James C. Schopf

Many statist accounts of development, especially that which has occurred in East Asia, emphasize the autonomous role of the bureaucracy. Civil servants in these accounts are often assumed to give planrational guidance to economic forces. This argument fits nicely with the claims of some strong-state advocates that the messiness, conflict, and jockeying for position characteristic of democratic politics do disrupt the efficient contributions to development that a state-led or dirigiste system makes possible. This article, however, argues to the contrary, in favor of a different theoretical analysis to which comparative examination of Korean regimes gives some empirical confirmation. In Korea, authoritarian leaderships extracted funds and rewarded political supporters by using banks and bureaucracies to coddle inefficient but favored firms with close ties…….

Asian Survey, 41:5, pp. 693–715. ISSN: 0004–4687.

Ronald V.Clarke

Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies is a landmark collection that demonstrates how crime can be reduced by changing environments, opportunities, and systems rather than attempting to change offenders themselves. Edited by criminologist Ronald V. Clarke, this influential second edition presents 23 real-world case studies from around the world that show how practical, evidence-based interventions have successfully prevented crimes ranging from burglary and vehicle theft to fraud, robbery, vandalism, and public disorder.

The book introduces the theory of situational crime prevention, explaining how crime opportunities arise and how they can be systematically reduced through environmental design, management practices, surveillance, access control, target hardening, and other preventive strategies. Clarke outlines sixteen opportunity-reducing techniques and illustrates them through detailed case studies involving improved street lighting, CCTV systems, steering-column locks, property marking, public transport security, retail theft prevention, fraud reduction, and community safety initiatives.

Drawing on rigorous evaluations from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and Canada, the volume challenges traditional assumptions about crime control, including the belief that offenders inevitably displace their activities elsewhere. Many of the featured projects demonstrate significant and measurable reductions in crime, often producing wider community benefits beyond their original targets.

Widely regarded as a foundational text in criminology, policing, security management, and crime prevention, this book remains essential reading for scholars, practitioners, law enforcement professionals, policymakers, and students interested in understanding how carefully designed environments and strategic interventions can make crime more difficult, risky, and unrewarding.

Ciminal Justice Press. 1997. 367p.

This study explores the link between alcohol and drugs and robbery-based homicide victimization within the context of routine activities theory. Using 2001-2005 homicide and toxicology data from Trinidad and Tobago, the study considers the general context of robbery-related homicides by identifying common place, victim, offender, and time characteristics. Next, the study examines whether victims of robbery-based homicides were more or less likely to be using alcohol and/or drugs at the time of death than victims of domestic and “street” homicides. The results indicate that robbery-related homicide victims were less likely to test positive for alcohol or be intoxicated and were significantly less likely to test positive for marijuana and cocaine than victims of street homicides. Nevertheless, when considered within a broader context, Trinidad and Tobago robbery-based homicide victims test positive at higher rates for marijuana (13.6%), compared with homicide victims in other locations (6%). The results of this study suggest a firm link between victim substance use and homicide victimization in Trinidad and Tobago, which could help explain escalating violence levels in the country.

Criminal Justice Policy Review XX(X) 1–20.

Victims of an armed robbery are at great risk of psychological distress. This research is a prospective randomized controlled clinical trial of an adapted form of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD-A) with victims of an armed robbery. The specific goals are to examine whether the CISD-A is superior to the control group in both preventing the development of a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and attenuating the frequency and severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms. Following pretest, 75 participants were randomly assigned to individual debriefing or to a control group. Results revealed no differences between the CISD-A and the control group in preventing PTSD or attenuating posttraumatic symptoms 1 and 3 months later. [Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention 6:122–129 (2006)]

Contact author: Andre´Marchand, Department of Psychology, Universite´du Que´bec a ` Montre´al, C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre-ville, Montre´al, Que´bec, Canada H3C 3P8. E-mail: marchand.andre@uqam.ca.

doi:10.1093/brief-treatment/mhj007 Advance Access publication March 24, 2006

By The International Crisis Group

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What’s new? Once one of South America’s safest countries, Ecuador has in under a decade become its most violent, transforming into a hub of the drug trade to Europe. President Daniel Noboa’s iron-fist approach brought murder rates down at first, but violence has since soared again and crime continues unabated.

