Matthew Innes
Biographic Data
| ID | 242032 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Innes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Innes |
| SIGNATURE | INNES M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8950-8147 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 389 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Counter-Terrorism Strategic Communication Campaigns and the Generative Nature of Trust
This article examines how public-facing counterterrorism campaigns are strategically constructed and communicated, to try to signal trust, as part of their wider agenda to deter terrorist risks and threats. The empirical evidence includes frame analysis of the main messaging assets across three UK campaigns, in-depth practitioner interviews, and public focus groups across different parts of the UK. Building on sensemaking theory (Weick, 1995) we …
Frame, Fame and Fear Traps: The Dialectic of Counter-Terrorism Strategic Communication”
This paper explores the challenges and complexities navigated and negotiated in public facing counter-terrorism strategic communication campaigns. Informed by frame analysis of campaign assets, practitioner interviews and public focus groups, the discussion pivots around three high-profile UK public messaging campaigns. Building from Goffman’s theory of ‘normal appearances’ and the established concept of a ‘frame trap’, the analysis identifies tw…
De-platforming disinformation: Conspiracy theories and their control
Informed by two case studies of de-platforming interventions performed by Facebook against two high profile conspiracy theorists who had been messaging about Covid-19, this article investigates how de-platforming functions as an instrument of social control, illuminating the intended and unintended effects it induces. To help interpret the patterns in the data, two novel conceptual innovations are introduced. The concept of ‘minion accounts’ capt…
Real-Time Text Classification of User-Generated Content on Social Media: Systematic Review
The aim of this systematic review is to determine the current state of the art in the real-time classification of user-generated content from social media. Focus is on the identification of the main characteristics of data used for training and testing, the types of text processing and normalization that are required, the machine learning methods used most commonly, and how these methods compare to one another in terms of classification performan…
Social network interventions in the space of topological relationships between communities
A social network intervention is a process of intentionally altering a social network to achieve an objective. The objective in question may concern accelerating behaviour change or improving organisational performance. In this work we propose a novel model of social network interventions which considers topological properties of relationships existing between communities. Broadly speaking, topological properties of such relationships include pro…
Erving Goffman on Misinformation and Information Control: The Conduct of Contemporary Russian Information Operations
Misinformation is a social problem increasingly, and routinely, commanding significant political and public attention. Less well known is that Erving Goffman was writing about misinformation as early as 1953 in his PhD thesis. Subsequent to which, he wrote repeatedly about the social organization and conduct of 'information control' across several of his most influential publications. This article distils his ideas about these concepts to explore…
Assisted’ facial recognition and the reinvention of suspicion and discretion in digital policing
Automated facial recognition (AFR) has emerged as one of the most controversial policing innovations of recent years. Drawing on empirical data collected during the United Kingdom’s two major police trials of AFR deployments—and building on insights from the sociology of policing, surveillance studies and science and technology studies—this article advances several arguments. Tracing a lineage from early sociologies of policing that accented the …
Normalisation et domestication de la désinformation numérique: Les opérations informationnelles d’interférence et d’influence de l’extrême droite et de l’État russe en Europe
Cet article présente le processus de normalisation et de domestication de l’utilisation de la mésinformation et de la désinformation numériques dans les campagnes électorales en Europe. Plus précisément, notre analyse retrace l’influence des innovations associées aux techniques numériques d’ingénierie de l’influence portées par des groupes de l’extrême droite et des agences liées au Kremlin. À l’aide de ressources conceptuelles et empiriques, nou…
Covid-19 and the digital revolution
Since the 1980s, the digital revolution has been both a negative and positive force. Within a few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social and economic life. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers. This article assembles evidence from different area…
Techniques of disinformation: Constructing and communicating "soft facts" after terrorism
Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of "techniques of disinformation" used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes empirically to the neglected topic of social reactions to terrorism. It also ad…
Disinformation and digital influencing after terrorism: Spoofing, truthing and social proofing
This article explores how digital communications platforms are used in the aftermath of terrorist attacks to amplify or constrain the wider social impacts and consequences of politically motivated violence. Informed by empirical data collected by monitoring social media platforms following four terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017, the analysis focusses on the role of ‘soft facts’ (rumours/conspiracy theories/fake news/propaganda) in influencing p…
