Crime science
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Crime science is the study of crime in order to find ways to prevent, detect and solve crimes ethically and with regard to the broader social implications of interventions. Three features distinguish crime science from criminology: it embraces the physical, computer and engineering sciences as well as the social; it focuses on crime rather than criminals, and it is single-minded about cutting crime, rather than studying it for its own sake. Crime science was conceived by the British broadcaster Nick Ross in the late 1990s in order to recruit scientific methods to crime prevention, with encouragement from the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens and Professor Ken Pease.
The first incarnation of crime science was the founding, also by Ross, of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London in 2001. In order to reflect its broad disciplinary base the JDI is established in the Engineering Sciences Faculty, with growing ties to the physical sciences such as physics and chemistry but also drawing on the fields of statistics, environmental design, psychology, forensics, policing, economics and geography. It has established itself as a world-leader in crime mapping and for training crime analysts (civilian crime profilers who work for the police).
An international Crime Science Network was formed in 2003, with support from the EPSRC. Since then the term crime science has been variously interpreted, sometimes with a different emphasis from Ross's original description published in 1999, and often favouring situational crime prevention (redesigning products, services and policies to remove opportunities, tempations and provocations and make detection more certain) rather than other forms of intervention. This reflects its focus on delivering immediate reductions in crime.
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