Niall Hamilton-Smith

Measuring police impact on organised crime: Performance management and harm reduction

Purpose – This paper aims to analyse and critique common performance indicators for the policing of organised crime, and to propose a new approach.Design/methodology/approach – This paper was based on key respondent interviews with staff at an organised crime‐policing agency; literature review; analytical work and construction of a new model.Findings – KPIs and other targets drive the policing of organised crime. Often these ultimately constitute numerical targets – amount of drugs seized; number of key nominals arrested, etc. – which are crude and which the research evidence base on the reduction or prevention of organised crime activity does not support as being suitable measures of success. Success in contemporary organised crime policing is increasingly becoming defined in terms of “harm reduction” (often at the “community level”). A new performance management framework for organised crime‐policing agencies is proposed, which is more sensitive than traditional measures to harm reduction. The proposed ...

The geometry of shadows: a critical review of organised crime risk assessments

This article reports on a research project that aimed to review existing law enforcement approaches to assessing the risk posed by organised crime, as well as to examine the experience of law enforcement officers in using some of these approaches in different parts of the UK. We first outline the background to the project, before discussing some of the theoretical issues that all organised crime risk assessment approaches must typically grapple with. We then discuss some of the types of risk assessment approaches that are currently in use. Finally, drawing on the experience of officers and analysts using different approaches in the field, we consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of different extant assessment ‘tools’.

Community policing and reassurance: Three studies, one narrative

Drawing on data from three separate studies of community policing (CP) in Scotland this article identifies common themes in the practice of contemporary CP. First, following in the wake of the global financial crisis, we have an austerity drive with cuts to policing budgets setting the context in which CP practice is now negotiated. Second all three studies evidence an increasingly entrenched performance management framework for policing which exerts pressures on beat officers to depart from established, valued and often ‘unmeasurable’ activities within CP practice. Third, we see the depletion of the traditional ‘tools of the trade’ of CP as new recruits, lacking the skills of the traditional beat officer, are assigned CP functions, while mentoring opportunities for supporting their professional development become increasingly inadequate. Finally, the idea of reassurance as a core policing goal has informed the re-organization of Scotland’s main police forces towards models which purport to increase CP numbers, visibility and public engagement. In the context of the preceding three themes however, these re-inventions of CP have been problematic in various ways: conflicted, superficial and unconnected to developments in policing and procedural justice theory around legitimacy and public confidence. Indeed, we will argue that given the formal increase in public-facing CP numbers across the sites examined here, the procedural justice perspective, with its focus on the quality of police–public encounters, has real potential to enhance the efficacy of CP in Scotland.

The transfer of English legislation to the Scottish context: Lessons from the implementation of the Football Banning Order in Scotland

This article compares the enactment of Football Banning Order legislation in Scotland to that in England and Wales. Football Banning Orders evolved in England and Wales through the 1990s into a particular form of hybrid legislation, culminating in the Football (Disorder) Act of 2000. The legislation was not introduced into Scotland until the Police, Public Order and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill in 2006. By 2010, it appeared that orders were being under-utilized in Scotland. This raised questions as to whether there was less need for orders within the context of Scottish football, whether the legislation was either being poorly implemented or if imposing orders was being actively resisted. In focusing primarily on the utilization of the legislation by police on the ground, this article questions whether the football or policing contexts are markedly different in the two jurisdictions. We argue that one of the dominant explanations for the comparatively low use of orders in Scotland relates not to the content or interpretation of the particular legislation involved, but to broader differences in how criminal justice legislation is typically enacted.

Football Banning Orders: The Highly Effective Cornerstone of a Preventative Strategy?

On 13 April 2013, Millwall played Wigan Athletic in the semi-final of the FA Cup at Wembley Stadium, where disorder involving Millwall support- ers at one of the Football Association’s showpiece events firmly placed the subject of football hooliganism back in the public sphere. The events at Wembley were followed by disorder at the Newcastle v. Sunderland game, where 29 arrests were made on the day of the game (in total 106 were made) and a horse was captured being punched by a Newcastle sup- porter on camera. As the media predictably referred to ‘shameful events’ that were ‘reminiscent of the dark days of football riots in the 1970’s and 80’s’ (Watson and Brooke, 2013), political attention turned to what measures were in place to prevent football-related disorder. This subject was raised in Parliament when, on 13 May, Dan Jarvis (Labour MP for Barnsley Central) asked the secretary of state for the Home Office what steps had been taken to enforce banning orders and to reduce levels of violence around matches. On behalf of the home secretary, the Home Office minister Damian Green responded.