Counter-governance and ‘post-event prevent’: Regulating rumours, fake news and conspiracy theories in the aftermath of terror
How Russia's Internet Research Agency Built its Disinformation Campaign
In this article we analyse features of the information influence operations run by the St. Petersburg based Internet Research Agency, targeted at Europe. Informed by publicly available ‘open source’ data, the analysis delineates three key tactics that underpinned their disinformation campaign: account buying; ‘follower fishing’; and narrative switching. Both individually and collectively these were designed to build the reach, impact and influenc…
How Co-Production Regulates
This article examines how and why regulatory influences tend to embed within the practices of co-production. Informed by empirical data derived from semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of experts in co-production, the analysis seeks to illuminate some of the ‘soft’ and ‘interactive’ forms of regulatory work that are performed. In so doing, the discussion provides a ‘lightly’ critical reading of co-production and draws in Erving Gof…
Robert Persons, Popular Sovereignty, and the Late Elizabethan Succession Debate
This article explores how, and why, Robert Persons's A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (1594) scandalized late Elizabethan England. By invoking the spectres of popular sovereignty and political resistance, Persons, as is well known, threatened to disrupt the succession of James VI of Scotland to Elizabeth I's throne. In doing so, however, he also undermined the very notion that the English crown passed by succession …
After Woolwich: Analyzing Open Source Communications to Understand the Interactive and Multi-polar Dynamics of the Arc of Conflict
This article is based upon a case study of the 2013 murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London. It shows how analysis of open source communications data collected via social media platforms can illuminate the inter- and intra-community conflict dynamics arising in the aftermath of such events. Framed by Collins’ recent theoretical work on the escalatory and de-escalatory forces in conflict situations, the empirical analysis brings to the fo…
Ten "Rs" of Social Reaction: Using Social Media to Analyse the "Post-Event" Impacts of the Murder of Lee Rigby
This article provides a case study analysis of social reactions to the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013. Informed by empirical data collected by systematic monitoring of social media platforms, the analysis identifies a number of online behaviours with offline effects—labeled the ten “Rs”—that collectively constitute the process of social reaction to the crime. These are defined as: reporting; requesting; responding; recruiting; “risking”; re…
A Disruptive Influence? "Prevent-ing" Problems and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in Practice
This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter-Terrorism. Informed by empirical data collected during semi-structured interviews with police officers involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analys…
Signal Crimes: Social Reactions to Crime, Disorder, and Control
1. A Signal Crimes Perspective 2. Why Disorder Matters: Reading Urban Situations 3. How Fear Travels: The Private, Parochial, and Public Harm Footprints of Criminal Homicides 4. The Crimes That Were Not There: 'Soft Facts' and the Causes and Consequences of Crime Rumours 5. The Long Shadow of the Twin Towers and the 'New' Counter-terrorism: A Case Study of the Institutional Effects of Signal Crimes 6. Control Signals An Afterword on Method: 'Gonz…
Helping police with their enquiries: International perspectives on homicide investigation
It remains one of the key paradoxes of policing studies that homicide investigation is one of the most publicly visible and concomitantly least understood aspects of the police function. When mass
The problem of success: What is a ‘good’ homicide investigation
Police detectives traditionally defined a successful homicide investigation as involving a suspect being identified, charged and ultimately convicted – preferably for murder. However, it is increasingly being recognised, not least by police officers themselves, that definitions of success can be more complex. Informed by empirical data drawn from field studies of police murder investigations in the UK, this article identifies four alternate defin…
Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages
Can we speak in confidence? Community intelligence and neighbourhood policing v2.0
Informed by empirical data collected in the London Borough of Sutton (LBS) in four sweeps between 2007 and 2010, this article examines the impact of a community engagement methodology encouraging citizens to articulate their local security needs to Neighbourhood Policing teams (NPTs). By acting on this community intelligence police are able to ‘tune’ their interventions towards those problems generating most social harm. In so doing, the data sug…
The Carolingian World
At its height, the Carolingian empire spanned a million square kilometres of western Europe - from the English Channel to central Italy and northern Spain, and from the Atlantic to the fringes of modern Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. As the largest political unit for centuries, the empire dominated the region and left an enduring legacy for European culture. This comprehensive survey traces this great empire's history, from its origins a…
Seeing like a citizen: Field experiments in ‘community intelligence‐led policing’
This paper describes an innovative community engagement methodology designed to provide police with a ‘rich’ community intelligence picture of the ‘drivers’ of insecurity in neighbourhoods. Informed by empirical data from three case studies where this methodology has been trialled it is argued the approach facilitates a ‘community intelligence‐led policing’ approach. This has the potential to establish meaningful connections between community pol…
