By Elle Wadsworth, Mafalda Pardal, Lucy Strang, Laura Atuesta, Fin Oades, Emily Hutton, Eric Sevigny, Emily Lawso

The report concludes with reflections and implications from this review’s findings (Chapter 6), as follows:

Overall, the available evidence suggests that drug-related law enforcement activities are of limited effectiveness in reducing violence. Indeed, more studies demonstrated an association between drug-related law enforcement activities and increased violence than decreased violence. Selective enforcement tactics appeared the most promising in their capacity to reduce violence, although the evidence base covered in this review is limited.

Passive drug-related law enforcement activities, such as increasing police presence in known drug market areas, appear promising in reducing violence. However, less evidence is available on the effectiveness of these interventions than on active law enforcement activities.

The causal mechanisms of violence reduction are under-explored in the literature. However, several studies discussed supply disruptions, focused deterrence and positive relationships between police and communities as potential success factors.

Barriers to the effectiveness of violence-reduction efforts included the resilience of drug markets, the cultural significance of violence in some drug trafficking organisations, and law enforcement’s limited resources.

This review did not identify any UK-based evidence – most research came from the Americas. While most law enforcement activities in this review also occur in the UK, the results are not directly replicable in a UK setting.

Evidence on the relationship between drug-related law enforcement and serious violence and homicide over the last decade is lacking. What was previously effective (or ineffective) in reducing violence may yield different results now.

More evidence is needed on the effectiveness of drug-related law enforcement activities in retail-level markets or prison settings in reducing violence.

Relevant agencies planning and implementing drug-related law enforcement activity should consider the risk of increased violence, particularly for interventions for which available evidence suggests a strong association (for example, leadership removal and seizures).

Future UK research on drug-related law enforcement and violence could focus on interventions that may reduce violence, such as selective enforcement, and whether the findings presented can be validated.

London: Home Office, 2025. 63p.

By: Charlotte Gill, David Weisburd, Cody W. Telep, Zoe Vitter & Trevor Bennett

Objectives Systematically review and synthesize the existing research on community-oriented policing to identify its effects on crime, disorder, fear, citizen satisfaction, and police legitimacy.

Methods We searched a broad range of databases, websites, and journals to identify eligible studies that measured pre-post changes in outcomes in treatment and comparison areas following the implementation of policing strategies that involved community collaboration or consultation. We identified 25 reports containing 65 independent tests of community-oriented policing, most of which were conducted in neighborhoods in the United States. Thirty-seven of these comparisons were included in a meta-analysis.

Results Our findings suggest that community-oriented policing strategies have positive effects on citizen satisfaction, perceptions of disorder, and police legitimacy, but limited effects on crime and fear of crime.

Conclusions Our review provides important evidence for the benefits of community policing for improving perceptions of the police, although our findings overall are ambiguous. The challenges we faced in conducting this review highlight a need for further research and theory development around community policing. In particular, there is a need to explicate and test a logic model that explains how short-term benefits of community policing, like improved citizen satisfaction, relate to longer-term crime prevention effects, and to identify the policing strategies that benefit most from community participation.

J Exp Criminol DOI 10.1007/s11292-014-9210-y

By Dorothea Delpech , Herve Borrion and Shane Johnson

Illegal activities concerning terrestrial species (TS) are responsible for a variety of health, environmental, economic and security issues. The majority of academic research associated with species relates to conservation, with few publications specifically investigating the scale of crimes impacting species or how they can be prevented. This article systematically reviews the available evidence about what works to prevent crime against terrestrial species. Of over 29,000 documents that were returned in the first stage of the review, these were filtered to just over 100. The remaining documents were partially or fully read to identify the most relevant documents to include in the final qualitative synthesis. The review results show there is a significant lack of primary research in this area, as only five articles were found that met the study inclusion criteria. The identified articles focus on the effects of two types of situational crime prevention interventions: community outreach and ranger patrol frequency. Community outreach was shown to have a significant impact on local poaching levels, while for patrolling the evidence suggests a positive impact on the discovery of poachers, animal carcasses and poaching paraphernalia, however, the quality of these studies varied greatly. To prevent the further decline of species numbers internationally, more effort should be invested in publicising existing research into the effectiveness of prevention strategies that have not reached the wider scientific audience, as well as the funding and promotion of research into alternate methods of crime prevention. 

Crime Sci (2021) 10:1 

By  Kate Bowers , Lisa Tompson and Shane D. Johnson

In many disciplines, there is a wealth of primary evaluation research on what works, and systematic reviews that synthesize that evidence. This is, of course, extremely positive. However, the sheer scale of the information and the way in which it is indexed and presented can mean that it is difficult for practitioners to locate the best available evidence. For this reason, in health, education, and other disciplines, using techniques from information science, researchers have systematically assembled databases such as those hosted on healthevidence.org and educationendowmentfoundation.org which bring together the most reliable evidence. Hitherto, no such database has existed for crime and criminal justice interventions. This article sets out some of the challenges and early findings of one exercise which aims to produce such a database, being completed as part of the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction initiative in collaboration with the College of Policing. 

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 17, 2023

By Cynthia Lum, Christopher S. Koper, David B. Wilson, Megan Stoltz, Michael Goodier, Elizabeth Eggins, Angela Higginson, Lorraine Mazerolle

Body-worn cameras do not have clear or consistent effects on most officer or citizen behaviors, but different practices need further evaluation. Law enforcement agencies have rapidly adopted body-worn cameras (BWCs) in the last decade with the hope that they might improve police conduct, accountability, and transparency, especially regarding use of force. Overall, there remains substantial uncertainty about whether BWCs can reduce officer use of force, but the variation in results over studies suggests there may be conditions in which BWC could be effective. BWCs also do not seem to affect other police and citizen behaviors in a consistent manner, including officers’ self-initiated activities or arrest behaviors, dispatched calls for service, or assaults and resistance against police officers. BWCs can reduce the number of citizen complaints against police officers, but it is unclear whether this finding signals an improvement in the quality of police-citizen interactions or a change in reporting. Research has not directly addressed whether BWCs can strengthen police accountability systems or police-citizen relationships.

Campbell Systematic Review, 2020. 40p.