Why does it matter? Ecuador’s authorities have declared the country to be in the grip of internal armed conflict, deploying soldiers to prisons and crime-hit communities. With no sign of violence falling, the government is set to double down on its tough approach, expanding cooperation with the U.S. military and private security contractors.

What should be done? Crackdowns send a strong message to communities and criminals alike, but alone they tend not to overwhelm drug markets. Ecuador should do more to bring state services and licit economic opportunities to crime-hit neighbourhoods while quelling the corruption in ports, prisons and the state that helps generate the crime wave.

Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2025. 52p.

By Abby Córdova and Helen Kras

 With a focus on the implementation of women’s police stations (WPS), we posit that local policies that address violence against women can result in positive feedback effects on institutional legitimacy. We theorize that WPS increase police legitimacy among women by improving perceptions of personal safety and government responsiveness. To test our hypotheses, we rely on municipal and public opinion data from more than 100 municipalities in Brazil. The results of our multilevel analysis indicate that WPS produce positive feedback effects among women, resulting in higher trust in the police among women than men and closing the gender gap in perceptions of police effectiveness. Incorporating an instrumental variable in the analyses yields similar results, suggesting that these effects are not endogenous. Moreover, the results of our mediation models show that WPS’ positive effects on women’s views of police legitimacy are driven by improved perceptions of personal safety, and not perceptions of government responsiveness. 

Comparative Political Studies 2020, Vol. 53(5) 775–808 

By Europol, Innovation Lab

This report from Europol's Innovation Lab explores how the police can adapt to the increasingly digital lives of European citizens. Online worlds are increasingly perceived as lawless, and while community police officers play a key role in the physical world, community policing equivalents are often in their infancy or absent in virtual worlds.

Discover an overview of online policing principles and current initiatives across Europe, including case examples from specific countries to facilitate learning for similar initiatives

Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2025. 21p.

By Eric Arnold

This Comment explores the current state of police reform in the city of Chicago, with a special focus on the various oversight agencies currently in force. Chicago has a long history of police misconduct, and the city has tried to make changes over the years to restore the community’s trust in policing. The police reform movement became especially prevalent in recent years following the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago Police Officer in 2014. This Comment will show why the current mechanisms in place are insufficient to bring the needed change to the Chicago Police Department, and that the Chicago Police Department has shown time and time again they are unable to police themselves. While there have been some effective changes to the city’s policing efforts in recent years, considerable room for improvement remains.

This Comment will evaluate some of the recent measures taken to change the Chicago Police Department, specifically looking at measures targeted at changing the culture of the Chicago Police Department by increasing transparency and accountability. These measures include mandatory body-camera footage and a ban on officers being affiliated with extremist groups. This Comment will explore and evaluate the effectiveness of these changes and how they could be further enhanced. This Comment will also propose additional solutions that Chicago could consider to increase police accountability and transparency and thus improve overall officer performance. This includes using more objective tools to measure police officers’ day to day performance, which can be done using tools similar to those being used in New Orleans and in Miami. This Comment will conclude with additional policy considerations and measures for enforcement, specifically focusing on ways to incentivize more responsible policing.

 115 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 205 (2025).

By Trevor George Gardner

 If criminal justice minimalism is a shared principle among criminal law scholars, it can help to clarify the quality of our disagreements. Every normative proposal in the criminal legal literature can be held to the minimalist standard—audited, so to speak, to account for the policy author’s minimalist claims. To this end, this Essay proposes a four-step framework by which to evaluate adherence to the minimalist principle, where each step serves as a hub for pointed scholarly debate regarding the path to minimalist criminal justice.

Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, 2025

By  Sandra J. Ley Gutiérre

When do protests against crime and insecurity take place, regardless of the risks that such mobilization may entail? This paper argues that while violence provides an initial motivation for participating in protests, social networks play a fundamental role in incentivizing citizen mobilization against insecurity. Socialization within networks helps generate solidarity and empathy among participants, while at the same time transforming emotions associated with living in a violent context into potential for action. Also, through networks, individuals share information about opportunities for collective action and change their perceptions about the effectiveness and risks of such activism. These distinct mechanisms are valuable for the activation of protest against crime across levels of violence. Supporting evidence is derived from an original dataset on protest events in reaction to violence in Mexico between 2006 and 2012. Additionally, I rely on qualitative in-depth interviews and participant observation to illustrate the role of networks in protest against crime across several Mexican states. This paper contributes to the growing literature on criminal violence and political participation.Notre Dame, IN: The Kellogg Institute for International Studies
University of Notre Dame, 2022.

