By: Graham Farrell

What follows proposes a means by which to improve and accelerate police work so that it has an emphasis upon the rights and needs of victims. Using a term such as victim-oriented policing sounds like a proposal to compete with community policing or problem-oriented policing, but it is not. As proposed here, it would be entirely the fact that the concerns of victims should underpin a great deal of police work - more so than they do at present. it would be a complement to, rather than a substitute for, such approaches to policing.

The main proposal of this paper is that a simple means to promote victim-oriented policing (the term is broadly defined later) may be via an emphasis upon the policing and prevention of repeat victimization. For present purposes, repeat victimization is defined as the repeated criminal victimization of a person or place, or a target however defined. it is now well known that a small proportion of victims experience a significant proportion of all crime because they experience repeat victimization (see e.g. Skogan 1999; Friedman and Tucker 1997; Davis, Taylor, and Titus 1997; Pease 1998). Hence, to cut a long story short, preventing repeat victimization holds the potential to prevent crime. it helps victims in a practical and fundamental manner: Ezzat Fattah suggests that “Healing, recovery, redress, and prevention of future victimization are the primary objectives of most crime victims” (Fattah 1997: 270)

The focus here is upon the implications for police work with victims. While the phenomenon of repeat victimization presents a potentially wide range of implications for research and practice, for different areas of the criminal justice system, the work of community agencies and individuals, these areas are not the focus here.

International Symposium on Victimology, pp. 196-212

By Bethan Loftus, Martina Feilzer, Benjamin Goold

The ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) is largely a response to a stream of national media scandals that exposed the illegal and unethical behaviour of undercover police officers in two secretive units. The testimony of those who were the targets of undercover operations has further exposed the human costs stemming from the personalised and highly invasive surveillance undertaken by anonymous state agents. In this article, we reflect upon the existing research on covert policing and identify new areas for conceptual and methodological engagement, with a view to better understanding the harms that these secretive operations can generate. Attending to the inherent and inescapable intimacy of covert policing offers a much-needed opportunity to explore the effects of a unique state practice that can radically alter the lives of individual surveillance subjects, and which tests our conventional understandings of the legitimacy and limits of force, coercion and police power.

The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, Volume 63, Issue 3, Pages: 245-271 | First Published: 09 August 2024

By Michael Gennaco, Stephen Connolly and Julie Ruhlin

In the summer of 2019, Vallejo officials were responding to a time of transition for the City’s Police Department. The chief was newly retired, and the search for a new leader was underway against a backdrop of recent incidents – including fatal officer-involved shootings – that had prompted public concern and even demonstrations. It seemed as if a number of individual encounters were fitting all too well into larger, troubling narratives about American law enforcement: deadly force under disputed circumstances that affected minority subjects to a disproportionate extent, and strained relationships with residents that arose from and contributed to that reality while raising issues of trust and public confidence. Leadership within Vallejo’s city government decided that the time was right to take a step back and to assess the Department’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities in a new way. The City engaged an outside consultant to conduct this assessment.

This report is the product of that review. It was prepared by OIR Group, a team of private consultants that specializes in police practices and the civilian oversight of law enforcement. Since 2001, OIR Group has worked exclusively with government entities in a variety of contexts related to independent outside review of law enforcement, from investigation to monitoring to systems evaluation. Our members have provided oversight in jurisdictions throughout California, as well as in several other states.

Playa del Rey, CA:  OIR Group, 2020. 74p.

By H. Goudriaan.

Victim reports are the main source of information for the police regarding where crimes are committed, and also the basis for most subsequent actions of the criminal justice system. Therefore, the victims' decision to report to the police is crucial. However, much criminal victimization is not reported and, consequently, many offenders are never prosecuted. Why are some crimes reported and others not? Substantial differences in reporting are found across crime locations, neighborhoods and countries. In this book, a socio-ecological model of victims' decision-making is introduced which endeavors to explain these contextual differences in reporting. To empirically test the main hypotheses derived from this model, several data sources are used and different research strategies are employed, with which the effects of crime, victim and contextual factors on victims' reporting behavior are simultaneously analyzed. Factors constituting the context in which crime incidents take place (e.g. whether the location is in the private or public domain), as well as factors composing the neighborhood context (e.g. the neighborhood social cohesion) and – to a lesser extent – the country context in which victims reside, were found to play a role in victims's decision (not) to report.

Leiden: University of Leiden, 2006. 213p.