Mining Police-Recorded Offence and Incident Data to Inform a Definition of Repeat Domestic Abuse Victimization for Statistical Reporting

Following inspections in 2013 of all police forces, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary found that one-third of forces could not provide data on repeat victims of domestic abuse (DA) and concluded that in general there were ambiguities around the term ‘repeat victim’ and that there was a need for consistent and comparable statistics on DA. Using an analysis of police-recorded DA data from two forces, an argument is made for including both offences and non-crime incidents when identifying repeat victims of DA. Furthermore, for statistical purposes the counting period for repeat victimizations should be taken as a rolling 12 months from first recorded victimization. Examples are given of summary statistics that can be derived from these data down to Community Safety Partnership level. To reinforce the need to include both offences and incidents in analyses, repeat victim chronologies from policerecorded data are also used to briefly examine cases of escalation to homicide as an example of how they can offer new insights and greater scope for evaluating risk and effectiveness of interventions.

Predicting bee community responses to land-use changes: Effects of geographic and taxonomic biases

Land-use change and intensification threaten bee populations worldwide, imperilling pollination services. Global models are needed to better characterise, project, and mitigate bees' responses to these human impacts. The available data are, however, geographically and taxonomically unrepresentative; most data are from North America and Western Europe, overrepresenting bumblebees and raising concerns that model results may not be generalizable to other regions and taxa. To assess whether the geographic and taxonomic biases of data could undermine effectiveness of models for conservation policy, we have collated from the published literature a global dataset of bee diversity at sites facing land-use change and intensification, and assess whether bee responses to these pressures vary across 11 regions (Western, Northern, Eastern and Southern Europe; North, Central and South America; Australia and New Zealand; South East Asia; Middle and Southern Africa) and between bumblebees and other bees. Our analyses highlight strong regionally-based responses of total abundance, species richness and Simpson's diversity to land use, caused by variation in the sensitivity of species and potentially in the nature of threats. These results suggest that global extrapolation of models based on geographically and taxonomically restricted data may underestimate the true uncertainty, increasing the risk of ecological surprises.