By Steven Dudley, et al.

Although traditional synthetic opioid strongholds like the United States and Canada appear to be experiencing a stabilization of their illicit fentanyl market—evidenced by a historic reduction in overdose deaths 1—synthetic opioids continue to expand across the globe, creating widespread health and security concerns. Existing explanations for the rise and stabilization of these markets focus on economic incentives, supply-chain disruption, precursor controls, consumption patterns, and public-health interventions. But the role of organized crime in structuring retail distribution has been largely overlooked. The experience of Mexico’s northern border illustrates that local criminal governance can be a decisive factor in determining where and how new drug markets take root. Fentanyl, for example, has quietly reshaped drug markets in Mexico and upended some widely held assumptions of how larger criminal groups interact with these markets. As local criminal organizations became major producers and exporters of the synthetic opioid to the United States, domestic consumption also emerged in key trafficking corridors. In Tijuana and Mexicali in Baja California, Hermosillo and Nogales in Sonora, and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, the transnational fentanyl economy has taken root locally, generating unprecedented public health and security pressures. This expansion, however, has been uneven, and the criminal actors who control local drug economies are far from monolithic. Across northern Mexico, fragmented local factions—sometimes linked to larger organizations, sometimes operating with considerable autonomy—determine what reaches consumers and under what conditions. Retail fentanyl markets have therefore expanded not simply in response to demand or price signals, but according to thestrategic decisions of local criminal groups. In Baja California, these groups actively promoted fentanyl sales, enabling the market to consolidate. In Sonoran cities and Ciudad Juárez, they restricted distribution, confining consumption to specific user niches.Overall, the impact on the ground has been substantial. The introduction of fentanyl triggered waves of overdose deaths and serious health effects among users. Although there are signs that the crisis may have stabilized in some areas, the risks persist, and the problem remains underestimated in official statistics, limiting the effectiveness of institutional responses that are already ill-equipped to address it. This report aims to provide a deeper understanding of this issue. It examines fentanyl consumption dynamics in the cities mentioned, traces the evolution of the market, and outlines the distribution networks that sustain it. Additionally, it analyzes the models of criminal control over local drug markets and assesses the state’s response to date. A central question running through the analysis is why fentanyl did not spread uniformly across these cities and what role local criminal structures played in that divergence.

Washington DC: Insight Crime, 2026. 66p.

By Crest Advisory with RSM UK Consulting

Economic growth is the number one mission of the Government in the UK, seeking to restore stability, increase investment and reform the economy to improve productivity, prosperity, and living standards. This commitment has been made in the context of a sustained period of economic stagnation, throughout which there has been an ongoing conversation as to whether the right levers are being pulled to achieve economic growth. The Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser for the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) commissioned us to understand the role of policing as a lever - our research seeks to collate existing evidence as well as identify where there are opportunities to develop this evidence in the future. This research also falls within the wider discussion on police funding, police productivity and police reform which is particularly relevant given that the Home Office will be looking to find savings ahead of this year’s spending review as an unprotected government department, ongoing debate about the police funding formula and growing financial pressures on police forces. Science and technology has a significant role to play in police efficiency and effectiveness, but also growth. The NPCC’s Science and Technology Strategy sets a clear ambition for policing “to deliver the most science and technology led police service in the world”. Often, our understanding of policing impact is focused on implementation and public safety outcomes, but economic outcomes have the potential to shift the narrative in terms of how we define an effective and efficient police response. Our work, in partnership with RSM UK Consulting, has sought to understand the evidence between policing and economic outcomes, from which we have produced a logic model to understand these relationships (a logic model conceptualises the links between activities and key outcomes). While we have not been able to estimate the scale of impact of UK policing on economic growth, we hope this logic model can act as a framework for partners to use to further develop the evidence base around the impact of policing on economic outcomes, specifically designing evaluations with these outcomes in mind. In time, this evidence may begin to change how we understand the positive impact of policing on individuals, businesses and communities in England and Wales - with the potential for positive economic outcomes influencing future decisions on funding allocations and commitments to specific policing initiatives and operational interventions. Furthermore, growth could sit alongside efficiency and effectiveness as key metrics for success in policing.

London: Crest Advisory, 2025. 69p.