Probabilistic abductive computation of evidence collection strategies in crime investigation

J. Keppens, Q. Shen and B. Schafer. Probabilistic abductive computation of evidence collection strategies in crime investigation. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pages 215-225.

Crime Prevention and New Technologies: The Special Case of CCTV

Norris, G. & Wilson, P., 'Crime Prevention and New Technologies: The Special Case of CCTV', In: Issues in Australian Crime and Criminal Justice, Lexis-Nexis, pp.409-418, 2005. RAE2008

Northern Ireland After the Good Friday Agreement: Victims, Grievance and Blame

Breen Smyth, Morrisey, M., Northern Ireland After the Good Friday Agreement: Victims, Grievance and Blame (Pluto Press, 2002), pp.xiii+247 RAE2008

The Criminalization of Mass Starvations: From Natural Disaster to Crime Against Humanity

Edkins Jenny, 'The Criminalisation of Mass Starvations: From Natural Disaster to Crime Against Humanity', In: 'The New Famines: Why Famines Persist in an Era of Globalisation', (New York: Routledge), pp.50-65, 2006 RAE2008

Seguridad y violencia de género en Navarra

A lo largo de este estudio se pretende reflexionar acerca del concepto de seguridad en general, para posteriormente abordar la violencia de género como un tipo de violencia más propio de nuestra época. Con la finalidad de construir un plan de protección, basándome en las necesidades escasamente cubiertas por parte de los cuerpos de seguridad en Navarra y las distintas instituciones que participan en el protocolo de actuación. Hasta el momento la mayoría de estudios de relevancia sobre el tema se han centrado en definir cuál es el problema y a quienes afecta, pero siguen haciendo falta tanto medidas de prevención que disminuyan considerablemente este tipo de delitos, como de protección para las víctimas y el entorno que les rodea, con el fin de sentirse respaldadas y protegidas por parte de la sociedad y de las instituciones.

A post-structuralist analysis of Irish youth crime prevention policy with specific emphasis on the Garda youth diversion projects

Garda Youth Diversion Projects (GYDPs) have since their beginnings in the early 1990s gained an increasingly important role and now constitute a central feature of Irish youth justice provision. Managed by the Irish Youth Justice Service and implemented by the Gardai and a variety of youth work organisations as well as independent community organisations, GYDPs are located at the crossroads of welfarist and corporatist approaches to youth justice, combining diversionary and preventative aspects in their work. To date, these projects have been subjected to very little systematic analysis and they have thus largely escaped critical scrutiny. To address this gap, this thesis locates the analysis of GYDP policy and practice within a post-structuralist theoretical framework and deploys discourse analysis primarily based on the work of Michel Foucault. It makes visible the official youth crime prevention and GYDP policy discourses and identifies how official discourses relating to youth crime prevention, young people and their offending behaviour, are drawn upon, negotiated, rejected or re-contextualised by project workers and JLOs. It also lays bare how project workers and JLOs draw upon a variety of other discourses, resulting in multi-layered, complex and sometimes contradictory constructions of young people, their offending behaviour and corresponding interventions. At a time when the projects are undergoing significant changes in terms of their repositioning to operate as the support infrastructure underpinning the statutory Garda Youth Diversion Programme, the thesis traces the discursive shifts and the implications for practice that are occurring as the projects move away from a youth work orientation towards a youth justice orientation. A key contribution of this thesis is the insight it provides into how young people and their families are being constituted in individualising and sometimes pathologising ways in GYDP discourses and practices. It reveals the part played by the GYDP intervention in favouring individual and narrow familial causes of offending behaviour while broader societal contexts are sidelined. By explicating the very assumptions upon which contemporary youth crime prevention policy, as well as GYDP policy and practice are based, this thesis offers a counterpoint to the prevailing evidence-based agenda of much research in the field of Irish youth justice theory and youth studies more generally. Rather, it encourages the reader to take a step back and examine some of the most fundamental and unquestioned assumptions about the construction of young people, their offending behaviour and ways of addressing this, in contemporary Irish youth crime prevention policy and practice.

Victims of infanticide and conspecific bite wounding in a female-dominant primate: a long-term study.

The aggression animals receive from conspecifics varies between individuals across their lifetime. As poignantly evidenced by infanticide, for example, aggression can have dramatic fitness consequences. Nevertheless, we understand little about the sources of variation in received aggression, particularly in females. Using a female-dominant species renowned for aggressivity in both sexes, we tested for potential social, demographic, and genetic patterns in the frequency with which animals were wounded by conspecifics. Our study included 243 captive, ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), followed from infancy to adulthood over a 35-year time span. We extracted injury, social, and life-history information from colony records and calculated neutral heterozygosity for a subset of animals, as an estimate of genetic diversity. Focusing on victims rather than aggressors, we used General Linear Models to explain bite-wound patterns at different life stages. In infancy, maternal age best predicted wounds received, as infants born to young mothers were the most frequent infanticide victims. In adulthood, sex best predicted wounds received, as males were three times more likely than females to be seriously injured. No relation emerged between wounds received and the other variables studied. Beyond the generally expected costs of adult male intrasexual aggression, we suggest possible additive costs associated with female-dominant societies - those suffered by young mothers engaged in aggressive disputes and those suffered by adult males aggressively targeted by both sexes. We propose that infanticide in lemurs may be a costly by-product of aggressively mediated, female social dominance. Accordingly, the benefits of female behavioral 'masculinization' accrued to females through priority of access to resources, may be partially offset by early costs in reproductive success. Understanding the factors that influence lifetime patterns of conspecific wounding is critical to evaluating the fitness costs associated with social living; however, these costs may vary substantially between societies.

Crime in College Park: understanding crime levels, perceptions, and environmental design in an off-campus student-occupied neighborhood

Gemstone Team Crime Prevention and Perception

Fatal impact? The effects of emotional arousal and weapon presence on police officers' memories for a simulated crime

Purpose. (1) To investigate the effects of emotional arousal and weapon presence on the completeness and accuracy of police officers' memories; and (2) to better simulate the experience of witnessing a shooting and providing testimony. Methods. A firearms training simulator was used to present 70 experienced police officers with either a shooting or a domestic dispute scenario containing no weapons. Arousal was measured using both self-report and physiological indices. Recall for event details was tested after a 10-minute delay using a structured interview. Identification accuracy was assessed with a photographic line-up. Results. Self-report measures confirmed that the shooting induced greater arousal than did the other scenario. Overall, officers' memories for the event were less complete, but more accurate, when they had witnessed the shooting. The recall and line-up data did not support a weapon focus effect. Conclusions. Police officers' recall performance can be affected both qualitatively and quantitatively by witnessing an arousing event such as a shooting.

From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British women writers in detective and crime fiction

This work considers, seriously, the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of 42 key novels, it introduces these authors for students and the general reader within the contexts of their lives, and critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. [From the Publisher]

Victims or survivors? Debate about victimhood in Northern Ireland.

There is a broad range of definitions of victimhood. The term 'victim' might be seen in a negative sense, because it is often perceived as implying stereotypes of vulnerability, passivity and weakness. But, on the other hand, the term can entail benefits such as recognition, validation, support and compensation. In Northern Ireland, the debate becomes extremely politically loaded and follows well-trodden sectarian lines. The main aims of this paper are to briefly examine the various connotations of the terms victim and survivor, to analyse the debate in Northern Ireland and its political implications, and finally, to present a general overview of the research undertaken to identify who are the victims. co-authored with research assistants