Crime Science

The term was coined by Nick Ross to define a practical, experiment and evidence-based approach to cutting crime and tackling terrorism.

Its first major institute was created at University College London in 2000, and the term crime science has been adopted by practitioners in the US and elsewhere, and has been introduced at universities such as Twente University in the Netherlands.

Crime Science investigates patterns in crime so as to find new ways to disrupt it. It fights crime as doctors fight injury and disease, not just as isolated cases, but as epidemics which are best tackled through public health prevention rather than relying on emergency treatment after than the event. Thus crime science explores ways of reducing opportunity and temptation, as well as increasing the likelihood of detection. It is more concerned with how, why and where crimes happen than with the criminal justice system. It embraces every practical discipline from architecture to zoology, especially computing, engineering, geography, product design, psychology, and town planning.

It differs from criminology in four respects: it is aimed at practical crime reduction, whereas much of criminology is concerned with political and social philosophy and with criminal justice; it is intensely practical with a declared aim of reducing victimisation, whereas criminology tends to be theoretical and focused on offenders; it is truly multidisciplinary; and it takes a quantitative, experimental, scientific approach (and at UCL, for example, has its home in the engineering faculty rather than, as always with criminology, as part of the arts or humanities).

The UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science is named after Nick Ross's co-presenter who was shot dead by a deranged man on the doorstep of her home in 1999. The Institute was described by the prime minister as, "an exciting development to bring people together across a whole range of disciplines to create a world centre of excellence and to stimulate a whole new range of solutions to crime." It has been involved in a whirlwind of initiatives including formal briefings with key opinion-leaders, training of large numbers of police crime analysts, inspiring and designing new government policies for reducing car crime, redesigning goods and services to make them less vulnerable to crime, pioneering world-leading geographic information systems for predicting crime, and undertaking a variety of research projects with over £8m of backing from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the European Union.

The Jill Dando Institute website is at jdi.ucl.ac.uk