Crime, criminal justice and public safety research

Why a specialist area

Research on crime and justice is easy to get wrong. Recorded crime figures measure reporting and recording practice as much as crime itself. Victimisation surveys measure something different again. Administrative data from courts or prisons is collected to run an institution, not to answer a research question, and it carries the shape of the process that produced it.

Someone who works in this field knows to check those things before drawing a conclusion. That is the practical value of a specialist focus: not access to privileged information, but familiarity with the sources, their limits and the literature that has already examined them.

What we can be asked to do

The work is desk based and analytical. In practice that means one of four things.

• Evidence reviews. Gathering and assessing what the published literature says on a defined question, with the search and selection recorded so the review can be checked.
• Analytical briefs. Short, structured documents written for people who have to make a decision rather than read a thesis.
• Analysis of data you hold. Cleaning, tabulating and describing administrative or survey data you already have, within the limits of what it can support.
• Research reports. Longer documents drawing several strands together, with sources and dates recorded throughout.

Sources we work from

Desk research depends on what is publicly available and on what a client can share. Depending on the question, that usually includes published national statistics and official reports, administrative data supplied by the client, peer-reviewed research and systematic reviews, reports from established research and civil society organisations, and legislation and case law where the question is procedural.

Every factual claim in a deliverable carries its source and the date it was accessed. Where the evidence is weak, contested or simply missing, the report says so. A review that cannot answer the question it was given is more useful than one that pretends to.

Before an assignment is accepted

Not all research activity sits in the same regulatory position, and the difference matters. Reviewing published literature is not the same as going out to collect data from people.

Where a proposed assignment would involve primary data collection, fieldwork, interviews with research participants, or handling personal or sensitive data, the scope and any approval requirements are assessed before the work can be accepted. That assessment is done for the specific activity rather than assumed from the general type of work.