Signal crimes and signal disorders: Notes on Deviance as Communicative Action 1
In this paper a ‘signal crimes’ perspective is outlined in an effort to unpack the relationships between experiences of crime and disorder, and perceptions of criminogenic risk. Grounded in symbolic interactionist sociology, and developing a social semiotic understanding of risk perception, it is a perspective that focuses upon processes of social reaction and the ways in which people interpret and define threats to their security. It is proposed…
Policing Uncertainty: Countering Terror through Community Intelligence and Democratic Policing
This article explores how counterterrorism policing strategies and practices in the United Kingdom have changed in the face of recent terrorist attacks. It considers the evident limitations of these developments and how a local, democratic style of neighborhood policing could be used to manufacture the community intelligence “feed” that offers the best probability of preventing and deterring future forms of such violence. These substantive concer…
Land, Freedom and the Making of the Medieval West
In the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, barbarian warbands acquired property rights in the former provinces of the Roman west, in a process that established the broad structural characteristics of early medieval society in western Europe: that is the central contention of this essay. Focusing on the western Mediterranean heartlands of the Imperial government and senatorial aristocracy, it argues that these property transfers were fundamen…
How Russia's Internet Research Agency Built its Disinformation Campaign
In this article we analyse features of the information influence operations run by the St. Petersburg based Internet Research Agency, targeted at Europe. Informed by publicly available ‘open source’ data, the analysis delineates three key tactics that underpinned their disinformation campaign: account buying; ‘follower fishing’; and narrative switching. Both individually and collectively these were designed to build the reach, impact and influenc…
Why ‘soft’ policing is hard: On the curious development of reassurance policing, how it became neighbourhood policing and what this signifies about the politics of police reform
Tracing the development of Reassurance Policing and its recent translation into Neighbourhood Policing, this article examines why it is that ‘soft’ policing functions appear so difficult for the police to perform. It is argued that over the past three decades the reform of policing in the UK has tended to oscillate between positions emphasizing coercive ‘hard’ policing functions and alternative conceptions that focus upon the conduct of soft poli…
Organizational communication and the symbolic construction of police murder investigations 1
This paper draws upon a range of empirical data to consider the ways in which police murder investigations are symbolically constructed, both within and outside of the police organization. It is argued that a range of communicative formats serve to produce the activities associated with police murder investigations in a way that serves to legitimate the police function to both members of the public and police officers alike. A particular emphasis…
Reassurance Policing, Community Policing and Measuring Police Performance
The central theme of this article is that current police performance measures are largely inadequate for capturing many dimensions of community policing practice. Focusing upon a recent innovation in policing strategy in the United Kingdom, that of reassurance policing, an argument is developed for alternative ways of thinking about police performance and how it can be gauged. Drawing upon ideas and insights from social research methodology, it i…
Professionalizing’ the role of the police informant: The British experience
This paper examines recent trends in the use of informants by the police in crime investigation work. The rise of the ‘new managerial state’ and the demand for an increased degree of efficiency in the delivery of policing services is identified as an important influence upon the apparent increased willingness of police policy makers to countenance the use of informants. Data is presented which suggests that informants are a cost‐effective resourc…
Control Creep
Reacting to the attacks on September 11th and subsequently, governments in both the USA and UK have identified a need to enhance the social control apparatus in order to protect citizens from forms of 'asymmetric warfare' conducted by terrorist groups. These attempts to reform the provision of security and control cannot be understood in isolation. They are connected to a deeply entrenched process of 'control creep', whereby the social control ap…
Techniques of disinformation: Constructing and communicating "soft facts" after terrorism
Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of "techniques of disinformation" used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes empirically to the neglected topic of social reactions to terrorism. It also ad…
Covid-19 and the digital revolution
Since the 1980s, the digital revolution has been both a negative and positive force. Within a few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social and economic life. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers. This article assembles evidence from different area…
Introduction Reassurance and the “New” Community Policing
After a decade where the discourse of police reform gravitated around ideas of “pluralization”, becoming “intelligence-led” and having “zero-tolerance”, more recently there has been a revival of in
Disinformation and digital influencing after terrorism: Spoofing, truthing and social proofing
