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Abstract
There is growing interest in a public health approach to policing. In Britain, it has attracted major government investment and is advocated as a way to improve understanding and prevention of violence. We largely support efforts better to integrate public health and policing. We do, however, argue in this paper that the current conception of public health is unduly narrow, focussing overwhelmingly on early intervention and paying little attention to situational measures directed at more immediate causes of crime. We argue that the neglect of situational intervention rests on a partial interpretation of the public health literature, and ignores a long history of situational measures being effectively used to reduce harmful behaviours. If a public health approach is to generate improvements in policing and crime prevention, we argue that a broader conception of public health is needed.

AbstractMissing persons investigations are arguably the most common and costly non-crime problem the police are expected to handle, with a large proportion of all cases attributable to young people. This article investigates the prevalence, time course, distance, and correlates of repeat disappearances by children (under the age of 18 years). Using data from one UK police force for the period January 2011 to May 2013 (n = 1,885), we find that (1) nearly two-thirds of all missing child reports are repeat disappearances, (2) a small proportion of children who go missing repeatedly (15%) account for over half of all missing persons incidents, (3) children who go missing repeatedly tend to travel shorter distances than children reported missing once, and (4) the likelihood of a child going missing on multiple occasions is associated with age, being in care, a history of family conflict, and if going missing was judged to be 'out of character'. The implications of our findings for the prevention of repeat disappearances by young people are discussed.

The results of this study reveal a major methodological problem with an established body of criminological literature—the journey to crime. The dominant finding of such research is that most crimes occur close to an offender's home. Consequently, journeys to crime typically display a distance‐decay function that is assumed to exist between and within offenders. However, most journey‐to‐crime studies use nested data—individual offenders contributing multiple crime trips—yet employ analytic methods that fail to account for this property, leading to inference and aggregation concerns. In the study outlined in this article, we demonstrated the implications of using nested data for analyzing the journey to crime. We showed that once controlling for nesting, only a few (prolific) offenders display a distance decay pattern. Implications of the findings for theory and future research are discussed.

This collection of essays, published to mark the 20th anniversary of Realistic Evaluation, celebrates the work of Professor Nick Tilley and his significant influence on the fields of policing, crime reduction and evaluation. With contributions from colleagues, co-authors and former students, many of whom are leading scholars in their own right, the thirteen essays which make up this volume contain both personal reflections and analysis of the prominent topics in Professor Tilley's forty years of scholarship.

AbstractFuel prices have increased sharply over the past year. In this study we test the hypothesis that increases in the price of fuel are associated with increases in motorists filling their fuel tank and driving off without paying. We use weekly crime data from six police forces in England and Wales for the period January 2018 to July 2022, combined with regional data on the number of fuel sales and average fuel prices. Our results demonstrate an overall weak price-theft relationship for the 238 week study period, less so than in previous studies. However, we find strong evidence that the recent spike in fuel prices was associated with elevated levels of fuel theft. The implications of our findings for future research and crime prevention are discussed.

AbstractKnife crime remains a major concern in England and Wales. Problem-oriented and public health approaches to tackling knife crime have been widely advocated, but little is known about how these approaches are understood and implemented by police practitioners. To address this knowledge gap, this article draws on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 44 police personnel to consider the processes and challenges of applying problem-oriented and public health approaches to knife crime. Findings show that knife crime was seen as a complex social problem which would not be solved by 'silver bullets'; prevention was prioritised and the limitations of enforcement were widely acknowledged; there was an emphasis on understanding and responding to vulnerability and risk; discussion of 'holistic' and 'whole systems' approaches was evident (but these concepts were rarely defined); and the problem of serious violence was viewed as a shared, multi-agency issue that the police could not tackle alone. Various challenges were also evident, most notably around analysis of the drivers and patterns of knife crime and the evaluation of knife crime interventions. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for knife crime prevention and the implementation and advancement of problem-oriented and public health approaches to policing.