies from 1987 to 2025. The findings identify 2017 as a critical scholarly inflection point, driven by global scrutiny of police violence. The research confirms that representation substantively reduces the police misconduct and highlights that organizational socialization and rigid bureaucratic paradigms often attenuate the efficacy of diversity initiatives. The study concludes that achieving democratic accountability requires a transition to active representation, facilitated by a fundamental transformation of institutional culture and the equitable integration of representative cohorts. This synthesis provides a comprehensive roadmap for future research and policy interventions in police forces.
This study evaluates outdoor environmental interventions implemented by a municipal public housing provider in police-designated vulnerable residential areas in Gothenburg, Sweden. Using geocoded address-level crime data (2019–2023) and a staggered difference-in-differences design, we estimate the effects of such interventions on outdoor-related crime drawing on crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and related environmental crime prevention approaches. Across multiple specifications and control groups, we find no statistically significant reductions following intervention exposure. Event-study estimates indicate no differential pre-treatment trends, and robustness checks yield substantively similar results. Descriptive spatial analyses show no consistent evidence of crime displacement. The findings suggest that broad, multi-purpose housing-led improvement strategies do not automatically translate into measurable crime reductions when preventive mechanisms are diffuse or weakly aligned with specific crime problems. The study highlights the importance of aligning environmental interventions with clearly defined crime problems and contributes to debates on the role of public housing providers in community safety governance.
Many human interactions may be thought of as a series of anticipations of what others will do and the resultant tailoring of behaviour. This paper looks at police-public interactions in terms of actions relative to expectation and the implications for applicable research. The decision of victims not to report a crime is used to illustrate the approach. Specifically, the proportion of decisions to report a crime that were police related, changes in this trend over time as well as reasons for it are analysed. Analysis of responses to the Crime Survey for England and Wales between 2001 and 2023 suggests that anticipated police reactions feature in between 40 and 52
Children’s independent mobility is considered important for the healthy development of children. One of the known barriers to children’s independent mobility is parental fear of strangers. The present study investigated the effectiveness of school-based crime prevention programs on parental fear of strangers in Japan. An online survey administered through an online research panel company was conducted. We analyzed responses from 275 mothers living in Tokyo with their female elementary school children in the range of third grade to sixth grade. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the associations between the implementation and participation in school-based crime prevention programs and mothers’ fear of strangers, while controlling for parental factors, child factors, and neighborhood characteristics. Overall, no crime prevention programs were found to reduce fear of strangers. Paradoxically, however, three school-based crime prevention programs were associated with a significant increase in mothers’ fear.
Using a cross-sectional survey of 1552 small and medium-sized enterprises in Sweden, we investigated the impact of crime on entrepreneurs’ attitudes and behaviors. Almost half of the respondents reported that their companies had suffered at least one crime in the prior five years. Businesses were particularly affected by theft/burglary, vandalism, invoice fraud, and cybercrime, but 24.7
Mapping crime hotspots is an important technique for identifying areas with significant criminal activity. Law enforcement agencies must have access to timely and reliable information in order to plan and make sound decisions. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) offer a comprehensive approach to evaluating crime patterns by examining the locations and timing of incidences. Traditionally, crime mapping depended on pin-maps, which were often slow and inaccurate. This study aims to identify hotspots for hit-and-run incidents in six major districts of Maharashtra, India, during July and August 2023. The study used advanced geospatial approaches such as Kernel Density Estimation and Spatial Autocorrelation to identify substantial clusters of hit-and-run incidents. These hotspots were primarily found in densely populated urban areas, particularly the central business district and main highways. The statistics showed that high-traffic areas had a 25
The true extent of crime against farms in Ireland is unknown as official statistics are not collected on this specific area of crime. The Irish Farm Crime Survey sought to enhance understanding of farm crime by undertaking a national survey of farmers on their experiences of crime, with a particular focus on trust and confidence in the police, including their willingness to report incidents of crime. Responses to an open question at the end of the survey gave a voice to the individual farmer participants in the survey. The study found that in general Irish farmers have a positive or neutral attitude towards the police, and in their open responses, they responded well to engagement by community policing efforts. This is important and may provide a basis for making policing more present in rural life, which was regarded as important by many of the study’s participants.