This article explores how digital communications platforms are used in the aftermath of terrorist attacks to amplify or constrain the wider social impacts and consequences of politically motivated violence. Informed by empirical data collected by monitoring social media platforms following four terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017, the analysis focusses on the role of ‘soft facts’ (rumours/conspiracy theories/fake news/propaganda) in influencing p…
The problem of success: What is a ‘good’ homicide investigation
Police detectives traditionally defined a successful homicide investigation as involving a suspect being identified, charged and ultimately convicted – preferably for murder. However, it is increasingly being recognised, not least by police officers themselves, that definitions of success can be more complex. Informed by empirical data drawn from field studies of police murder investigations in the UK, this article identifies four alternate defin…
The 'Process Structures' of Police Homicide Investigations
Journal Article The 'Process Structures' of Police Homicide Investigations Get access Martin Innes Martin Innes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 42, Issue 4, 1 September 2002, Pages 669–688, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/42.4.669 Published: 01 September 2002
From Community to Communicative Policing: Signal Crimes' and the Problem of Public Reassurance
In this paper the concept of 'signal crimes' is proposed to capture the social semiotic processes by which particular types of criminal and disorderly conduct have a disproportionate impact upon fear of crime. Drawing upon the wider social scientific literature on risk perception, a sense of how and why different crime types might be possessed of different signal values is provided and some of the implications for current police practice outlined
A Disruptive Influence? "Prevent-ing" Problems and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in Practice
This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter-Terrorism. Informed by empirical data collected during semi-structured interviews with police officers involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analys…
Can we speak in confidence? Community intelligence and neighbourhood policing v2.0
Informed by empirical data collected in the London Borough of Sutton (LBS) in four sweeps between 2007 and 2010, this article examines the impact of a community engagement methodology encouraging citizens to articulate their local security needs to Neighbourhood Policing teams (NPTs). By acting on this community intelligence police are able to ‘tune’ their interventions towards those problems generating most social harm. In so doing, the data sug…
Assisted’ facial recognition and the reinvention of suspicion and discretion in digital policing
Automated facial recognition (AFR) has emerged as one of the most controversial policing innovations of recent years. Drawing on empirical data collected during the United Kingdom’s two major police trials of AFR deployments—and building on insights from the sociology of policing, surveillance studies and science and technology studies—this article advances several arguments. Tracing a lineage from early sociologies of policing that accented the …
Ten "Rs" of Social Reaction: Using Social Media to Analyse the "Post-Event" Impacts of the Murder of Lee Rigby
This article provides a case study analysis of social reactions to the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013. Informed by empirical data collected by systematic monitoring of social media platforms, the analysis identifies a number of online behaviours with offline effects—labeled the ten “Rs”—that collectively constitute the process of social reaction to the crime. These are defined as: reporting; requesting; responding; recruiting; “risking”; re…
Helping police with their enquiries: International perspectives on homicide investigation
It remains one of the key paradoxes of policing studies that homicide investigation is one of the most publicly visible and concomitantly least understood aspects of the police function. When mass
Policing the past: Cold Case Studies, Forensic Evidence and Retroactive Social Control1
In this article an empirically grounded study of the police practices used when conducting cold case reviews of unsolved homicides is used to illuminate the key features of what is termed 'retroactive social control'. It is suggested that this mode of social control, that works by placing past events under new descriptions, is an increasingly important feature of how social control is being imagined and delivered, and is predicated upon the capac…
What's Your Problem? Signal Crimes and Citizen-Focused Problem Solving
How Co-Production Regulates
This article examines how and why regulatory influences tend to embed within the practices of co-production. Informed by empirical data derived from semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of experts in co-production, the analysis seeks to illuminate some of the ‘soft’ and ‘interactive’ forms of regulatory work that are performed. In so doing, the discussion provides a ‘lightly’ critical reading of co-production and draws in Erving Gof…
The Appliance of Science: The Theory and Practice of Crime Intelligence Analysis
Intelligence analysis has emerged as an important component of contemporary policing strategies. Drawing upon qualitative data and a perspective informed by some of the concepts associated with the sociology of scientific knowledge, this paper provides an epistemologically oriented critique of some of the key techniques associated with crime analysis. Data presented suggest that crime analysis: is used in line with traditional modes of policing; …
An Iron Fist in an Iron Glove’ The Zero Tolerance Policing Debate
This article examines the development of zero tolerance policing in Britain and America. It traces the philosophical and theoretical bases of the zero tolerance approach and how they have influenced the practical implementation of a particular view of the police role in society. It is argued that central to the changes in public policing within the wider remit of social control, is an increasingly influential populist dynamic which is transformin…
Beyond the Macpherson Report: Managing Murder Inquiries in Context
This paper draws upon data collected as part of a three year project examining how the police investigate murder, to criticise and develop some of the conclusions of Sir William Macpherson's report into the Stephen Lawrence investigation. It is argued that the majority of attention in the aftermath of the report has been concerned with issues of police racism, but that this ignores a potentially significant theme connected to the management pract…
Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic Past
In 893 Archbishop Fulco of Reims wrote to Arnulf, king of the east Frankish kingdom. Fulco had just engineered the coronation of the Carolingian Charles the Simple in west Francia, in opposition to Odo, the aristocrat who had seized the western crown in the crisis of 888. After 888, Arnulf, as a Carolingian (albeit an illegitimate one), had established a hegemony over the various kings within the Frankish empire, Odo included. Hence Fulco's need …
The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages
This volume investigates the ways in which people in western Europe between the fall of Rome and the twelfth century used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms by which ideas about the past were subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) reshaped for present purposes. As well as written histories, also discussed are saints' lives, law codes, buildings, Biblical…
Professionalizing’ the role of the police informant: The British experience
This paper examines recent trends in the use of informants by the police in crime investigation work. The rise of the ‘new managerial state’ and the demand for an increased degree of efficiency in the delivery of policing services is identified as an important influence upon the apparent increased willingness of police policy makers to countenance the use of informants. Data is presented which suggests that informants are a cost‐effective resourc…
Short notices
Policing the Media: Street Cops and Public Perceptions of Law Enforcement. By David D. Perlmutter (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 159pp. pound15.99 pb, pound44.00 cloth)
Journal Article Policing the Media: Street Cops and Public Perceptions of Law Enforcement. By David D. Perlmutter (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 159pp. £15.99 pb, £44.00 cloth) Get access Martin Innes Martin Innes University of Surrey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 41, Issue 2, March 2001, Pages 405–407, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/41.2.405 Published: 01 March 2…
Control Creep
Reacting to the attacks on September 11th and subsequently, governments in both the USA and UK have identified a need to enhance the social control apparatus in order to protect citizens from forms of 'asymmetric warfare' conducted by terrorist groups. These attempts to reform the provision of security and control cannot be understood in isolation. They are connected to a deeply entrenched process of 'control creep', whereby the social control ap…
‘He never even allowed his white teeth to be bared in laughter’: The politics of humour in the Carolingian renaissance
Humour is scarcely a topic that looms large in Carolingian history. The overriding seriousness of a dynasty that saw its mission as the creation of a Christian society dominated not only contemporary discourse, but also that of modern interpreters. In a political culture wherein argument was prosecuted whenever possible with pen rather than sword, written texts were used to elevate personal and factional interests to the moral high ground. In thi…
Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest and Authority in an Early Medieval Society
Journal Article Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest and Authority in an Early Medieval Society Get access Matthew Innes Matthew Innes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 473, September 2002, Pages 939–941, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/117.473.939-a Published: 01 September 2002
The 'Process Structures' of Police Homicide Investigations
Journal Article The 'Process Structures' of Police Homicide Investigations Get access Martin Innes Martin Innes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 42, Issue 4, 1 September 2002, Pages 669–688, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/42.4.669 Published: 01 September 2002
Organizational communication and the symbolic construction of police murder investigations 1
This paper draws upon a range of empirical data to consider the ways in which police murder investigations are symbolically constructed, both within and outside of the police organization. It is argued that a range of communicative formats serve to produce the activities associated with police murder investigations in a way that serves to legitimate the police function to both members of the public and police officers alike. A particular emphasis…
From Community to Communicative Policing: Signal Crimes' and the Problem of Public Reassurance
In this paper the concept of 'signal crimes' is proposed to capture the social semiotic processes by which particular types of criminal and disorderly conduct have a disproportionate impact upon fear of crime. Drawing upon the wider social scientific literature on risk perception, a sense of how and why different crime types might be possessed of different signal values is provided and some of the implications for current police practice outlined
Understanding Social Control: Deviance, Crime and Social Order
Series editor's foreword The argument A history of the idea of social control A history of social control practice Everyday order Policing Punishing Surveillance The architecture of social control Risk, regulation, audit Conclusion Index
Investigating MurderDetective Work and the Police Response to Criminal Homicide: Detective Work and the Police Response to Criminal Homicide (Clarendon Studies in Criminology)
Investigating Murder provides a unique insight into how police detectives investigate and solve murders. Based upon fieldwork observation of murder squads at work, interviews with detectives and detailed analysis of police case files, it provides an original and innovative account of the practices and processes involved in the investigation of homicides, as well as some of the problems that are often encountered in the conduct of this work. Drawi…
The Appliance of Science: The Theory and Practice of Crime Intelligence Analysis
Intelligence analysis has emerged as an important component of contemporary policing strategies. Drawing upon qualitative data and a perspective informed by some of the concepts associated with the sociology of scientific knowledge, this paper provides an epistemologically oriented critique of some of the key techniques associated with crime analysis. Data presented suggest that crime analysis: is used in line with traditional modes of policing; …
Signal crimes and signal disorders: Notes on Deviance as Communicative Action 1
In this paper a ‘signal crimes’ perspective is outlined in an effort to unpack the relationships between experiences of crime and disorder, and perceptions of criminogenic risk. Grounded in symbolic interactionist sociology, and developing a social semiotic understanding of risk perception, it is a perspective that focuses upon processes of social reaction and the ways in which people interpret and define threats to their security. It is proposed…
What's Your Problem? Signal Crimes and Citizen-Focused Problem Solving
Why ‘soft’ policing is hard: On the curious development of reassurance policing, how it became neighbourhood policing and what this signifies about the politics of police reform
Tracing the development of Reassurance Policing and its recent translation into Neighbourhood Policing, this article examines why it is that ‘soft’ policing functions appear so difficult for the police to perform. It is argued that over the past three decades the reform of policing in the UK has tended to oscillate between positions emphasizing coercive ‘hard’ policing functions and alternative conceptions that focus upon the conduct of soft poli…
Reassurance Policing, Community Policing and Measuring Police Performance
The central theme of this article is that current police performance measures are largely inadequate for capturing many dimensions of community policing practice. Focusing upon a recent innovation in policing strategy in the United Kingdom, that of reassurance policing, an argument is developed for alternative ways of thinking about police performance and how it can be gauged. Drawing upon ideas and insights from social research methodology, it i…
Introduction Reassurance and the “New” Community Policing
After a decade where the discourse of police reform gravitated around ideas of “pluralization”, becoming “intelligence-led” and having “zero-tolerance”, more recently there has been a revival of in
Policing Uncertainty: Countering Terror through Community Intelligence and Democratic Policing
This article explores how counterterrorism policing strategies and practices in the United Kingdom have changed in the face of recent terrorist attacks. It considers the evident limitations of these developments and how a local, democratic style of neighborhood policing could be used to manufacture the community intelligence “feed” that offers the best probability of preventing and deterring future forms of such violence. These substantive concer…
Land, Freedom and the Making of the Medieval West
In the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, barbarian warbands acquired property rights in the former provinces of the Roman west, in a process that established the broad structural characteristics of early medieval society in western Europe: that is the central contention of this essay. Focusing on the western Mediterranean heartlands of the Imperial government and senatorial aristocracy, it argues that these property transfers were fundamen…
Seeing like a citizen: Field experiments in ‘community intelligence‐led policing’
This paper describes an innovative community engagement methodology designed to provide police with a ‘rich’ community intelligence picture of the ‘drivers’ of insecurity in neighbourhoods. Informed by empirical data from three case studies where this methodology has been trialled it is argued the approach facilitates a ‘community intelligence‐led policing’ approach. This has the potential to establish meaningful connections between community pol…
The 'death' of Dixon: Policing gun crime and the end of the generalist police constable in England and Wales
Informed by qualitative data from a study of formal and informal social control responses to gun crime in Lambeth, South London, this article seeks to map the contours of some of the key aspects of the policing of firearms offending in England and Wales. It is proposed that policing responses can be distinguished between a `preventative' disposition in areas where gun-related offending is rare, and a pragmatic `manage and suppress' reaction that …
Political science (41 works) · Law (34 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Criminology (28 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Law (22 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (21 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (20 works) · Politics (17 works) · Psychology (17 works)